My Story: Trying to Get Out

I had arrived in Yemen for the third time on Aug. 9, 2006. During the second week of October, I received an email from my biological father. I found my birth parents in 1990, and my father and I had become close friends. He was the only family I had, and I love him dearly. In the email, he told me that he had just found out that he had stomach cancer and that he was dying. He told me that he thought he was going fast and was really sick. I needed to go back to America to see my dad.

Ahmed, however, had put a travel ban on me and wouldn't let me leave the country. He didn't like my dad, since my dad didn't like him (he was a great judge of character). He couldn't care less that my dad was dying and that I needed to go see him and help him in his final days.

Meanwhile, my kids were absolutely miserable, and they were getting hit all day every day by Ahmed. I couldn't stand to watch and not be able to help them, They needed to go home.

I was closely monitored and was not allowed to go anywhere or do anything without his permission. When he was at work, he had relatives and neighbors watching every move I made, alawys reporting to him if I left the front gate, at what time I left and at what time I returned. Then I got questioned for hours when he got home from work asking where I was, who I talked to, what I did, etc.

At the end of October, I got my chance. Ahmed went to visit a friend for Eid (the holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan). When he and his family left, I grabbed the kids and we ran to the US Embassy in Sanaa asking for help.Vice consul David Fuller took me into his office, and I told him the whole story. I told him how wehad come to visit Ahmed, how abusive he was to me and the kids, how we were monitored and forbidden from going anywhere without him, etc. I gave him a copy of the US court papers showing that I had sole custody of the kids, as well as the outstanding federal arrest warrant against Ahmed for kidnapping.

David Fuller took my kids into a room by themselves and questioned them to verify the stories of the daily beatings, without my influence. He listened as they told him about the daily beatings and saw the bruises that were all over my children. After the interview process was over, he said to me, "We can help. We had the same situation last year with another American woman, and within a week we got her and her children safely out of the country". I was so relieved.

We went to a hotel and hid from Ahmed, since he was out looking for us. The next day, Ahmed once again proved what a master manipulator he is. The day after we came to the embassy for help, David Fuller called Ahmed on the phone. Ahmed was charming and told David how he had never hit me or the kids. He told David that I was mentally ill and shouldn't be believed, etc. He poured on the sharm, as he always does.

The unbelievable part is that, from that point on, David Fuller was no longer willing to help us. He told me that he had no time for us, because he had a stack of files on his desk and he needed to work on them. Then he said, "We can't help you. We will provide a driver and a car, and we will take the kids back to Ahmed's house and drop them off. If you choose not to take our offer, then you are to walk out that door and not come back, because we won't let you in. You're on your own."

I was flabbergasted at his complete disregard for me and my kids, and how he could ignore hearing my kids tell their story. He ignored the bruises covering my children. He ignored the custody papers and the outstanding arrest warrant and was demanding that we go back to Ahmed's and refusing us any help whatsoever. Ahmed is not a US citizen, but my children and I are. But yet he was so willing to immediately believe Ahmed's pretty little story and send us back to the wolves.

I had no more money, and I really needed to go to America to be with my dad. I told David Fuller that I needed to leave because my father was dying, and that I couldn't leave because of the travel ban Ahmed had put on us. David agreed to arrange a meeting at the Yemeni passport office so we could try to get the travel ban lifted so I could return home to my father.

The meeting took place the next day. There was many people in attendance. Ahmed and his two brothers were there. Three US Embassy employees (David Fuller, his colleague, and a translator) were there, as well as about 8 Yemeni military people, one of which was the head or director or something like that from the passport office.

The embassy people tried for hours to get Ahmed to remove the travel ban so that I could go see my father. Ahmed refused - for hours. The debate went back and forth and back and forth for several hours. The head Yemeni passport guy was trying harder than the US Embassy people to get Ashraf to lift the ban. He was a nice guy, but he, too, believed Ahmed's story that Ahmed was this wonderful, upstanding man and father and husband who had never touched us, and that I was just some crazy woman who didn't know what reality was. Even so, he invested a lot of time and energy trying to get Ahmed to lift the ban. Of course, I didn't understand a lot of what was said, because most of the meeting took place in Arabic. The only English spoken was by me and the embassy staff, and then the translator translated what we said into Arabic.

Finally, after 6 hours of debate, Ahmed stated - in English and, from what I was told, in Arabic - that he would lift the travel ban on me so I could return to the States, and that if I went and got a court paper in America stating that, if anything ever happened to me, custody of the children would go to him (and they wouldn't get put in foster care, since I had no family in America other than my dying father), he would then lift the travel ban against the children and let them return to America. He made this statement in front of his brothers, in front of the three embassy staff members, and in front of the Yemeni military people who were there. I felt that was fair, and I was so relieved. Finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel.

However, Ahmed is good at one thing. He's really good at lying and at getting people to believe whatever he says. And David Fuller at the embassy was about to screw me and my children even worse...