Sea Change

September, 2005

As he entered the classroom, Andy saw his friend Hadia Durani and his face lit up with a smile. Andy and Samantha had first met Hadia when she came to the Vineyard as an Afghani refugee in the spring of 2002. It never failed to amaze Andy how fond he had grown of the young woman whom he had hated with a fierceness that shocked and saddened his mother and sister.

When Ben Bennett died in the North Tower on September eleventh, it felt to Andy as if everything safe and secure in his life had died with him, but he had kept most of his feelings buried deep beneath the surface. To this day he wasn’t sure why, but he thought it might have been because he felt an obligation to help his mother and sister get through the trauma of 9/11. Whatever the reason, he had kept his emotions well hidden, until the day he met Hadia. Suddenly, he had a focus for his anger and pain.

Unlike Andy, Sam had developed an instant liking for Hadia. Sam recognized that they shared much in common. Hadia’s father had been a professor at the university in Kabul. As the father of a young daughter, he wanted Hadia to have more opportunities than the Afghan culture provided. Among other things, he believed in education for women, which was prohibited in the male dominated society. He had spoken out about his views and had been killed by the Taliban. Since higher education for girls was not a possibility in Afghanistan at the time, Hadia’s mother and uncle decided to send her to the United States to a friend of Hadia’s father who happened to live on Martha’s Vineyard.

The girls shared a love of learning and were excellent students. A friendship soon flourished, but Andy could not get past Hadia’s Muslim faith.

In Andy’s mind, all Muslims had become terrorists, therefore, Hadia was as guilty of his father’s death as Osama Bin Laden or the men who had flown the planes. Only when Sam and Rachel pointed out to Andy that his father would have been deeply disappointed in his behavior was Andy able to look at his feelings in a new light. Eventually they worked through their differences and Hadia, Sam and Andy became a devoted trio of friends.