It is day 11 of my 14-days self quarantine since I returned abruptly from my dream journey to my beloved homeland Kurdistan. I have a lot of projects to finish while home and I am shifting my office in the living room into another quieter room in our house to give me a lot of alone time to finish writing. The motor vehicle accident and the mild traumatic brain injury I suffered, delayed my book one whole year and now, the corona virus world wide pandemic is delaying it again. My trip to my homeland was to go to certain places and meet certain individuals but due to the spread of the virus (2 cases at the time), I was unable to do that so I took the time to visit some people and see parts of my hometown that was not closed.

The gentle and highly intelligent lady welcomed me into her beautiful house and we chatted for hours. She gifted me many many books one of which is of a famous Iraqi poet (Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri). I recall my very first school project I did on my own about a well known and historical figure, I selected him and I loved his poetry. I loved that he was political writer. Her late husband, my he rest in peace, written books about him becuase they both were friends with that poet.

Such an honour to be in the presence of such a classy and highly intelligent woman. In the coming days, I will contact her and ask her several questions and will be writing an article about her.

My journey to my homeland was brief and suddenly was disrupted due to the pandemic unfortunately. I would be there still until the end of this month but, oh, well. I will plan it again once this disaster is over.

Sending love to you all at home, you who are essential and critical workers who are risking your lives to keep the services we desperately need running. I do love and honour you. Please stay safe and I pray this shall pass and we enjoy peace a health after this.

A big part of me is pleased how calm the world have become. How little money we are spending and how clean the environment is becoming. We must never go back to the way things were before the pandemic. I for once will never be the same when it comes to consumerism, rushing, stressing about worthless things and my carbon footprint.

I am taking this time at home to continue healing my brain and continue writing. Being in my homeland healed me in such a way that I am writing poetry again. I can’t wait to share it with you all.

Finally, after twenty-six years and after a very long battle internally, externally, and financially, I did it. I finally did it!

I battled within myself because I worried if I could afford such a long journey and more, I feared how my husband would say no fearing for my safety. I will now get to sit and share; however, briefly, a bit about the trip to my homeland, Kurdistan, with you all.

Here is one photo I can share. Above me is a sign that reads in Kurdish: SHARI JWAN =Beautiful City. This photo was taken by my eldest sister, who took me all over Suliamany to show me around.

I missed my homeland so very much. March 21st, 1994 was the day I took my very last steps before I migrated to Canada. I have had solid plans to go to Kurdistan in spring 2019 but due to my TBI, I could not go.

I purchased my flight in October 2019 but did not tell anyone, not even my husband or my boys. I knew in deepest soul and my heart that I was going, and there was nothing, and no one would stand in my way. I have denied my heart and my spirit for far too long when they felt the tug to return home. I had to return home or die of sadness. It was powerful, it was deep and it was real.

Even though I purchased my tickets secretly, I felt absolutely no fear, worry, anxiety, or uneasy intuition. I felt the most peace within I have ever felt getting the expensive return flight to Kurdistan through Lufthansa Airlines. I felt complete and utter contentment and started from that day on, journaling every day of how excited I was to count down to the day that I go back home.

In my journal, I read it and see how happy I was at the beginning and as the number of days went from three digits to double digits, and in the ninety-day marks, I began to worry. I was yet to tell my husband and my boys of my plans to go visit my homeland.

The day came, it was half an hour before the new year 2020. I told Harry and then I visited my boys and told them. Not until late January no-one in my own family knew I was going.

So, here I am, at home, sharing a part of my fantastic journey that was abruptly and suddenly cut short due to the virus that was declared ‘pandemic.’ Things became uncertain all over the world, so I paid the penalty of ~$600 and changed my flight to return to Canada because I feared I would be stuck and would not be able to fly home. 

I write this as I am on Day #8 of 14 days self-quarantine. It is something we are all doing to avoid the possibility of spreading the COVID-19 (coronavirus).

I will not bore you with the details for now because I am writing the entire story to share with you at a later day. I want to take more time in the coming days to tell you what incredibly fantastic time I had visiting my homeland. It was terrific; Kurdistan is the most beautiful place on earth, and I will go back when this crazy time is over. I wish you all one day to get to go and see Kurdistan. Each day I was there, I told my sister, was the best day of my life, then the following day, I told her, no, no, this is the best day of my life. This went on for the entirety of the first seven days.

I was amazed at how much love I felt from everything in Kurdistan. I felt the love from the people, the trees, the gentle breeze, the mountains, the rain, the waters, the birds, the animals, and even the sacred soil I walked on. It is an incredible feeling to return to my homeland. Sad that I had to respond in such a hurry.

Enjoy those few pictures, and I will share more in the coming days. And, yes, I did write many many new poems. I will type them all and share it with you all.

Ps. for those of you can’t wait that long to see my journey written here on my website, feel free to see my posts on my Instagram page @Lozna1972

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What my class will offer you:

• Why we dance and why it is good for you
• Basic moves and my signature PBS
• Arabian dance in a choreographed piece
• 3 traditional Kurdish dances (hal-par-ke)
• Iraqi group (dabka) and (radih)

*Dress in flexible clothes (skirts or pants)
*Bring your own reusable container for water

https://www.facebook.com/danseetcstudio/

Date: Saturday, Feb. 22nd, 2020 Time: 3:00-5:00pm (Start at 3pm SHARP) Location: Danse Etc. Studio 910 Sherwood Ave., CoquitlamV3K 1A6right by the IKEA in Coquitlam Cost: $20.00/person If you are accompanying a person and staying to watch: $10.00 Payment method: Cash at the door

I am fundraising to go back to Kurdistan –my homeland to visit and complete my book.

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Disclaimer: This is a (one day) FOR FUN —fundraiser dance class.  It is a low-intensity workout. Everyone is welcome to join. If you are not well or overstretch yourself, I won’t be responsible for the injury. This is learning & laughter & support a writer, crash dance class, so, if you can’t do a certain move, just don’t do it!

Here is the full speech and the poem I shared at the celebration of life event in North Vancouver yesterday. I was humble and honored to be asked to speak and share my poem.

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Before I begin, I wish to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded and un-surrendered sacred land of the Musqueam xʷməθkʷəjˀəm, Tsleil-Waututh səl̓ilwətaɁɬ and  Squamish Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw Nations. This is the ancestral land of the Coast Salish People.

Good evening to you all.

Please do forgive me because I won’t thank you for being here this evening; instead, I want to say —and say it from the deepest part of my heart and soul that I am so sorry that you and I have to gather here today. 

This tragedy, this crime against humanity, this ‘mistake,’ this deliberate disregard for life should have never happened. 

This was avoidable! 

This was a massive and devastating blow to peace on this planet! 

The damage, the harm, and the far-reaching trauma that will ensue for decades and for generations to come must never be allowed to happen to anyone anywhere, ever! 

The painful ripple effect of what was done to all 176 passengers and crew of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 on January 8, 2020, is reaching the farthest places on this earth. For each soul lost, hundreds and hundreds of people are hurting, and as we witness them suffer, we suffer too. 

We lost great minds; we lost future prominent leaders, researchers, journalists, professors, and doctors. 

We lost teachers, artists, students, and flight attendants. 

We lost wives, husbands, moms, dads, sisters, brothers, and even a precious one-year-old Kurdish girl, Kurdia Molani. Lives perished, families broken, humanity reeling, and a hopeful future went with a single press of a button. 

We gather and mourn this tragedy of that flight that was scheduled international passenger flight from Tehran to Kiev that fateful day. It was shot down shortly after takeoff from Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport. 

Attributing this crime to ‘human error’ by The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran is unacceptable, and for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who denied it, then later describe it ‘unforgivable mistake’ won’t cut it either. 

We will forever honor the lives that were cut short. We demand that the families be supported, access granted to surviving relatives, and we want the victims to remain a symbolic figure for all nations to never, ever let such crime to happen again.

May those we lost, rest in peace, may each family member and all who knew those we lost, find comfort, and take all the time needed to grieve the terrible loss. 

May we as one, as witnesses to what was done to those families, remain united in love, support, openness, giving, and never allow hope to be lost. 

Allow us to become more united and more connected —now more than ever, in harmony, compassion, empathy, peace, and, most importantly, with love because love can heal all wounds.

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My Family

~by Lozan Yamolky 

Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot down by Iranian missile shortly after takeoff on January 8th, 2020 killing all 176 passengers including 57 Canadian citizens. Two of those that we lost were, Snoor Pourghaderi & Serveh Pasavand. May they all rest in peace and may their loved one and all who knew them, find peace, comfort and healing. I wrote this pome from the point of view of Amir, the father and husband of two we lost in our Kurdish community in Canada.

I am not broken;

I am shattered. 

I am not weeping;

I am drowning in my tears. 

I am not hurting;

I am partially dead inside

because they took my family away.  

Break every bone in my body;

just don’t take my family away from me. 

Torture me and cut every nerve ending in my extremity;

just please, don’t harm my family. 

Burn my body whole and alive.

Burn my body whole and alive;

just don’t touch my family. 

Point ALL your mightiest weapons at me

and SHOOT;

just don’t point it at them!

Please, don’t point it at them. 

Let me be the last husband 

and the last father to ever die 

protecting his family 

from your insatiable lust for blood, 

power, ego, oil, control 

and for your insatiable desire

to have more money. 

Take back your flowers; 

instead, go make them not press that button. 

Take back your condolences; 

instead, go and shout at them to stop, 

for God’s sake, stop! 

Blow out all those lit up candles; 

instead, go tell the world 

to never let them get away with it; 

don’t let them do it to another soul. 

Stop the senseless slaughter! 

The slaughter of my family; 

the massacre of my soul, 

and the sacrifice of my future.  

Enough violence.

Enough ‘mistakes’ & ‘friendly-fire’.

Enough excuses.

Enough destruction of innocent lives and livelihood. 

My family didn’t deserve this.
I don’t deserve this!

Enough! 
—©Lozan Yamolky

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YES, every dress you see me wearing in those photos and many many more dresses, accessories & scarves will be placed in an auction page to be sold to the highest bidder.
I am raising funds to gather $5,000.00 to plan my lifelong dream trip to my homeland to finish my memoire.

Every dollar counts and each dress sold, will bring me one step closer to fulfilling my dream of going home this year.

Stay tuned 😉

https://www.tricitynews.com/news/refugee-poetry-and-dinner-for-human-rights-in-port-moody-1.24023277

https://www.tricitynews.com/news/refugee-poetry-and-dinner-for-human-rights-in-port-moody-1.24023277

Copied:

A dinner in Port Moody focusing on refugees through music and poetry will mark the 71st anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

The annual fundraising dinner, to be held Dec. 10 and hosted by members of Tri-Cities Amnesty International, will feature the Vancouver Kurdish Music Ensemble and refugee poet Lozan Yamolky, as well as a video outlining the history of human rights. 

“The Tri-Cities is now home for hundreds of refugees from many different countries,” Amnesty member Hazel Postma said in a press release. “Lozan’s poems evoke the sense of loss, as well as the hope, many of them must feel as they come to terms with their new reality.”

Yamolky was born in Iraq of Kurdish descent and, as a young adult, sought asylum in Turkey where she worked as an interpreter for the UN and the Canadian embassy. She moved with her family to Canada in 1995. Her poems reflect the anguish and suffering experienced by refugees. She says her purpose is to “wake up our conscience.”

The dinner, hosted by the Coquitlam restaurant Pasta Polo, takes place at The Old Mill Boathouse, 2715 Esplanade Ave., Port Moody. Tickets are $25 a person and include music, poetry, dinner, dessert and a silent auction. To reserve, go to eventbrite.com/e/80185686547.

https://www.tricitynews.com/news/refugee-poetry-and-dinner-for-human-rights-in-port-moody-1.24023277

https://www.tricitynews.com/news/refugee-poetry-and-dinner-for-human-rights-in-port-moody-1.24023277

© Copyright 2019 Tri-City News

Hello everyone, join us and enjoy (Tellers Of Short Tales) on Thursday January 9th, 2020 6:00-8:00pm in New Westminster. I am the host and will be introducing Shawn Douglas who is a Canadian screenwriter, an academic, and a critically-acclaimed author.

Please join us to enjoy reading by the author and if you have a short story or even a part of a story you are writing, come read it with us.
This is not a critique group nor will we judge your work. Just come and share with us what you wrote.

I will be reading a story from the memoire I am working on. I hope to see familiar faces and new faces. Bring a friend and come. It will be fun!

They say, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, well, I watched, bewildered, our village here in Canada –a nation of immigrants, got few very loud people who hated refugees with passion. That behavior birthed this poem!
I wrote this poem to awaken in people who hate immigrant & refugee, their sense of compassion, their sense of decency and empathy.
I was commissioned by a chamber choir to write a poem about ‘The Refugee Experience’, so I offered this poem which was composed and sang in majestic and angelic choral music by The DaCapo Chamber Choir in Waterloo Ontario, Canada in March 2019.

I am here
—©Lozan Yamolky
(3rd Book of Poetry collection: Dreamers Needed 2019)

You won’t find me in the abandoned towns, the empty schools,

playgrounds, or the collapsed hospitals
of my homeland. 

You won’t find me

at my friends’ houses, on my bicycle

in the park, or in a roofless home

on a dark and frightening night. 

You won’t find me in the market

that is now colourless and empty;

you won’t find me on a prayer mat

at a mosque that now

is a sniper’s enclave. 

You won’t find me on a merciless

rocky mountain path

overflowing with women and children
searching for safety under a brutal

hot sun. 

You won’t find me covering my ears
to drown out the din

of the relentless bombing. 

You won’t find me in cities

blanketed with smoke,

carpeted

with the blood of the innocent

oozing beside a fading horizon 
that begs the sun not to leave

at dusk. 

You won’t hear my name mentioned

in the keening cries

of parents left childless in the mayhem;
nor will you find me buried

along with those

that perished from hunger

and from pain, longing for peace,
and you won’t find me

among the little girls bought

and traded and used
spoils-of- war. 

You won’t find me clinging to dear life

on a flimsy boat crossing the sea
in search of a new place to call home,
and you won’t see my life jacket floating.

You won’t find me drowned in the sea,

washed up on an unforgiving shore
or wrapped in a golden rescue blanket

shivering,

unable to speak or cry. 

You won’t find me in the crowd

fleeing the imminent and terrible end.
You won’t find me fenced-in

behind a gate

from which I cannot escape,

and at the mercy of an army

that cannot understand

the words I speak. 

You won’t find me dousing the flames
of a burning refugee camp in Lesbos. 

You won’t find me picking up

food scraps in Vienna,

and you won’t spot me escaping bulldozers crushing

my makeshift home

on an icy dawn in Calais.   

You won’t find me

where I used to belong

or where I have been lost

on the journey;

I am no longer languishing
in a refugee camp. 

I am not there

because I have been found,
and just like a little tree,
I am planted in new soil.   

I am here 
—I am here now. 

All you must do

is help me grow

because I am the child, 
and this… this is our village.

—©Lozan Yamolky
(3rd Book of Poetry collection: Dreamers Needed 2019)

Good day to you all and please do forgive my temporary absence. A lot has been going on in my life starting by my continued healing journey from the (Mild) Traumatic Brain Injury –Ps. I hate calling it ‘mild’ but that is was what I was diagnosed when shortly after the November 23rd, 2018 motor vehicle. There is nothing ‘mild’ about brain injury. folks, please do me a favor and do not give any advice whatsoever to person in your life with brain injury unless you -yourself, have felt that pain. Do not ever tell those with injury that ‘it happened for a reason’ and don’t dare to tell them, ‘you look fine’. dont tell them to ‘get over it’, don’t tell them, ‘the more you talk about it, the worse it gets’. please don’t unless you are prepared to be slapped across the face ok?
I mean well when I say those words becuase I do not want you to make the mistake a small number of people in my circle continue to talk this way with me. I don’t like them but I let them get it out of their system and hopefully one day they read and learn about TBI.

This is an old photo of Christmas 2017 my hubby shot of me when one of my beautiful sisters took me to a salon to make my long curly hair, straight. I kept startling my hubby and my boys confusing them because they kept thinking a strange woman is in the house LOL. That was funny.

My temporary absence was due to many reasons and I can list some of them here: The ongoing physical and mental therapy I am receiving, I started working and driving again, I am back to working on completing my memoir (the TBI prevented me for many months from writing and also creating new poetry), I am gradually and painfully slowly am writing new poems again, my boys are teenagers now and I needed to deal with few family issues beside my 86-year-old father having heart attack and the most important reason to point out here is that my computer got a nasty malware that didn’t allow me to use my website and I am not that bright to fix computer problems so I took time off from posting.

I will try to get back to writing and posting here. I entered few poetry contests and I studied to take my STIBC exam (wish me luck) I am waiting for the test result. Society of Translators and Interpreters of BC will put my name on a massive database of province-wide interpreters and translators and will assist me to also hike my fee/ hourly rate.

I am also aiming at finishing my manuscript and make the first draft before Christmas becuase I am planning to go visit my homeland in spring of 2020

I have been taking a lot of time to heal by connecting to the beings all around me including the four legged, the feathery friends, the scaly ones that swim in the water, the creepy crawlers, the air I breath, the soil I walk on, the water inside me and that rain that falls on me. I have been spending a lot of time in solitude among the mighty grandfathers and grandmother speaking trees in the forest. I have attended few indiginous women sweat lodge and also using CBD oil to help me heal and calm my anxiety.

I have benefited immensely from others around me mainly women who have been beyond kind to me and helping me along the way. Many lifted me up, many of them told me of their own/loved ones brain injures and most just loved me the way I am and helped me whenever I needed them without judging or questioning me or lecturing me on how ‘I should’ be in order to heal from TBI. Those men, those women and those non-binary and two spirit people around me are the reason I am healing and made it this far. You know who you are. I thank you and I love you.

I am blessed and happy to be gradually recovering from the injury yet still struggling with some annoying and disruptive symptoms. I hope they all go a way so I can get back to my life and finish my memoire soon.

Be well, be kind and be you.

I am back baby, I am back!