By Bill Clark
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Join me today for a lesson in diversity and acceptance — and a chance to say “happy anniversary.”
Our lesson in diversity and acceptance revolves around Shakir Hamoodi and his life’s journey from Iraq to become a U.S. citizen and, since 1985, a Columbian who has been a godsend in our understanding of differing cultures.
Happy anniversary? The Hamoodi family is celebrating the seventh anniversary of the family business — World Harvest International and Gourmet Foods.
Our tale begins in 1952. Shakir Hamoodi was born into a family of 11 children in Anah, a small, pastoral village in a river valley in west-central Iraq.
His dad, who died a year ago, was a mechanic and a farmer whose crops and livestock fed the large family and supported education for all. His mother still lives in Anah, and all 10 siblings have survived the violence of the past two decades in a war-torn nation.
Shakir earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Baghdad in 1975 and a master’s degree in thermodynamics from the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1979.
After two years of field experience in nuclear engineering in France, he returned to Iraq for four years, working as a nuclear engineer. “No,” he laughed in answer to Ol’ Clark’s obvious question, “I was not working on weapons of mass destruction.”
As an internationalist and a man with an inquiring mind, he wanted to come to America, arranging a scholarship to do so. He married Lamya, a country girl from a nearby village, and the pair landed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
“When we arrived in Troy, it was not the America we envisioned,” Shakir recalled. “I had been accepted at several universities, including the University of Missouri. We didn’t unpack in Troy, quickly grabbed a Greyhound bus and landed here.” The year was 1985.
Shakir worked at the MU reactor, finished his work on a doctorate, and he and Lamya began a family, which grew to five children.
The plan had been to stay here a semester or two, but they found a home in the new Islamic mosque, and it has been a major factor in their lives for 25 years.
By 1991, the Hamoodis felt it was time to return to their homeland and were packed and ready when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The door home was closed. Columbia became the Hamoodis’ future.
“Family and children became our priority,” Shakir said. He traded a green card for U.S. citizenship and remained on the MU staff through the 1990s.
Lamya continued as a teacher of Arabic at the Islamic School and at the Columbia campus of Moberly Area Community College. Both remain leaders in their church.
The kids mirror their parents. Lamees, 24, is an MU graduate and also teaches at the Islamic School; Owais, 22, plans to graduate from MU next month with a double major in biochemistry and economics; Salahodeen is a junior electrical engineering student at Stanford; Husam is a junior at Rock Bridge High School and a member of the Quiz Bowl team headed to the state Quiz Bowl finals; and Abdulrahman is an eighth-grader at Jefferson Junior High School and active in soccer.
The World Harvest store came into being seven years ago with the help of two friends who ran a similar store in Champaign, Ill. The store sells a wide variety of cheeses, meats, wines, juices, breads, oils and other items from every corner of the world.
The store’s celebration continues through the weekend. It will take that long just to sample all the cheeses.
Not much positive can be said for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, but Columbia can thank the situation for giving us one of our most interesting and valuable proponents of diversity and great cheeses — the Hamoodi family. http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2011/apr/20/anniversary-holds-lesson-in-diversity/
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