This piece of writing is a true tale “From the Vault”, so to speak.

I wrote “In Bright Blue Tucson Skies” for Professor Kristen L. Hanley, teacher of English 305 at Regent University.

It was finished on March 30, 2018, just a few months prior to my graduation ceremony.

This story is one of the most important in my life. The events recorded here changed the trajectory of everything, and awoken me to my true Being, my Caste Soul.

So without further adieu, read on, and discover the truth hidden…

In Bright Blue Tucson Skies

By Richard Barrett

03-30-2018

The blazing sun of the clear Arizona skies burned down upon the hot steaming pavement in the seedy Tucson slums. My blue eyes were slit from the blaze and a steely self-determination. 

It was late May in hottest state of the U.S.A. But it couldn’t be has hot as Cairo, Egypt, the homeland of the man whose abode I sought. 

The guy was a pharmacists in the old country, and I couldn’t help but think that somehow, these run-down stucco apartments were a downgrade to what a doctor would have lived in over there. 

He had to come to this country a month or two before, I had heard. He was a Coptic Christian, fleeing the Islamists who had taken over his homeland, desperate to get his family a better live than one under Sharia slavery. 

*********

The year was 2012 A.D., and in those distant days the murdering Muslim Brotherhood maniacs had conquered the land of the Pharoahs under their ape-like leader, the savage and sadistic Mohammad Morsi. 

These things I knew from two, three years of following the events of the Middle East. I had grown up in the days of the Iraq War in a family of news junkies…at age five, I watched the Axis of Evil speech. At age eight, I watched the Saddam statue fall. And at age nine, I watched as we caught the Butcher of Baghdad himself. 

At the time of this visit, the Arab Springs was in full spring, and me and a handful of other homeschool students followed the story closely in a class unassumingly termed “Current Events.” It was ran by dear mother,  who had procured a native from each foreign country we studied every week. 

This time, it was Egypt week. 

*********

The guy’s name was Malik. We had tracked him down from a friend of mine who ran a refugee relief organization in Tucson. The city south of Phoenix is one of three United Nations refugee ports into the United States, and this friend was the one there to greet them.

I had worked with her the year before, entertaining Middle East kids for a week in the summer. There, I had learned that I loved the Arab people. We got along very well, because we had a lot in common. 

I liked their freewheeling style, their devil-may-care attitude, their love of life. In the Arabs, I saw myself…younger, less mature, but fiery and fierce in spirit all the same. 

They were like raw material, unrefined gold, and I knew that if America would take it upon herself to tutor them, they would grow into a great and mighty people. 

I could not control America, but I could control me…and as one dedicated to the ideals “That all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with certain, unalienable rights: among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, I took it upon myself to fulfill the mission of Arab freedom to the best of my ability.

*********

The paint–peeled door opened up slowly to the apartment, and in the entrance stood a man not much bigger than my 5’5” frame. Malik. 

He was dark, with olive skin and aquiline features, coal black hair and a moustache to match. His big brown eyes welled over with a relief and joy, the likes of which I had never seen. 

“You have come!” he cried. “You have really come! You are true followers of Jesus Christ!”

My mother and I slit each other sideways glances at the oddity of this, but his zeal was infectious. We smiled big, broad, joy-filled smiles at his sincerity. You could feel the sunshine, a kind that does not come from the summer sky. 

*********

“Sit down, sit down, let us make you something to eat!”

We were taken aback by the hospitality. We were ushered to a goodwill couch, a sickly brown Brady Bunch affair that had seen better days. 

“This is my wife, Miriam,” he ushered to a big, jovial lady with flowing black hair and green, happy-sad eyes that like Malik’s, held a peculiar kind of sunshine. 

“And this is my son, Ki-Ro-Los,” he pointed to a little boy, nine years old, with the brown puppy-dog eyes that held the innocence of all nine year olds everywhere. What struck me about him was how closely he resembled my own nine year old brother at home. 

“Say hello to our guests, Ki-Ro-Los,” Malik instructed, and dutifully Ki-Ro-Los obeyed. 

“My son,” Malik said proudly, “Is named after our Coptic Bishop, Ki-Ro-Los II. That is him on the wall.”

He pointed to a grainy, pixelated picture printed on cheap paper and hung on the paint-peeled off-white walls at an off angle…with scotch tape. 

*********

Malik sat down with us, as Miriam served us sugary tea and noodles from a can. 

“What do you want to know about Egypt?” Malik asked, an open air of transparency about him. 

“Well Malik,” I said. “You’re a Christian. You’re not Muslims. What was life like for you over there?”

A dark cloud covered Malik’s sunshine. His shoulders slumped. It was as if a switch had flipped…the jovial, open host was gone, and a sad, burdened man had taken his place. 

But his eyes burned with a truth that the burden could not suppress. 

“Life was very hard  for us as Christians…” he shook his head. “Very hard.”

“When I was a boy,” he went on, “We would go to school. I studied very hard. I worked all the time. I mastered material…my goal was to be the best student.

“But our teachers were Muslim. A Christian boy could not get higher grades than a Muslim boy. Even if he did better, he could not get the grade he deserved.

“When it was time for religion classes, the school would not pay for a priest to come and teach us. We were not Muslim, so we were not allowed to sit in the Muslim class while the Imam would teach. They did not give us a priest, and they did not let us sit in class. So they told us: ‘Go out and clean out the garbage of the school and in the streets. Go and clean the gutters, go out and clean the waste in the toilets…Christians are filth. That is where you belong.’”

Malik gritted his teeth, and sighed heavily. 

“All my life, this treatment followed us as Christians. Even when I became a pharmacist. They paid me very little.” 

“They didn’t pay you good because you were  a Christian?” I said, my eyes narrowing. “In the U.S., a pharmacist is a good paying job. What’d they pay you.”

A shadow of shame covered his face like a fail. 

“You will laugh,” he said, shaking his head and lowering his eyes.

I had never seen a man with that much shame.

“Listen Malik,” we said. “We’re your friends. We won’t laugh. We promise.”

“I made $12 a month.” 

“My gosh…” I shook my head. “I’m sorry brother.” 

I knew a Ukranian chick who was mail order bride. Her husband was killed by the mafia back in the old country, so she took a job at a leather tanning factory to feed her newborn daughter. 

She made $2000 a month. 

*********

“Everyone knows you are a Christian in Egypt,” Malik said. “It is in our names. Muslims have names like Mohammad, Abdullah, Fatima. Christians have names like Mark, Miriam, James.”

“That can spot you just by your name,” I said. “That must make things pretty hard, you can’t fly under the radar.” 

He nodded. “It is. But we are proud. We are followers of Jesus Christ. We take our names from the Bible. We also have these…”

Suddenly Malik, Miriam, and Ki-Ro-Los’ wrists shot in our faces as they placed their hands palm up in our line of sight. On each wrist was a green diamond. 

“We put these on ourselves to tell everyone we are Christians. It is hard, but we do not hide it. We want everyone to know.”

I was looking at the modern day fish symbol of the catacombs.

*********

“When you are a Christian in Egypt,” Malik told us, “Even medical access is denied to you.” 

“How so?” I said. 

“They can tell who we are by our names, and they say: ‘We will not treat you.’”

“You’re kidding” I said. 

“It’s true…it happened to Miriam’s father.”

Miriam nodded to us all. “Malik is right…it is terrible.”

“Miriam’s father got an infection in his leg,” Malik told us. “I was in pharmacy school, so I knew it could be treated very easily with antibiotics. But when he went to the hospital, they would not give him any.

“They told him, ‘We will not waste good medicine on a Christian dog.’

“His leg got sicker and sicker, and the infection spread. I was engaged to Miriam at the time and in pharmacy school, so Miriam took him to the doctor every day. They refused to look at him. They would wait for hours every day, and they would say, ‘We do not treat Christian dogs.’

“Finally, it got so bad, that it threatened his life. If he did not get the leg cut off, he would die.”

Malik gritted his teeth, his eyes burning with indignation as he leaned forward. 

“They told my wife that it would be worse for them as Muslims to touch a pig than to touch her dying father.”

He turned away and shook his head. 

“This is what we lived with,” he said. 

His fiery gaze returned again. 

“So Miriam called me, crying and screaming, ‘You have to help me, my father is going to die.’ So I leave pharmacy school in the middle of class, and go down there.

“I beg the doctors, ‘Please, please cut off the leg. He is going to die.’ I am crying, ‘Please don’t let my fiance’s father die.’

“Finally, one of the doctors agrees to cut it off.” 

Slowly, Malik looked down in disgust. 

“They cut it off. But they said they wouldn’t dispose of it, because it was a filthy Christian leg.

“So here I am,” he spread his arms wide, “Look at me, I am not a big man. I am carrying her father as he hobbles on one leg. My wife is carrying his gangren-stricken leg, crying.”

A deep sadness welled up in his eyes.

“This is what I lived with. Because I am a Christian.” 

*********

“When the Revolution of 2011 happened, things only got worse for us,” Malik said. “That was when the Muslim Brotherhood took over.”

“They stopped the police from patrolling the streets. Crime was everywhere. They stopped delivering the garbage…piles of trash rose up in heeps on the streets.

“And the life we lived, it only become worse…”

Worse? How how in the world could it get worse than busting your tail for no grades, no pay, and no basic human dignity.

I was about to be surprised. 

“So in October of 2011, me and other Coptic men go down to a famous radio station to protest peacefully the horrible conditions we were living in.”

Suddenly, Malik shot up out of his seat, and retreated into the back room. He came back holding a laptop.

“This is a video of the protest,” he said.

It was an Al-Jazeera newsreel. Its grainy image showed a dark city street, bathed in the sick orange and yellow of cheap streetlights. It was the middle of a road, lined on both sides with parked cars. A great mass of humanity walked between them. 

There were two men circled. One circle was white. One circle was red. 

“That white one is my best friend,” Malik said. “That red one is me. Watch.” 

Suddenly out of the left frame and armored car shot into the scene, barrelling down the road at high speed as two others followed. People scattered out of the way, when suddenly, the white circle went flying into the hair, slammed by the armored car and crashing down into the pavement in a sickening thud. 

“That was my best friend!” Malik hissed. Tears were pouring down his face…tears of anger, sadness, confusion.

 “And that was me!” he shouted in agony. “Look!” 

The red circle had jumped beneath one of the parked cars on the side of the road.

“He died,” Malik said, his voice hollow. “I survived.”

The room was silent. I looked down at Ki-Ro-Los. Should the kid be seeing this?

In a heartbeat, my question was answered.

“The last straw,” Malik said, “Was when they threatened my son.” 

*********

“Ki-Ro-Los would go out and play outside, like most boys do,” Malik said. “He would go to the park, and play with his friends.

“Everyday, he would hear over the loudspeakers, ‘Kill the infidel! Kill the infidel!’

“He came home one day, and he asked me, ‘Daddy, who is the infidel?’

“‘That is us, son,’ I told him. ‘We are the infidel, because we love Jesus.’

“So every day, when he went outside, he was afraid, because he would hear ‘Kill the infidel!’ everywhere in the streets.

“Soon, he stopped going out to play with his friends. He stayed at home, close me and Miriam. He was so scared, any time he heard a loud noise, he would hide, thinking they were coming to kill us.

“He was right. They kill Christians, they sell the kids into sex slavery, and they make the women into wives of Muslim men.

“Even today, he still sleeps in our bed, because he is afraid any time he hears a loud noise. Even in America.

“One day, I received a phone call from a local Imam. I get on the phone, and I ask him what he wants. Imams don’t call Christians, we don’t go to Mosque. 

“He says to me, ‘You have a fine son. It would be a shame if something were to happen to him.’

“Then he laughed.

“That was the last straw.”

He went on to tell us that after months of waiting, he finally was approved for an emergency visa to come to the United States. He had been here two months. 

*********

I loved Malik, Miriam, and Ki-Ro-Los. Having moved around the country, I had met many people. But never before had I ever met Christians more true than these Copts. 

One day, Malik told me something that will always stay with me. 

“You are a good boy, Richard, You love your family, you help your Mom, you care enough to learn about us and what is happening to Christians,” he put his hand on my shoulder. “God will use you. You will do great things.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, my blue eyes slitted in steely determination. 

“Malik, I love your people. I love you, my brother. I have been blessed. And I will do everything I can to help you.”

That day, sunshine and shadow brought by Malik, Miriam, and Ki-Ro-Los was forever etched upon my soul. 

The Christians of the Middle East were implanted on my heart as a cross to bear from God. 

I have done many things in my life since then, and I have seen many things.

But I have never forgotten that day.

The day all the Middle East news stories came to life. 

The day that “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” was more than just words you memorize as a kid. 

The day that I realized that as a Christian and an American, I’ve got a job to do. 

That job is to make this world a better place for my brothers and sisters in Christ…

Those true Christians living way over there… 

In a hell that is indeed, hotter than the blazing sun in the bright blue Tucson skies.

Sincerely,

Richard Barrett

Published 10-19-2023, at 1:16 PM

Written 03-30-2018

Written somewhere in the USA…