Helping one girl face the future with hope

IT WAS shrapnel that brought her to Los Angeles. Hot and sharp, it pierced her legs, her stomach and her right hand. It mangled her face around her deep brown eyes, and it tore off her nose.

“I’m hurt,” Marwa cried. “Mommy, I’m hurt in my face. I’m hurt, Mommy. My face.”

A missile? Mortar? Whose? It was impossible to know. The Americans were invading Baghdad, and Marwa Naim blamed them. She would never forget the explosion. It had blown up her house, thrown her into the air and flung her on top of her mother. Marwa saw a hole the shrapnel carved into her mother’s stomach.

Her mother lay still. Marwa saw blood. “Mommy, Mommy, get up.... “

Then Marwa’s vision began to fade. She would recall thinking that she herself was dying. Or that maybe she was already dead. Before she lost consciousness, she heard her aunt screaming for her father.

“Mohammed!” her aunt cried. “Your wife is dead! Your wife is dead!”

Marwa was 9 years old.

She had been pretty, her skin soft and toffee-colored, her eyes, mouth and nose set together in perfect proportion, just like her mother’s. It gave her the confidence to make herself known, even in a rough suburb like hers on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, a poor and religiously conservative neighborhood where girls settled into defined roles and rarely ventured out alone.

But now her face! Iraqi doctors removed the shrapnel from her stomach and hand and repaired the scars on her lip and around her eyes. But they could not replace her right thumb. And her nose? There was next to nothing. No nostrils, no tip. Just two holes and a small gutter covered by a zigzagging scar.

She saw her face in a mirror and cried. She was too embarrassed to go out. Everyone stared and gossiped. She stopped going to school. Other children called her “Mrs. No Nose.” She hated those taunts, hated them more than anything. “Mrs. No Nose. Mrs. No Nose.” She couldn’t take it.

Her father got a small aid grant and opened a tiny store, where he sold chips and Pepsis to his battle-weary neighbors. That was how aid groups found out about Marwa. They offered to arrange for her to fly to Los Angeles. The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund offered to buy her a ticket and find somewhere for her to stay.

The UCLA Medical Center and its chief of plastic surgery, Dr. Tim Miller, offered to restore her face -- for free.

But if Americans had hurt her, could they be trusted to heal her?

She would have to go to the United States for months alone. How would she manage? She knew no English, and her perceptions came from bootlegged Jackie Chan movies and whispers on the street: America was an ugly, scary place, especially for Muslims.

When she returned, would she come back just to be killed in another explosion?

Go, her father said. If she didn’t look normal, she would never finish school, and she might never marry. He blamed the Americans too. He would recall seeing their aircraft firing missiles just before the concussion. But her face meant so much.

“You’re going to look better,” he said. “Your nose will get better. Its beautiful shape will be back.”

Fearful arrival

MARWA Naim arrived at Los Angeles International Airport one foggy evening in January. By then, she was 11 but still too young to be alone. She carried all of her belongings in a small bag. She wore a pair of thin brown sandals, cream-colored pants and an old light-blue hijab, the head covering common among Muslim women. It was frayed and had small holes at its edges.

“You must be Marwa,” a man said in Arabic. He hugged her and gave her a clutch of red and pink flowers. “Assalamu alaikum, habibi,” he said. “May peace be upon you, little girl.” He was holding a small photograph of her, taken before her injury. “My name is Mr. Saad. Welcome.” He introduced her to his wife, Yabitha, who stood quietly by his side. “We’ll be sticking together for a while.”

Marwa was afraid. They drove to Saad Alazzawi’s home in an old Mercedes. Through the fog, she peered out at a freeway and its maze of speeding cars; at billboards with women in bikinis and men with bare chests; at glowing, red and blue neon signs and thousands of white lights from homes and businesses stretched as far as she could see.

She would remember thinking of home. She wanted to cry.

Saad had emigrated from Iraq in the 1970s. Wiry, with bushy salt-and-pepper brows and piercing eyes, he had spent years running a small Muslim school in South Los Angeles. Then things changed. Now, in the same building, he rented a banquet hall for weddings and quinceanera parties. Still, he was an eager helping hand in the Muslim community.

Though they shared a homeland, Saad and Marwa were different. He was Sunni and she was Shiite. He was strict and she was headstrong. Saad had a program for her: He would teach her to read and write better Arabic, educate her generally and train her in the ways of the Koran. He would try to keep her happy, in spite of all the medical tribulations she faced.

Grueling process begins

THEY began four days later. At UCLA, Dr. Miller smiled at her. She let herself smile back at him -- briefly. Then she looked down at the beige carpet.

“Marwa, hi,” he said. “How are you doing today?”

She was in an examination room. Miller would let me accompany him as he tried to undo the damage the shrapnel had done. It was devastating to see a child so badly disfigured, but I loved her spine-straight courage. So did Miller. A lean, energetic man in his mid-60s, he had been in South Vietnam. He had been shot at, heard missiles explode, seen children die.

“This is personal,” he said. “I have to help.”

He brought his face close to Marwa’s and studied the jagged contours. Where her nose had been, it seemed as if a small volcano had blown its top. Only the base remained, a clump of flesh. She could breathe normally, but she had holes for nostrils. And there was the zigzag scar.

Still, he thought, she was strikingly pretty. Her eyes were big and expressive, and she had a slight overbite that pushed her lips into a curl when she grinned, making her seem sheepish and vulnerable.

Miller had helped to restore thousands of faces. He knew about the psychology of self-image -- how hard it must be for a striking girl to suffer such a deformity.

“She’s not in great shape for this,” he told me on the phone late one night. “This is going to be extremely difficult. What happens in the first procedure, that’s going to set the course for the next operation and how this all will go.”

He figured it could take five, maybe six surgeries -- half a year, at least. He was concerned that everyone around Marwa might think this would be easy, as if it were some sort of a slam dunk. He said he had called two other surgeons to help him figure out which technique to use.

How do you build a nose from nothing? He compared it to what paratroopers had done in South Vietnam. “Working on her, it’s going to be like jumping out of an airplane,” he said, “and just hoping the chute opens.”

Marwa’s first leap came Feb. 10, after a sleepless night.

She had sat on her bed until dawn in a sparse room at Saad’s duplex, looking at photos of her family, everyone except her mother. She had no pictures of her mother.

She would remember hearing wind rattle against the windows -- and trembling.

At 6:30 a.m., she was at UCLA, surrounded by doctors and nurses. She eyed them warily, clutching a soft, brown teddy bear.

Miller walked in.

“Oh, my God,” she said in English. She had heard people say that when they were frightened.

“I have something for you,” Miller said. It was a flower: a tall, thin orchid with tender white petals. He asked an interpreter to translate.

“This is going to go well,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Thank you,” she said, again in English. And she smiled.

By 8 a.m. they were in surgery. She was anesthetized. Miller applied orange gel to her face. Then he marked off portions of skin with black ink.

At 8:05, he laid a scalpel into the flesh in the middle of her forehead. Delicately, he cut a U-shaped flap of skin. He left the bottom end of the flap attached between her thick eyebrows. He lifted the top end and examined both sides. It was brown on the outside, bloody and fatty on the inside.

A nurse suctioned the blood.

“Double hook, please,” Miller said, calmly. “Moist cloths, please.”

Gently, he draped the flap of skin against her cheek. He closed the opening it had left on her forehead.

Then he made a second incision, this time around the ugly black scar in the pit where her nose used to be. He cut out the scar and peeled back the skin on both sides. From my vantage point at Marwa’s feet, even I could see that there simply was not enough cartilage left to use as the foundation for a new nose.

Miller directed his fellow doctors to her right ear. Deftly, they cut inside. They took out small, white chunks of cartilage. With this cartilage, Miller and another doctor began to build a new nose. For a moment, they looked like artists. Delicately, they molded the chunks and then sewed the structure together.

Miller stepped back. The cartilage looked like a miniature flagpole, a few centimeters tall. Then he took the flap of skin, its bottom still attached between her eyebrows, and twisted it to turn the brown side out and the bloody side in. Finally, he stretched it down, over the top of the cartilage flagpole.

It was a nose.

But not a very beautiful nose. It looked like a swollen, twisted, bloodied clump.

To keep everything in place, Miller inserted a thin, 3-inch metal rod through the clump. It stuck out on both sides. In Marwa’s nostrils, he placed small yellow tubes to keep the passages open. The tubes jutted out from her face.

“This is a hard one,” he said, stepping back again. He wasn’t sure that her nose would ever look normal. And he worried about the forehead hair growing from it. He knew, though, that he would revisit this nose.

“Time will tell,” Miller said. “Time will tell.”

Now Marwa lay in recovery. Her eyes opened slightly. Saad stood above her. He held her right hand, stroked her forearm and prayed in Arabic. “In the name of the merciful and compassionate God, say, ‘He is God alone, God the eternal.... ‘ I seek refuge in the Lord of daybreak, in the Lord of men, the king of men, the God of men.... “

She moaned. I wondered how she felt. In Arabic, Saad asked her what was wrong. “She says, ‘The pain, it is bad. Very bad.’ ”

Marwa looked at Saad and muttered softly in Arabic. “What did they do to me? Why did they do this?”

Saad looked up to heaven, then at me. She was more than just a kid he was trying to help. She was a symbol. “We have hurt this little girl,” he said. “She didn’t deserve this. The children of Iraq, my people, they don’t deserve the pain they are taking. Now I have this little one to take care of .... She represents the tragedy of Iraq.”

He tightened his lips and shook his head.

Marwa clutched his hand.

He looked at me again. “What would you do?” he asked. He was thinking of her future.

“Should I intervene, maybe even try to keep her here, so she wouldn’t have to return? What should I do, as her guardian? Heal her and then let her go back to that war zone?”

There were no good answers. How moral would it be to heal a child and then send her directly back into the teeth of war? How moral would it be to keep her here, to separate her from her family?

Marwa tried to stifle her moans. Her eyebrows tensed.

She whimpered and opened her mouth slightly. A single tear formed at her right eye.

Slowly, it rolled down her cheek.

A land so new

MARWA turned 12. America was odd and amazing. Everywhere she went her eyes grew wide, sometimes with fear and disdain, sometimes with wonder. When she was not at UCLA, she flew kites, walked on the beach and ate Fosters Freeze treats. At an Islamic Chinese restaurant in Alhambra, Saad introduced her to egg rolls. She didn’t like them.

From inside Saad’s old Mercedes-Benz, she gaped at everything. “So many cars, so many cars,” she would say in Arabic. Saad translated. “It’s all so big, so rich, so clean.” She said she wanted a sports car, a convertible.

She stared at tight, low-cut jeans, skin-hugging tops and shirts with sleeves above the elbows. She said she wanted some of those clothes too.

But somehow she understood the price, and not just in dollars. Things seemed lock-step in America, she said, even regimented. Saad translated her words. “It is true, they have more freedom here. But in other ways, the people here, all they do is work.... There is no fun, only work. People are like machines here. Is this freedom?”

Still, she envied how easily American children could make their feelings known and how girls could act like boys: be tough, independent, aggressive.

She ran through Saad’s banquet hall, kicking a soccer ball. He taught her how to ride his son’s rickety black 10-speed bike, and she fell in love with it. She pedaled furiously around his neighborhood, her hijab flapping, the yellow tubes in her nostrils straining with each breath, blood trickling out.

“Please, little girl, slow down!” Saad shouted. What if she fell and did more damage to her face? He took the bike away.

It was futile. The next day, she sneaked it out -- and flew off again.

She grew tired of his program: the English, the Koran, the home schooling. She wanted to sleep in, skateboard, ride the bike.

Saad finally sent her to spend a weekend with Theresa Moussa, an Egyptian who had come to America as a girl. She worked for UCLA, helping the medical center with its Arabic-speaking patients. She had been interpreting for Marwa.

A divorcee with a son in college, Theresa was traditional enough to revere her parents and try to please them, but she was also strong and independent. She had flowing, black hair and long legs, and she didn’t try to hide them. She wore makeup and high heels, form-fitting skirts and blouses that showed her arms.

At Theresa’s house, Marwa walked with a bounce. They laughed and shared secrets. Marwa could watch all the TV she wanted and help herself to anything in the refrigerator. She and Theresa went to a beauty shop together and had their nails done in pink.

Marwa asked Theresa if she believed in God.

Yes, Theresa said.

Marwa noticed her crucifixes and her painting of the Virgin Mary. She must be from a different strain of Islam, Marwa thought. “So, you are Sunni, right?” she asked.

“No, I am Christian,” Theresa said. “Coptic Christian.”

One night, the two of them sat on Theresa’s black leather coach and watched a movie. Marwa draped her arms around Theresa and buried her head in Theresa’s chest. They both fell asleep.

Near midnight, Theresa woke. She gently awakened Marwa.

Groggily, Marwa looked into Theresa’s eyes. “Mommy.... “

On March 6, Miller operated again.

The flap of skin, twisting down between her eyes, seemed like a snout. In a restaurant one day, a boy had looked at her and fled back to his friends. “Elephant girl!”

Now Miller raised the flap. Underneath was the transplanted cartilage. With needles, scissors, forceps and thread, he chipped at the cartilage and molded it. Like a sculptor, he thinned it here, then thinned it there.

Slowly, he created a tip.

On April 10, he operated a third time. Using scissors and scalpels, he refashioned the flap of skin around the top of what was starting to look like a real nose.

There came a moment of truth.

He lifted the flap and snipped it from its moorings.

In a miraculous way, the flap would find new roots and new ways for blood to flow and keep it alive.

And there it was: Her face was beginning to look as it once had.

After each operation, Marwa moaned. “No, no,” she cried. “Get away, get away.”

“But little girl, you need water,” Saad said.

“They did more than what you told me!” she cried out after one surgery. “There is a lot of pain! I want my father! I need to be with my father! Ohhhh! Why? Why? Why? Why is this happening to me, Allah? Where is my mother? Why did she have to die? Why?

Saad could do nothing. He stroked her arm. “It’s OK, baby. It’ll be all right, little girl.”

“Mr. Saad, why is Allah punishing me? Why did Allah take my mother? I want to be with her. I don’t want to live anymore. I wish I had died. I wish the Americans had just killed me.”

The anesthetic worked like a truth serum, Saad thought, letting her spill out her true feelings. He stiffened when he heard them.

Marwa wanted to see her face.

A hand mirror lay on a table. Saad hesitated. Then he gave it to her.

Marwa stared. Despite improvements, her nose was still a puffy, reddened clump, oozing blood. Two yellow tubes still protruded from its nostrils.

“This is a nose?” she cried out. “Why didn’t God let me die?”

Concerns and clashes

BETWEEN surgeries, Saad spoke to Marwa’s father and learned that he was patrolling the roof of his flat every night in fear that someone would hurt his family.

How could Saad, in good conscience, send Marwa home?

On the other hand, so long as she was in America, how could he shield her from temptations? Especially the temptation of the bicycle?

“Baby, baby, please, no,” he pleaded with her. “Please, off the bike before you fall and hurt yourself.”

She rode it anyway, in circles, just out of reach. She mimicked him, speaking in English. “Baby, baby, please. Baby, baby.... “ Then she would switch to Arabic. “I know what you can do and what you cannot do. You are not my father. And I am a child. Here I have rights.”

One day, without warning, the front wheel of the bicycle twisted on a patch of oil. The bike slid out from under her, and she plunged to the ground. With her thumbless hand, she broke her fall, but the yellow tubes jarred loose and spilled to the pavement.

Saad ran to her.

She dusted herself off, picked up the tubes and looked at her hand. Blood trickled from a gash. The tubes would have to be cleaned and reinserted. Her face trembled, as if she wanted to cry, but she held it in. She couldn’t afford to show her tears, not now.

“That’s it,” Saad said. “I take the air out of the tires. No more biking.”

Marwa brushed past him and walked away muttering. Saad translated. She was saying: “I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

Saad was growing weary and frustrated. He needed a break. He began letting her spend more weekends with other families in the network of Iraqi Americans around Los Angeles.

Sometimes she stayed with the family of Karim and Lily Karam in Palos Verdes Estates. The Karams took her to ride horses and let her try on lipstick. She watched an old Egyptian movie about a belly dancer named ZuZu, who fell into the arms of a blond leading man. “Hi, handsome,” Marwa said, in English. “So handsome.”

She borrowed the movie and took it back to Saad’s, but he wouldn’t let her watch it.

“Movies like this, they are totally undermining me,” Saad said, burying his head in his hands. “And undermining society. It’s taking liberalism into the extreme. As far as the clothes, anything goes. Freedom, freedom. We are free to do whatever we want. I can’t have her watching this trash. Not in my house.”

One Saturday, Theresa and her fiance took Marwa to Universal Studios. I went along. At Waterworld, a lavish production based on the movie, men in green uniforms strutted in front of us with rifles and grenades. They fired at each other. Water splashed. Explosions thundered. The men screamed.

Marwa held desperately to Theresa’s arm. “Theresa, Theresa, is it real? What is happening?”

It was fake, Theresa said.

Marwa didn’t believe it. She ducked and tucked her head against Theresa’s shoulder. She opened her mouth and closed her eyes.

Pop-pop-pop.... Boom!

Men fell into the water.

One blast shook the ground. It must have sounded like the explosion in Iraq that changed her life. Could she take it?

Finally, she looked up. She saw that Theresa was smiling and laughing. Everyone was applauding.

By the end of the show, Marwa was applauding too.

The day was darkened by thoughts of my father. He had fallen gravely ill with heart disease, and I was worried. Marwa could tell. “He could die,” I told her -- really die, not like the men in Waterworld.

She said she would pray for him.

On another Saturday, she practiced putting makeup on Theresa, who woke to find her eyes caked with black liner and thick blue shadow, her lips painted bright red, her cheeks plastered with rouge. When Theresa drove her home to Saad’s house, Marwa said: “I don’t know why I love you, but I do.”

Marwa looked at her nose in the rearview mirror. It did, indeed, seem like a nose. “I like the way I look now,” she said. “You are so good to me, so nice. Do you love me too?”

“Yes, of course I do,” Theresa would remember saying. “You are special to me. You are like the daughter I never had.”

“I like that,” Marwa said. She clutched Theresa’s arm. “That makes me happy.”

On May 10, Marwa had her fourth operation. By now, doctors were making progress with the hair that had been growing in little clumps on her nose. They used a laser to kill the follicles. Still, there was more to be done.

Before her anesthetic, Miller walked into her room, smiling. Her nose had a few lumps. A thin scar stretched from her eyebrow to her hairline. But he thought he could diminish those things. And he had a surprise.

“This,” he said, “is probably going to be our last time.”

“OK,” she shot back in English. “Be careful.”

He laughed. She knew so much English now. Gone was the shy, scared girl he had met back in February. Earlier in the week, she had come to his office. She wore a new ensemble: a fashionable pair of white jeans, a pink top and a pink hijab.

She clasped his hand and held it tight for a full minute.

He teased her.

She giggled, then looked him in the eye and winked.

During the surgery, Miller opened her nose with a scalpel. He trimmed and shaped the cartilage at its tip, then cut bits of bone that had formed a little hump at the ridge and flattened it slightly.

He narrowed the scar on her forehead. It took two hours. Then Miller lifted the skin around her nose and examined it. He announced that he was going to sew the skin together. When he finished, he stepped back to see how she looked.

He turned to me and clenched his fist. “You know what?” he said. “We’re done. It’s just going to be a few more stitches, and then we’re done. This is all I can do for her.”

When Marwa healed, she would have a fine nose.

He would check her in a year, if he could, and make any necessary adjustments. Otherwise, her surgeries were over.

Time for farewells

AFTER the operation, Marwa spoke to Saad so rudely that he sent her to her room -- more than once. She hugged her teddy bear, clutched a photograph of her father and wept.

Finally, Saad asked Salam and Sahar Ali, an Iraqi American couple in Mission Viejo, to keep her while she healed and until she could go home.

“I should not have brought her to stay with me,” Saad told me one afternoon. “I would not do this again. She has brought it all to my face: the war, the suffering. I was trying to deal with the guilt I have for not being in Iraq, for not helping enough. But with her behavior and her pain, I have seen in front of me the tragedy of Iraq.”

Tears pooled in his eyes.

The Alis took Marwa to a mosque, where she heard an imam speak about honoring mothers. She knelt and cried. “In heaven,” she asked, “will I see my mother?”

Worried about her sadness, the Alis let her watch satellite TV. They took her to Disneyland, to Chuck E. Cheese’s, to Starbucks and to an outdoor mall in Irvine, where she rode a carousel for the first time and spent an hour at a computer store.

She went to Al Ridah, an Islamic school, where Marwa helped students with their Arabic.

Now it was only a matter of weeks. On the phone, I spoke with her father in Iraq. Gunfire and explosions were a constant part of life. He had seen a man being kidnapped. An American tank patrolling his street had rolled over his car and destroyed it.

“I am very scared of what it is going to be like when she comes back,” he said. He knew that Marwa had grown accustomed to America and liked it. He wondered if she could handle the hardship in Iraq, even if she had a nose. “I am afraid.”

But he needed her. She had to help take care of the house and her older brother and two younger sisters -- even if it meant that she could not go back to school. He needed her to wake the other children, make them breakfast, clean the house....

Marwa went to a department store one evening with Sahar. She jumped on the back of a shopping cart and pushed off, racing down the aisles. Sahar chased her. “Don’t do that! Marwa, please.”

“But Auntie,” Marwa shouted. “Here I am free! Free, Auntie, free!”

Finally, the day came.

Marwa’s nose was healing. It looked much like a normal nose, slightly upturned and gracefully proportioned. It had a small lump at the bridge, and its skin was a touch darker than her cheeks. A thin scar traced a straight line from between her eyebrows up to her scalp.

She had spent the night at the Karams’ in Palos Verdes Estates so she could be nearer LAX. Now it was morning, and she was watching a video of Cinderella, who was defying all expectations and transforming into a princess.

“Time is up, Cinderella,” Lily Karam said. “We are going to miss the plane if you keep watching.”

Marwa wouldn’t budge. “No, no, I don’t want to go. I’ll go tomorrow, OK?”

I had planned to fly with her as far as Amman, Jordan, where her father was to pick her up and take her home. But now I could not go. My father’s heart had grown weaker, and he had died just days before.

In Lily’s car, rushing to make up time, I told Marwa how her courage with far greater hardships had helped me while I sat at my father’s side.

On several occasions before, she had let me know exactly how tired she had grown of my notebook and questions. But now she paused.

“Thank you, Kurt,” she said in English as she sat in a car that drove through thick traffic on Pacific Coast Highway. “This nice. Thank you.”

She grew quiet. She rolled down the window and stared out. Her lips quivered. She turned to Lily and said that she knew she had to go home but that she wasn’t sure if going home would be good for her.

It helped that at LAX she was surrounded by many of the people who had helped her. Saad was there, along with officials from the relief fund that had paid for her trip. One of them wondered aloud: “How does a 12-year-old girl injured in the war adapt to a foreign country like this one -- and then go back to war?”

Marwa stood tall. She wore a chiffon top, high-heeled shoes and wraparound sunglasses. She carried a fancy handbag. Covering her hair was a new, cream-colored hijab, embroidered with tiny sparkles.

Her luggage was filled with new clothes, stuffed animals, jewelry, wristwatches, purses, a SpongeBob, Play-Doh, journals, a picture frame trimmed in pink fuzz -- and photos of Saad, Miller, Theresa.

She reached up and hugged Theresa.

“I don’t want.... “

Theresa cut her off. “Listen, you have to go. I want you to look back and remember your time here -- and remember me. But you have to go. You go -- and make something of yourself.”

“But .... “

“Don’t worry, no matter how far we are, we will always be friends.”

Gently, Theresa placed into Marwa’s small hand a letter.

“But I will miss you....”

“I will miss you too....”

A bittersweet journey

MY COLLEAGUES, photographer Anne Cusack and reporter Ashraf Khalil, accompanied Marwa on the plane. Marwa took out a photo of Theresa and kissed it, again and again. She read Theresa’s letter. It said Theresa would never forget her.

Anne could see Marwa was sobbing.

At the baggage claim area in Amman, she spotted a man who looked like her. His back was turned, but she knew instantly that it was her father. She wrapped her arms around his legs, and he swept her up into his arms.

During two days in Amman, Marwa got a glimpse of her future. Mohammed Naim expected his daughter to address people formally, with honorifics: uncle, auntie or mister. But she called Ashraf by his first name. Her father upbraided her.

She pouted.

“She’s getting stubborn,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m not stubborn!”

“That’s something that has to change,” he said. Such disrespect could lead to danger at home. “We have to bring her back to our way.”

He tried to prepare her for her neighborhood: His shop was faring poorly. Few people had enough money for Pepsis and chips. “Our neighbors? They were kidnapped, last month.”

Everyone knew she had been in America, and people who had gotten help from Americans were not well thought of. “We come home every night and lock ourselves in.”

She looked at him wearily. “Let’s change the subject.”

At 7 a.m. July 3, Marwa Naim and her father climbed aboard a propeller-driven, 13-seat Fokker to fly back to Baghdad. She wore designer jeans, high heels, a white blouse and a denim jacket, cut short above her waist.

She walked up a staircase to the door of the plane. She turned, gave a tiny wave and was gone.

A changed life

WHEN they reached Iraq, Marwa told me by phone, she learned that her father had remarried. His new wife was Faiza -- one of her distant cousins. Faiza, her father said, was pregnant.

Her neighbors could not believe how her face had changed. No one called her “Mrs. No Nose” anymore. She said that she was happy to be home but that she was rarely allowed to go outside, because of the violence.

In America, she could ride a bike, swim, see Theresa. “I want to go back,” she said. “I want so go back as soon as I can.”

kurt.streeter@latimes.com

*

About this story

Writer Kurt Streeter and photographer Anne Cusack spent four months with Marwa Naim, her doctors and those who welcomed Marwa into their homes. Streeter interviewed them extensively. He and Cusack were present during each of her surgeries and many of her experiences of daily life in America. Conversations in Arabic were translated by her caretakers. Cusack and writer Ashraf Khalil accompanied Marwa back to the Middle East. The account of the bombing that injured her is drawn from interviews with Marwa, her father and Marine Col. Christopher Conlin, who led American troops through her neighborhood on their way into Baghdad.

*

On latimes.com

An extensive photo gallery chronicling Marwa’s months-long medical ordeal, the ups and downs of her strange new experience in Southern California and her journey back home can be viewed at latimes.com/newface.