I am a 10-year-old girl in Baghdad sleeping in the guest room with my parents and sisters. We gave up our rooms to my uncle, aunt and their families. Our neighborhood is safest. I wake up to sound of bombs and my mom’s voice telling me that our “safe neighborhood” is being attacked. We all rush into the most secure room in the house — our living room, the room with the least windows — and wait for the sound of the cruel bombs to stop.

Everything looks red for some reason.

Maybe it is the light reflected from the windows directly upstairs. Maybe it is just my wild imagination. I squeeze myself tighter between my mom and my little sister. I can hear them breathing deeply. I am scared, but I try not to let it show. Is today the day for us to die? My mom tells my sisters and I, “Everything is going to be okay.”

***

The school bell rings; it is time to go home. My neighbor comes to take us in his car. We are driving. I see a crowd of people hovering over something, but I don’t understand what is happening. My neighbor, Ahmed, tells my sisters and I to close our eyes until he says it’s safe to open. I cover my eyes with both my hands,  but I take a peek anyway through the little cracks that separate each one of my fingers.

I see the remains of a blown- up man. There are blood, clothes and pieces of this man everywhere. People are crying. I don’t think I should look anymore. I close my eyes to process what I just saw. It is not like what you see in an action movie. He was a man with a family that loved him.

***

I am in school. I walk into class with my friend Zainab. She takes her seat next to the window; I take mine a little further. We are in the fourth grade. We are talking because the teacher isn’t in the class yet. I hear an explosion; immediately, I know: A bomb exploded. The windows break but the curtains were strong enough to hold the pieces back before they touched Zainab. Kids are screaming. Teachers are rushing the kids out of the classes and into the fields. Kids are crying. I look around the crowd hoping to find my sisters or cousin. I don’t find them until our parents come to take us home.

***

I was born and raised in Baghdad. I lived there until I was about 10; until war struck my family, hard. Since our neighborhood was considered safe my parents decided it was a good idea to stay where we were. Then, in 2006, my dad got kidnapped by a gang from Baghdad called militia Al Mahdi whose goal was to ”liberate Iraq and its people” — yes, because kidnapping a 53-year-old man is a great step to liberation.

Our situation wasn’t original or unheard of, in Iraq after the invasion it happened all the time.  People kidnapped other people to get money, promising the family to return the victim safely after they receive the ransom, but instead killing them.  Telling the family where to look for the body– if they are kind enough to not let the parents go on a body hunt. We got lucky; they let my dad go after my mom paid them the amount of money they wanted, and we left Baghdad for good.

I will never forget that day, coming home after school and finding out my father had been taken.  I can’t imagine a scarier feeling.

Now I am 17-years-old, living in America and I don’t have to hear bombs going off on daily basis. Although America is a lot safer than Iraq, events such as the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, the Aurora movie theater shooting and the recent bombs that went off at the Boston Marathon drag my thoughts back to what I escaped from. I feel a rush of fear and anticipation every time I hear about these terrible events. I don’t want to go back to how my life was, filled with terror and agony.

For people like me, who have lived in Iraq or other violence infested country, it’s obvious that no one here cares.

On the same day of the Boston Marathon bombings, Monday April 15, The New York Times reported 20 separate attacks occurred in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Hilla, Falluja, Nasiriya and Tikrit. Thirty-seven people had been killed and more than 140 were wounded.

We did not hear about this.

In fact, I didn’t hear about it until I checked my Facebook and read what some of my friends, who live there, wrote. It makes me wonder, why, in between hours of the same shots of Boston over and over again, could the media not take a second to report on these other bombings?  These other deaths. Obviously what happened at the marathon is a tragedy.  But what about what happened, continues to happen and might be happening as you’re reading this, in Iraq?

Events like this, both here in America and in Iraq, make me wonder if there can ever be peace.