A Real Hero

         Hero, a word that is misused nowadays. People use it a lot and in trivial occasions and situations. This time, I'm going to tell you about a real hero, a father who is willing to sacrifice a lot for his children.

         In a country where you can't find a job easily, where you don't get to study what interests you, and you don't work in your favorite field, the hardest thing to do is to start a family. Let alone, buy a house, put food on the table and register his kids in a good bearable school.

Our main character here, was lucky to find a job opportunity outside the country early on in his “family life”. He found an opportunity to work in Oman, a nice, quiet and stable country. Living without his family 10 months a year, you can imagine how hard it must have been for him.

Two decades later, the company decided to transfer him to Libya, that was before the revolution, things were quiet back then. Then the revolution happened, things went out of hand, it went chaotic in no time. Guns were everywhere in the street, canons, even tanks. He decided to withstand everything and to stay working.

One day, he was driving home his car, thinking about his family that he hadn't seen for a few months. His thoughts was interrupted by the dozen of men blocking the road, asking him for his registration and license paper, but he could clearly see that they were not cops. The father had also known that these men do this all the time, they block the street, steal your car, shoot you and leave you laying in the street to die.

His mind was going crazy, he couldn't hear anything from the sound of his heart beats. Knowing these few minutes might very well be his last. They asked him to get out of the car, he did, then they asked him to turn around. He knows they will shoot them anywhere now. “What about my family? What about my mother? What about my body?” He kept thinking. In a moment where you can't think straight, he managed to jump behind the wrecks of a car, he crawled on his face in the mud attempting his best to escape his own death, to stay alive for his family.

He kept crawling with the image of his family in his mind, didn't stop for a moment, he found himself in front of a different street, he immediately stood up and pointed for a taxi to stop. “Where to?” The driver asked. “Just go”, the father replied in a feint voice. Survival instincts, he managed to sleep the night in his home.

Resign and just go home to your family, is that what you think he did? Well, the father, the hero, to this day, is still working in the same country, with the same company, driving around the same streets not caring about his life. And that ladies and gentlemen, is what I call a hero.