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We didn't know what a caring woman was here at Dar Al-Yateem orphanage before miss Amna came to teach us history. She hated the sight of the classroom so she always took us to the orphanage library for the history lesson, the change was a welcomed one as we have grown bored of the usual scenery.
Her smile as she walked into the classroom each day drew sunlight into our hearts. She was strict yet always let the occasional joke slide. Whether the name of Genghis Khan sounded funny or Hitler's stupid mustache, she even seemed welcoming to us making fun of horrible people.
As days went by she started peacefully teaching us about all the wars in the school's curriculum. But she knew how to keep us safe from the bullets shot outside, and told us that she had agreed with some people to add sound effects as we read page sixty-eight about assassinations. The airstrikes were merely her reinterpretation of the second world war. None of us felt captured as we read about the war against Iran. And when Al-Ba'ath soldiers came to the library doors with weapons, she closed the door to tell them that Abd al-Karim Qasim wasn't inside and went back quickly to tell us that they left.
Years have gone by, and she kept using all props and friends she knew to explain to us how history went. The smashed windows of the library were merely the result of the Hiroshima bomb and the burned books were that of Nagasaki. Then we united like the Japanese and rebuilt it, over and over again until we happily graduated, and embarked into the world armed with the knowledge she had taught us.
And she remained in the orphanage, using her daily kind smile, the actors she knew, and the props she had to give the new generation lessons about history while keeping death and destruction strictly in the pages and students' imagination.