Of all the places I imagined my story might one day sit, I don’t think I could have dreamed this one up.
You can now hear my story in Imagine Your Impact, an interactive experience at the Obama Presidential Center, celebrating changemakers from around the world whose work brings community leadership to life and inspires the next generation to step up and do the same.
My story begins in Baghdad, with my family fleeing Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurds. It winds through refugee camps, a bicycle gifted by a kind stranger, and a 24-year journey to find and thank him, a story that became the heart of a children’s book The Bicycle. Since then, the book has been used in thousands of classrooms to bridge divides and build empathy.
Carved into the exterior of the building are words from Obama’s 2015 Selma speech: “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’” What got my family to safety was not any one person, but the invisible threads between people. A stranger who drove over 150 kilometres to give a little girl a bicycle, a donation of coats, a shared meal that transcends language. Communities who opened their doors. People who showed up.
It is those connections, between neighbours and strangers and everyone in between, that carry us forward.
I’m deeply grateful to the Obama Foundation for making this possible, Patricia McCormick, Yas Imamura and everyone at Farshore, HarperCollins Publishers UK and HarperCollins Publishers.
I hope you’ll come and experience this rotating series of remarkable stories when the Obama Presidential Center opens to the public on June 19.
P.S. My birthday is just a few days before. As far as birthday gifts go, having your story housed in a presidential center is… not bad. Not bad at all.
Mevan Babakar 