‘Our whole family is excited’ to see woman taken to Mideast as child
Reunion between mom, daughter today
Just before sunset today, Robbie Lamb will do something she has done only once in the past 24 years: She will hug her daughter.
The unlikely reunion, their first in 15 years, overcame vast physical, cultural, geopolitical and emotional distances that neither could have imagined 28 years ago when Lamb, newly married to her Palestinian husband and living in Houston, gave birth to a daughter they named Laila.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Lamb, 61 and retired in Belen, said last week, her voice tinged with equal parts of excitement and caution.
Hoped-for reunions, she said, have fallen through in the past.
“Laila was going to surprise my mother by coming back,” Lamb said. “But my mother died in February.”
Barring any unforeseen complications, Laila Faddah, now a 28-year-old pharmacist living in Amman, Jordan, will step off a jetliner at the Albuquerque International Sunport and into the welcoming arms of her mother — whom she last saw in Amman when she was 13 — and a group of family members she has never met.
“We’re going to do everything!” Lamb said of her daughter’s planned 10-day visit. “We’re taking her to White Sands and the Jemez Mountains. We’re going to lot of stuff, just being together and spending time with her.”
A clash of cultures
Roberta “Robbie” Lamb, an Albuquerque native, was living in Houston when she met a Muslim college student, Hani Faddah, who pursued her fervently. The feelings, she said, were not mutual, but she relented and agreed to a single date, hoping that would convince him of her lack of interest.
Despite her misgivings about Hani, she became pregnant with Laila a few weeks later.
But Lamb, an independent 33-year-old, and Faddah, steeped in his Muslim upbringing, mixed like water and oil.
In 1989, Faddah had received a degree in electronic engineering and was offered a good-paying job in Kuwait. Hoping their lives might improve in a different setting, Lamb consented to the move. They arrived in Kuwait in June 1990 — just two months before neighboring Iraq invaded Kuwait, triggering the Gulf War.
During the five-month war, more than 200,000 Palestinians, often targeted for punishment by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi security forces, fled Kuwait. Lamb and her family left Kuwait in October 1990 and returned to Houston.
By April 1991, Lamb realized that, despite the love she had for Laila, her marriage was not going to improve. She left alone one night and was back in New Mexico the next day.
She soon learned that her husband and Laila had returned to Kuwait.
Where’s my daughter?
Over the next several months, Lamb learned that her 4-year-old daughter was living with her father’s parents, first in Kuwait then in Jordan.
Over the years, Lamb contacted the U.S. State Department, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, FBI, congressmen and other agencies for help getting her daughter back but to no avail.
“I tried everything to get her back, but everything failed,” she said.
Determined to stay in con- tact with Laila, Lamb became adept at finding the family’s ever-changing phone number. Contact by phone was sporadic at best, she said.
In 1999, after her ex had remarried and started another family, he consented to Lamb’s pleas to let her visit Laila in Jordan. She flew to Jordan in July 1999 for a seven-day visit.
“It was only a week, but it was a good week,” she said.
After returning from Jor- dan, her contact with Laila was sporadic at best. Lamb’s occasional phone calls were often monitored by family members, she said, and she was usually told the girl was unavailable.
About two years ago, Lamb’s efforts to find Laila on Facebook paid off, though Laila had used a different surname than her father’s.
“Thank god for the Internet,” Lamb said.
Since then, mom and daughter have exchanged emails and photos several times a week, trying to fill in the innumerable gaps between their lives.
Earlier this year, Laila persuaded her father to let her visit her mother in the states, Lamb said.
“I’m ecstatic,” Lamb said Tuesday after receiving a call from Laila saying she was at the Amman airport waiting to begin her journey to Albuquerque. “She’s excited ... our whole family is excited.”