Author Topic: My Libyan Friend Escaped Libya! Follow Up Article From Front Page of Star!!  (Read 437 times)

TraceOneInfinite Flat Earther 96'

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You guys might remember I posted an article a month ago that I helped get in the Kansas City Star (serves a Kansas City metropolitan of 2 million people) about my friend being trapped in Libya and trying to pressure the State Department to get out by way of the media.  I was even quoted in article.  Well my friend made it back so the journalist did a follow up article with him her in KC.  Pretty interesting stuff, check it out...

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/08/25/3099705/escape-from-libya-liberates-area.html

Escape from Libya liberates area resident
By MATT PEARCE
The Kansas City Star

Even if his circumstances are modest, Morad Elbusefi, who escaped from Libya, is happy to be living in Overland Park.

The Jack Stack restaurant at 95th and Metcalf might as well be heaven. Morad Elbusefi escaped a civil war and flew halfway around the world to get here.

In July, when The Kansas City Star first wrote about him, Elbusefi had been trapped in Libya for months. The Libyan-American and former Kansas City resident was hiding out in a small tribal village, biding his time for an escape.

Now, after hitching a perilous ride across the desert and crossing into Tunisia, the U.S. citizen is home safe.

At the restaurant this week, Elbusefi, 30, has a 5 o’clock shadow and close-cropped hair, tight white khakis, running shoes and a faded pink T-shirt that was one of the few things to escape Libya with him.

He’s small, so small that he nearly vanishes into the corner of the booth as the waiter leans over the table to take his order. He already knows what he wants, known it for months. The brisket — the big one.

“Fries?” the waiter asks.

“Cool.” Elbusefi smiles, and when the brisket arrives, he slathers the fries with barbecue sauce and files them into his mouth, one after another.

After the first hour of his 32-hour run for the Libyan border, he’d vomited everything he’d eaten because the truck was bouncing over the desert and the rocks so much. Sleep-deprived, he was jammed in its cab with three other men, no music, no air conditioning and almost no talk as they avoided roads and Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi’s troops.

But he made it, and now he sits in a giant padded booth all by himself, grabs the sandwich with both hands, takes a massive bite and smiles again. How does it taste?

“Like freedom,” Elbusefi says, smiling.

Elbusefi moved to Libya in 2010 after a friend offered him a job with a Libyan oil company, a potentially good opportunity in a country that was in the process of normalizing its relations with the U.S. But the job disappeared overnight when the war started. Elbusefi was stranded.

After The Star published Elbusefi’s story in July, the office of Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas moved to push the State Department to pay more attention to Elbusefi’s case. Elbusefi credits one staffer in particular — Ethan Patterson, a district representative based in Overland Park — for providing the support and positive attitude he needed to escape.

“It was obvious to me that this was someone who needed to get out of there,” Patterson said.

Even though the State Department wasn’t able to provide a rescue in the end, just talking to Patterson helped Elbusefi realize that it was time to leave.

And waiting already had its risks.

Elbusefi admits it only now — he didn’t want to be pitied — but he was shot at, twice, in the time before his escape. Once by a pro-Gadhafi militia in southern Libya, when he’d thought it was safe enough to take a jog. That time was just a misunderstanding, he says, and the militiamen apologized afterward.

“There was another time in Tripoli,” Elbusefi says, grimacing. “I don’t want to talk about that one. People would ask about it. Just say I was shot at.”

He linked up with a rebel driver and left on Aug. 5. Elbusefi’s material possessions consisted of two shirts, a pair of sweatpants, nail clippers, a pair of knockoff “Mark Zuckerberg Adidas flip-flops,” one pen, a pad of sticky notes and an old laptop.

On the almost delirious 32-hour ride to the Tunisian border, Elbusefi’s ride made impossible-seeming climbs over boulders and ruts.

“If you can imagine confining a group of mice in a can and shaking them relentlessly for a couple of hours, that’s what it was like,” he says.

They stopped frequently to scan for troops and rested at one point in an abandoned building in the desert. The next day, he reached the rebel-controlled town of Zintan near the Tunisian border at sunset. Soon he reached the crossing, where the Tunisian border guards stopped him and asked for his passport.

“The Tunisian (guard) asked me how I got into Libya, and I just looked at him and said nothing,” Elbusefi says. “He smiled, stamped my passport and said, ‘Go right ahead.’ ”

Free at last.

From there, he made his way home through Tunis, Morocco and eventually New York City, where Elbusefi, a runner, exercised his liberties in the most literal sense of the expression.

“I went to Manhattan and walked, and ran, ran barefoot. I ran around the island many miles every day,” he says. “It was beautiful.”

Now Elbusefi is back home in his brother’s apartment in Overland Park, bumming rides until he can make enough money to earn his independence, as well as some winter clothing. He’s got a job as a cook at a nearby McDonald’s he can walk to.

He sleeps in his niece’s bedroom on a mattress on the floor beside her bed, “Libyan-style,” he calls it. He’s slept everywhere over the past six months — who knew 100-thread cotton could be such a beautiful thing? — so he’s not bothered, except by one thing: The war he left behind was waiting for him when he got home, even in seeing his niece.

“She’s surrounded by stories of Gadhafi wanting to kill people, people wanting to kill Gadhafi — all that rhetoric, sometimes she repeats it.” He pauses. “She’s 4.”

He lets the last two words hang in the air over the parking lot outside the restaurant, and then stays quiet for a long time. It’s 10 p.m. here; in Libya at that moment, rebels were still fighting Gadhafi’s troops street by street in Tripoli.

Not his fight, maybe. But still his struggle.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/08/25/3099705/escape-from-libya-liberates-area.html#ixzz1WrKHiUli
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MUHFUKKA

Re: My Libyan Friend Escaped Libya! Follow Up Article From Front Page of Star!!
« Reply #1 on: September 03, 2011, 12:38:03 PM »
fuck your libyan friend

The blood gang embraces Tupac as a member even if YOU dont.
 

Chamillitary Click

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Re: My Libyan Friend Escaped Libya! Follow Up Article From Front Page of Star!!
« Reply #2 on: September 03, 2011, 04:51:58 PM »
I bet you don't even know this person. It just happens to be in a KC paper.
 

TraceOneInfinite Flat Earther 96'

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Re: My Libyan Friend Escaped Libya! Follow Up Article From Front Page of Star!!
« Reply #3 on: September 03, 2011, 05:33:25 PM »
I bet you don't even know this person. It just happens to be in a KC paper.

Then why the fuck was I quoted in the last article, dipshit
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Chamillitary Click

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Re: My Libyan Friend Escaped Libya! Follow Up Article From Front Page of Star!!
« Reply #4 on: September 03, 2011, 05:38:53 PM »
I bet you don't even know this person. It just happens to be in a KC paper.

Then why the fuck was I quoted in the last article, dipshit

Brian Nelson?
 

7even

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Re: My Libyan Friend Escaped Libya! Follow Up Article From Front Page of Star!!
« Reply #5 on: September 05, 2011, 06:45:10 AM »
I bet you don't even know this person. It just happens to be in a KC paper.

Then why the fuck was I quoted in the last article, dipshit

Brian Nelson?

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/K5fVtOSW9mA" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/K5fVtOSW9mA</a>
Cause I don't care where I belong no more
What we share or not I will ignore
And I won't waste my time fitting in
Cause I don't think contrast is a sin
No, it's not a sin
 

Chamillitary Click

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Re: My Libyan Friend Escaped Libya! Follow Up Article From Front Page of Star!!
« Reply #6 on: September 05, 2011, 09:47:28 AM »
^LOL. Brian goes by that name because it's truly obvious that's who he wants to be.