00:00My instant gut feeling was, she's gone.
00:05What happens when everything in your life has changed?
00:10And the man you thought would protect you and love you and care for you
00:14is this man that you are now running from.
00:17No little girl ever would think that their father would do anything to harm them.
00:22And from the moment that my father took me is where the lies began and the manipulation began.
00:27So at seven years old, my father kidnapped me and took me to the Middle East.
00:31He took me to Jorosh, Jordan, a small town where he was from.
00:35It was like a light switch.
00:38All of a sudden, I was taken from the Dallas area.
00:41Dallas, Texas was where I was born and raised.
00:44And he put me on a plane and took me to Jordan.
00:48No one told me what was going on.
00:50He just said we were going on a vacation.
00:52But as the weeks turned into months and I started going to school,
00:55I knew that this was not a vacation.
00:59My mom was not there.
01:00I was not allowed to talk to my mom or to speak to her on the phone.
01:03He would get frustrated when I would ask questions of when will I see my mom again.
01:08And going into Jordan, my first time to be there, I did not speak the language.
01:13I spoke very little Arabic.
01:15And so I was engulfed into a new culture with my family that I had never met.
01:20Most of them spoke only Arabic.
01:23Some broken English.
01:25Everything from the bathroom.
01:27And a seven-year-old little girl, the bathroom was very traumatizing.
01:31It was a hole in the floor with a chain above.
01:34And you would squat over the hole and you would clean yourself with your hand.
01:38There was no toilet paper.
01:39So the custom, the language, everything was drastically different.
01:45I was having to cover my hair, dress differently.
01:48And my father changed as well.
01:52In the States, my father was very loving and kind,
01:54took me in, fixed my hair, get me ready for school.
01:58But in Jordan, he was distant and he was cold.
02:02He was not mean.
02:03But there was a big cultural difference that at that age I did not understand.
02:09He was not the same person.
02:11So the fear began when I realized I was not going home
02:15and when I realized I might never see my mom again.
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