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Deonna Kelli Sayed's life is a Pandora's box of unique experiences and a roller coaster ride that many of us see on the tube but never experience first hand.
As the wife of Sayed Aqa, UN resident co-ordinator based in Bahrain, Deonna Kelli Sayed has her hands full not only as a diplomat's wife but as a budding writer and a mother of six.
She is a member of Elham, a creative arts group in Bahrain, and a columnist in Fact magazine. She also free-lances for several Bahrain-based publications and regularly writes short stories to whet her writing prowess.
Born in a typical American home in Florida, Deonna's family were devout Southern Baptists. At the age of 16 she was exposed to Islam when she started working for the Palestinian cause.
"I met some secular Muslims and what appealed to me was that although they defended Islam they did not impose their beliefs on anyone," she remarks adding that although she is a practising Muslim she doesn't force her views on anyone as people have their own spiritual journey to realise.
Deonna embraced Islam when she was 21 without her parents' knowledge and taught herself to pray in privacy of her room.
"When my mother discovered many years later that I had become a Muslim she actually took it as a rejection of the culture than anything else. But for me it was my Americanism that gave me the cultural freedom to be who I wanted to be. For me becoming a Muslim and discovering Islam has a deeper meaning than being born into it," she said.
What is paradoxical about Deonna is that she continued working for the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church even after becoming a Muslim as she never made a public declaration of her change of religion.
Later when she was working for International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), an Islamic think tank in Washington DC, Deonna covered her head during working hours before and later adopted the hijab just before her marriage. So the transition into Islamic culture for Deonna was a steady progression rather than an abrupt transformation.
It was in 1999 while working for the United Methodist Church in New York that Deonna met Sayed Aqa, a UN employee. Sayed Aqa was working with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, an organisation that was close to the late-Princess Diana's heart, and had done a lot of field work in Afghanistan. In fact, in 1997 Sayed Aqa accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the organisation bedecked in his Afghan finery.
In November 2000, Deonna and Sayed Aqa married in a Nikah ceremony and later had a reception at an Afghani restaurant in Washington DC.
Then they had the third wedding reception in Pakistan. "I asked him to marry me!" says Deonna, an act which is unheard of in the conservative society of Afghanistan.
"His gentleness, honesty and easy manner attracted me to him and the fact that he was a practising Muslim."
Deonna talks about loneliness and how difficult it is to find a "faithful life partner in the West" because of lack of a family support system.
"When my mother met my prospective husband she was very concerned and the first question she asked him was that, so are you going to make my daughter walk five steps behind you? To which he simply answered, only in an area filled with land-mines, so that he would be the first to step on them and not me."
Deonna and Sayed Aqa have adjusted to living within the realm of Islamic culture instead of Afghan or American culture which according to Deonna is a recipe to a successful marriage.
"Islam is a globalising force that brings different cultures together. Of course, we have met each other half way and there has been a lot of compromise. The key is to communicate, understand and function as Muslims," she states emphatically.
For Sayed Aqa, it was essential that Deonna understood his culture and roots. So before their marriage ceremony he took Deonna to Peshawar, a city in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan that borders Afghanistan, to meet his parents, his children and his brothers and sisters.
"He made sure that I knew everything before we married. But it was still a bit of a cultural shock when I had two of his children arrive in Washington DC just two months after our marriage," says Deonna adding that, "maybe I was young and immature at the time to realise the full impact of a ready-made family of five children that I had to look after.
"But, it was not something that he sprung upon me later. I had known from the beginning that his children would live with us wherever we went. Now I have gotten so used to them that if I don't have the hustle and bustle around me I feel nervous."
But along with being a busy diplomat, Sayed Aqa is a proactive father and a great support for Deonna as they share their parenting responsibilities. But dealing with children from his first marriage and to top it off managing the turbulent teen years (the eldest son is 16) has been a rocky ride.
The youngest child, Halima, nine, arrived last week from Pakistan to live with Deonna and Sayed Aqa and is a shy girl who is more fluent in Urdu than English.
In 2003, she accompanied her husband to the war-torn city of Kabul to meet his brothers and sisters who still live there.
Her son Ibrahim, then a toddler, had to be under constant supervision and couldn't play freely with his cousins for the fear of being kidnapped.
Deonna remembers seeing American troops - now fighting the Taliban - and feeling "ashamed" because of the "overbearing attitude" of some of the servicemen. "But America is my home where I'm returning," she states with conviction.
Although apprehensive and overwhelmed at the prospect of taking all six children and setting house in the US - Sayed Aqa will remain in Bahrain as the UN representative - Deonna is ready to move on for the sake of a better future for the children. Leaving her comfortable lifestyle in Bahrain and, more importantly, her husband, is going to be a major adjustment but she is upbeat about the future.
"These two years in Bahrain have given me an amazing opportunity to grow as an individual and has given me the confidence of who I am."
But moving to the West as a Muslim woman with familial connections to Afghanistan can elicit reaction that is shaped by popular Western media. But Deonna is unfazed by it.
"People in America are curious about Muslims and it works to my advantage. I can project an image of Islam that is progressive but within the theological confines of the religion. I don't have to apologise for being a Muslim because less than one per cent of Muslims are the cause of some problems in the world and we are not part of that percentage."
