Leaving Evanston - August 22nd, 2012

A view of Lake Michigan from a park 20 minutes walk away from where we live in Evanston. This lake is amazing, on any given day, depending on the sky and weather conditions, it will be a noticeably different shade of blue, gray or green. 

 Brothers K Coffeehouse. Our favorite coffee place, a five minute walk. On the right is one of the Kim brothers. We got to know many of the people here and it was a place of community. We often stopped here on the way to the lake. I studied for my boards in here for two weeks.

The kids take one of their last walks down a typical residential street in Evanston. Though urban in design, its nick name is "City of Trees". You can walk everywhere and it is tree-lined; people plant flowers and create gardens not only in their own lawn but in the patch of grass between the road and the sidewalk. Very peaceful just to walk through.

Our masjid. A ten to fifteen minute drive. Attached to a school, and so called Muslim Education Center (or MEC for short). They were able to build this masjid without interest-bearing loans (!) - you can really feel the tranquility there. This is a scene from heading to iftar there on one of the last nights of Ramadan.

Umm Ahmad (not pictured here) was our babysitter. A devout Muslim and Iraqi refugee who loved Inaya and Jibreel. The two of them call her "Dadi" or "Umm Ahmad Dadi". She spoke to them in Arabic and they got to understanding her, alhamdulillah. Last night we visited them and her son and Jibreel had a great time together. Pray for her as she recently had knee surgery and sustained a fall while at the hospital, fracturing her left arm. She was in pain, but she was still nothing but playful with the children.

 Last night, after the packers came and put everything into boxes earlier in the morning, Inaya asked me to teach her how to write. She can write a pretty solid capital I.  :)  She spent the next twenty minutes writing "thousands of notes", of which "only a few of them are poems." May Allah protect her and increase her in all good.

 A final salams to our beloved lake.