Teacher Following Her Heart to Libya

Life is comfortable here for Tahira Terkman. She has a job she loves teaching fifth grade in neighboring Kirkwood, friends she enjoys being with and family nearby.

But her heart tells her “home” is in Libya, a nation in the midst of turmoil, where her father’s extended family lives, where practicing her Islamic religion will put her in the mainstream and where she has felt at peace since the first time she visited seven years ago.

“I instantly fell in love with it,” the 25-year-old Creve Coeur resident said. “Always, deep down in my heart I felt like I wanted to put my roots down there. It was ‘me.’ It fit me.”

She teaches at  in Kirkwood.

Terkman, who was born and raised in Columbia, MO, and attended the University of Missouri, has practiced her Islamic faith all her life. Her mother was born in the United States and is Christian, but Terkman and her older sister were raised in the faith of their father, who was born in Libya and moved here decades ago to study computer engineering.

Growing up, Terkman did not know her father’s side of the family well because most of them lived in Libya. It wasn’t until the United States lifted a ban on travel to that country in 2004 did she first visit there.

Since then, she said, she has spent most of her summers staying with her grandmother in Tripoli, with uncles, aunts and other family members close by. Her sister moved there four years ago and is now married and expecting her first child.

“Even though this might be the harder path right now, it just feels right,” she said. “It felt like it was a good time for me in my life.”

Terkman said she felt helpless watching news reports of the turmoil in Libya, not knowing whether friends or family might have been harmed. That made her feel doubly sure she should follow her heart.

She hopes to move by August and thinks that it will be safe to travel by then and that Moammar Gadhafi will be on his way out of power.

“I’m definitely concerned,” she said. “I don’t want to live in a place where it’s not safe.

“It probably won’t be perfect when I get there and that’s OK,” she added. “I wish I had a crystal ball."

Many of her students and their families were shocked to hear she was leaving and concerned for her safety.

Elizabeth Strevey’s daughter, Stephanie, was in Terkman’s class last year and still visits her regularly after school. Terkman inspired Stephanie to want to be a teacher just like her.

Terkman was a fun-loving and nurturing teacher who broadened her students’ worldview without imposing her own views, Elizabeth Strevey said.

“Not only was she a great teacher but she really made them aware of the world outside our little pearly gates,” Strevey said.

She taught them about her family’s culture and why she wore a head scarf and told them stories of her visits to Libya. She showed  them that there were similarities as well as differences in cultures and religions.

“She taught them that clothing doesn’t make the person, and beliefs don’t make the person -- it’s what’s inside that counts,” Strevey said.

Now that Terkman has made the decision to move, she is less frightened than when she left Columbia three years ago to take her first job.

She worried then about how the students would react to her  head scarf and clothing that always covers her arms and legs, even when she's running or playing soccer. Her friends asked her, “Do the kids think it’s weird?”

“But it almost gives me goosebumps how accepting they are,” she said. “They ask questions, we talk about it. It always amazes me – you explain it and they’re like, ‘OK,’ and we move on.”

In Libya she hopes to find a job teaching English. She speaks Arabic and wants to work on a master’s degree in teaching English as a second language. 

But she will miss the students whose lives she touched through her teaching and as a volunteer for Girls on the Run, the nonprofit program that encourages preteen girls to develop self-respect and healthy lifestyles through running.

“If I could pick up Kirkwood and Westchester and stick them in Tripoli I would have the best of both worlds for sure,” she said.