I was raised in a flat in the east end of London and born to a Lebanese mother and father. I can remember that while growing up my parents refused to speak English in the house and only Arabic, like any youth I rebelled against my parents and I refused to speak Arabic telling my parents that we lived in England and not Lebanon and therefore we had no need to speak Arabic any longer. I remember my father telling me that it was important that I remembered how to speak Arabic and that one day it would help me.
When I first started working in the field of Executive Protection, one of my first jobs was to provide protection to an American woman who had fled an abusive relationship with her 4 year old son from her husband who was a Saudi Arabian national. We had been hired by the woman’s father to insure that she and his grandson were able to get back to the United States safely. I was working on a team of all Brits like myself who were former Para’s and SBS.
[Read more…] about True Bodyguard Stories # 11 The Importance of Language