With his brothers busy in the Libyan civil war that eventually led to the death of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and the overthrow of his government, Professor Mohamed Ali, who teaches web development at Sinclair Community College, took an emergency trip to Libya in February to help his sick mother and his sisters move to a secure location.
Several months later, he returned to visit his birthplace, El Marj, a city in Libya, and was handed a rifle for his protection because bombs, gunfire and missiles could be heard as Libyans walked through the streets.
No one was safe.
“We were in the middle of a war,” Ali said. “At the beginning, I was scared to see hospitals with kids with no limbs and bodies in pieces, but Libyans are strong. I have seen families who have lost their only kid but shed no tears because they will tell you that their kid died for the country, for a cause and for our freedom.”
As the war progressed, the revolutionaries started winning the war and seized some of Gadhafi’s military camps. Gadhafi’s camps gave them access to concrete bunkers or storage houses that were hidden deep in the desert that were jam-packed with wooden boxes filled with bombs, missiles, side arms and bazookas, according to Ali.
“These camps were in the middle of the desert, you don’t see anything. It just looks like a piece of land with nothing there,” Ali said.
But as more people became knowledgeable about the bunkers, Libya became increasingly dangerous, Ali said.
“Young people and also young women too, before they got into a fight they knew how to fight with words or their fists, but now every one of them has a machine gun, so when they got into a fight or dispute it became a very dangerous situation,” Ali said.
Ali, with the help of three to four men, would volunteer to search for the bunkers and then load the weapons onto a massive dump truck. The truck would then be transported to a safer location, so that the right people could control the weapons.
Ali said that he gained access to these bunkers because his brother is one of Libya’s transitional government leaders.
“We felt that if we leave these [bunkers] and these young folks get into them they can do more damage than just shooting one person,” Ali said.
But even with the death of Gadhafi, Ali and his brothers saw an increase of aggression and hostility in young Libyan men and women.
Aiming to get their minds off of war, weapons and missiles, Ali’s brother came up with a solution – he suggested that Ali and several Libyan professors volunteer to teach web development in the evenings for two to three hours for those who were interested.
The first night 16 students showed up. By the second and third week, they were teaching more than 250 students.
They used open source technology to create local servers, webpages, code scripting as well as plugins, according to Ali.
“When you teach a group sitting in close proximity – they become friends, so even that hostility that was leading them to use their side arms it became less aggressive because now they know each other,” Ali said.
Now that Libya has toppled Gadhafi’s totalitarian regime, Ali said, he hopes that Libya will be a better place. But he knows that a lot of work has to be completed.
“You always hope for the best, there are a lot of things that Libya needs to learn and do very quickly.”
He said that Libya is now returning to a state of normalcy, students have returned back to school and merchants have begun supplying their goods.
“I don’t want to make it look like I am a hero, I didn’t start this process, Ali said. “They have wisdom and their own system. I was there just as a tool – one of the tools that they used – I can’t claim anything.”
