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Spotlights Abdullah Abonamah '78 University of Dayton Quarterly, Fall 2005 "I knew about Christmas,” Abdullah Abonamah says, “but I didn’t know it was that day.” Abonamah is referring to the first time he stepped foot in Dayton in 1973. The airport lay empty and quiet. It had snowed. Abonamah’s coat was too thin for the freezing weather. He had arrived in Washington, D.C., from Libya the previous June with a suitcase, a couple hundred dollars and a cursory grasp of the English language. At age 19, he was sponsored by the Libyan government to study in the United States. He is from Benghazi, a village of 200,000; his Bedouin mother was illiterate, and his father, a car mechanic, worked hard to feed 12 children. “I was waiting for a taxi and there was a girl also waiting. I asked her, ‘Do you know where UD is?’ and she said, ‘Yes, but everything’s closed. Where are you staying?’ I said ‘UD,’ and she said, ‘UD’s closed.’” Abonamah laughs. The woman was visiting her boyfriend at UD, and they shared a cab to Liberty Hall. A bewildered priest let him in, where he bunked before moving to Stuart Hall. “My first semester was absolutely horrible,” he says, “I ended up dropping all my classes.” Eventually, life at UD improved. The turning point was meeting his future wife, Jane Ann Hurley ’80, at an International Club meeting. “I wanted to buy a stereo system. At the time I had a car (a used orange Volkswagen) and asked her if she wanted to go.” Abonamah laughs again and puts his hands together. “We became connected.” Their four children, Ahmed ‘04, Adal and Mariam, both currently UD students, and Yusef, who plans to attend in 2006. He later received his Ph.D. in computer science and is now director of the Institute for Technological Innovation at Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he can be reached at Abdullah.Abonamah@zu.ac.ae. He recently visited Father Tom Schoen, S.M., a favorite computer science professor. “He told me, ‘I can’t believe you are what you are and have become what you have become.’” —Patrick Hunt ’04

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