After several surgeries, Palestinian goes home
Youth was burned in a rocket attack
GROTON -- After spending nearly three months in the Boston area with a series of host families and undergoing two reconstructive surgeries, Mohammad Zughayer, 13, was ready to return home to Hebron in the West Bank yesterday.
Mohammad was tired of being fussed over twice a day by caretakers who rubbed cream over the skin grafts on his lower back and legs -- a sticky substance that would stain his clothes. And Marwan ElMasri, a chemist from Groton who has been Mohammad's legal guardian since the teen arrived in Massachusetts in September for medical treatment, was telling Mohammad's father to make sure the youth stuck to his doctors' orders.
''Don't let him trick you into not doing it," ElMasri said he told the teen's father, just hours before Mohammad was scheduled to depart on a flight through Paris to Amman, Jordan, on his way home. ''He needs to do it."
In the summer of 2002, at the height of the latest intifada, Mohammad, the seventh of nine children, was playing in his father's new
Mohammad went into a coma, awakening in an Israeli hospital seven months later with burns that had nearly melted his left arm. He had no fingers on his left hand. Third-degree burns covered 80 percent of his body. He had his right thumb, but the other four fingers were stubs. Half his hair had burned off, and his left ear was missing. He could no longer walk.
Thus began a series of more than 30 surgeries that has taken a youth who had never before left the West Bank on a journey to hospitals in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and finally, the United States.
He spent three months in Baghdad at the behest of Saddam Hussein, who gave the youth a watch with Hussein's face on it.
''I went to Baghdad in a wheelchair," he said. ''I left walking."
Mohammad came to Shriners Hospital for Children for treatment in September. When he was not in the hospital, he lived with four volunteer families in Groton, Dorchester, Framingham, and Randolph. Doctors replaced the leather-like scar tissue along his back and legs with skin from other parts of his body. A friend of ElMasri visited Mohammad and delivered daily lessons in Arabic, English, and math.
''It's almost to fulfill a duty," said ElMasri, who cobbled together the network of caretakers through the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, an Ohio-based nonprofit that brings injured or sick children from the Middle East for free medical care in the United States and Europe.
ElMasri hosted a reunion of some of the caretakers in his Groton home yesterday to send Mohammad off.
Maher Mutlaq, a research assistant in the computer science department of Boston University, had visited Mohammad at the hospital almost every day and had taken the shopping for gifts for his family. ''How he's coping with everything, sometimes it's overwhelming for me," Mutlaq said.
Sometimes, Mohammad's anger reflects the conflict in his homeland. Yesterday, the teen shook what was left of his right hand and expressed frustration in Arabic at President Bush and Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
''If I could just get a hold of Sharon and Bush, I would really hurt them with the rest of my existing hand," he said as ElMasri translated from Arabic.
In other ways, Mohammad is like a typical teenager -- interested in video games, cars, and girls.
During his stay, Mohammad gained 18 pounds and two pants sizes. He learned to play video games with one hand, and beats everyone at car racing. He tried lobster for the first time and liked it, but he did not care for Thanksgiving turkey.
Mohammad, who wants to be a reconstructive surgeon, said he could not wait to be home, where he raises pigeons and doves with his grandfather. He looked forward to doting on his baby sister, Batool, born nearly two years ago while he was being treated away from home. Last week, at Filene's, he picked out a red satin dress for her.
Someday, he hopes, he will return to Boston, where doctors can reconstruct his left ear.
''But nowhere is as beautiful as home," he said.
Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com. 
