Source: Ala'a Salama · EP 62
Subject: A hairdryer, a child's curiosity, and a missing pair of eyebrows
Ala'a Salama, as a kid in Ras Lanuf, was electrocuted by a hairdryer. The exact circumstances are reported in the episode without melodrama: the appliance was around, he engaged with it in some way that the appliance was not designed to accommodate, and he was electrocuted.
His eyebrows were burned off in the event.
He survived. He grew them back. The story is told in the episode as comic inflection — a Libyan boyhood remembered through the small disasters of curiosity, of a kind that children of that era and that town would recognise without explanation.
Ras Lanuf is a planned company town built around Libya's central petrochemical infrastructure. The children who grew up there were the children of engineers. Their fathers worked on refineries, on hydrocarbons, on systems where the consequences of mishandling were measured in lives. The household was not, in any straightforward sense, an engineering-free zone — the parents had thoughts about appliances, about electrical safety, about the basic protocols of domestic equipment.
A child who reaches for a hairdryer in a way that ends in electrocution is doing what children do. But the same child — twenty years later — is the IT engineer at the European Space Agency running ground systems for orbital missions, married into a family whose father worked on the Columbus laboratory module of the International Space Station, and obsessing over the architecture of his own smart home.
The kid who reached for the hairdryer became the adult who designs the integration of every appliance in the house with every other one. The shape rhymes. The hairdryer story is funny on its own terms, but it sits in the episode as a small early signal of what curiosity, applied to electrical systems, eventually does to a person.
The story is a single image. A hairdryer. A small face. A pair of vanished eyebrows. It does not carry weight in the way that other Damiri stories carry weight — it is not a near-death event reframed as a turning point, not a violence absorbed into the work of forgiveness, not a war entered into voluntarily.
Its function is different. It is the kind of childhood incident that, in the longer arc of an engineer's life, looks in retrospect like the first iteration of the same impulse. The hairdryer was one experiment, badly designed, that produced a clear empirical result. The smart home is the same impulse, three decades later, with better safeguards.
It is also a reminder of a rhythm Damiri returns to repeatedly: that the trajectories of its guests are not always a sequence of major events. Sometimes they are a sequence of small early curiosities, each one survived, each one informing the next, until they accumulate into a vocation.