Maureen Shaw has handed the assignment out many times in her career as an English teacher: write about a time when you were scared.
"Usually, it's 'a dog chased me down the street' or 'I had a bad dream,'" the Grade 9 English teacher at Erindale Secondary School said Wednesday at a very special meeting at the fire hall in Port Credit.
"But when Samera read this to me and the other students, our jaws just dropped," Shaw said.
Samera Khan's first-person account called, "The Day That Brought Me Close to My Death" has brought a lot of people close to tears, including some hard-bitten firefighters who've seen a lot of things they'd rather forget.
In her own words, Samera explains the horrifying events of Feb. 25, 2000 that saw her awakened in her family's smoky apartment at 2111 Roche Crt. in the middle of the night. A fire in the unit next door started a blaze that engulfed the whole floor and forced Samera and her two siblings and their mother and father to flee.
Then eight years old, Samera was separated from her mother during the escape bid. With her hand burned by a scalding metal doorknob and her bare feet being burned by melting plastic from the carpets, Samera rushed partway down the hall where she collapsed and screamed for help.
It was that scream, heard by Ken Stevenson and Duffy McCarthy, who subsequently found her and picked her up, that probably saved Khan's life.
At the meeting Wednesday the firefighters explained the poor odds they faced. The blaze in a 100-ft. hallway was particularly bad because the door of the unit where the fire started was left open. There were no fire breaks to protect them in the hall, the smoke was so thick you could not see the firefighter standing beside you and heat so intense it melted Stevenson's plastic visor.
"We don't usually risk ourselves like that," Stevenson said cryptically. There was obviously a lot of good management and more than a little good luck that night when both Samera and her pregnant mother were saved.
"If there is one thing I regret through that experience," Khan wrote in her story, "It is the fact that I could never say a 'thank you' to that person and that team of firefighters, who risked their lives to give me an additional opportunity in it. They make a difference in the world, whether people realize it or not. They make a tremendous difference which may result in their own deaths."
Thanks to Shaw, a Mississauga resident whose partner is a Toronto firefighter, and fire department officials, Khan's wish to say 'thank you' did come true.
"To meet them," Khan said later, "was beyond words."