A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(26)
One day Doaa received a message from her sister that filled her with worry. Asma read it out loud to her: “I miss you. The neighborhood misses you. It’s hard to live here without you. The whole neighborhood is crying. You are the light of the neighborhood and it has gone dark without you.” Back home, more people were dying every day, the supermarkets had almost nothing to sell, and each week more buildings were bombed to their foundations. Doaa begged her father to take them back to Syria where they could make a difference, rather than feeling useless in Egypt. Shokri looked at his daughter incredulously. “I am not bringing you back there to die,” he said, dismissing her pleas. Doaa argued and begged, but Shokri stood firm.
When Shokri grew too ill to work, she and Saja decided that it was up to them to support the family. They couldn’t start school until the next year, so they figured that they could use the free time to help their father, even though they were only seventeen and fifteen years old.
They found work in a factory that produced burlap bags. The owner told them that he wasn’t actually short of workers—about one hundred men and a few women were already working there—but he wanted to do his part to help Syrians. Every morning, the girls took a 7:00 a.m. bus to the factory and spent the day sewing bags, counting them, and carrying them on their backs to a scale where they were weighed and then placed on a stack. Doaa, weighing just eighty-eight pounds, would struggle under her heavy load. The workdays were long and hard. They had only one break for noon prayer and then worked until late in the evening. They had nothing to eat during the day; only cups of tea were served at their workplace. Doaa and Saja were two of just a few young women working in the factory, but they were treated with respect and kindness by their coworkers.
The best part of the job was the friends they made there. Doaa and Saja would whisper and joke with some of their young female Egyptian coworkers. One time one of them linked arms with Doaa and told her, “I love Bashar al-Assad because he gave us the chance to meet you.” Doaa missed her school friends back in Daraa and savored any opportunity to have girls her age to talk to. It helped her imagine a time when she could maybe feel more at home in Egypt.
As Doaa settled into her work, she began to feel less helpless and dispossessed. She was now bringing home money for her family and earning the respect of the people she worked for. She no longer felt like someone who had run away from the fight for her country, but like a young woman who was taking care of and providing for her family. Every time she handed money to her parents, she felt pride lift her chest. Her mother noticed the difference in her daughter’s attitude and felt a quiet satisfaction at watching her transform into a capable young woman.
Doaa also attracted the attention of the young men around her. During the three months she worked at the factory, two Egyptian men proposed to her, but she refused them both, despite being at an age at which girls often wed. Marriage was the last thing on Doaa’s mind. When she did marry, she knew it would be to a Syrian man once she returned back home.
One day Doaa took a day off work to take care of her mother, who was sick. As she made her mother tea and took care of Hamudi, she worried that she might lose her job or that the owner would cut her pay, so when she returned to work the next day, she went straight to the shift manager and offered to make up the time.
She entered his office with her eyes lowered and apologized for missing work. But instead of scolding her, as she expected, he smiled kindly at her and asked for her home address. The following evening, the doorbell rang and the shift manager and his assistant stood there bearing a basket full of fruit and sweets, and asking for Hanaa. When they sat with the family, they said that they had come to wish her a quick recovery. “We love Syrians. You are welcome in our country and we stand by you,” the shift manager told Hanaa and Shokri, leaning forward over his tea. “And don’t worry about your girls at the factory. I am looking after them.”
Doaa was touched.
At night, while Doaa relaxed from a hard day’s work, her thoughts would return to Syria. She spent her evenings flipping through news channels, waiting for the segments about the war. She texted back and forth with her closest friend, Amal, who was still in Daraa, and asked for any news. Doaa told Amal how she wanted nothing more than to come back home. But Amal warned her, “It is better that you don’t, Doaa, the situation is getting worse. It is dangerous for everybody. I don’t even go to demonstrations anymore now that you’re not here.” Doaa’s text conversations with Amal always left Doaa feeling conflicted. The danger of returning to Syria didn’t frighten her, but leaving her family without her support did. She couldn’t abandon them. She realized that she was needed here more than she was back there.
Meanwhile, Hanaa could tell that Doaa was longing for Syria, so Hanaa hid Doaa’s passport and kept a close eye on her stubborn daughter. Hanaa saw text messages on Doaa’s phone from friends back home that urged her to come back and rejoin their struggle. When Hanaa confronted her about the texts, Doaa assured her that she would not abandon the family. Hanaa then realized that in the months since Doaa had left Syria, she had matured. She had taken on responsibility for her family and was doing her part for them to get by in this life of exile, and that was all that mattered now.
However, the work at the factory was taking its toll on Doaa’s health and she was becoming more fragile with each passing day. When she was anxious and tired, she couldn’t eat, and her anemia returned. Shokri heard about a Syrian business owner, Mohamed Abu Bashir, who said that he could give all three of Shokri’s daughters sewing work for 500 LE ($50) each per month—more than they got making burlap bags. They all quickly accepted the new jobs.