A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(63)
Some of the messages were ugly: “How come you are one of the only ones who survived? You must have been helped by the smugglers.” Reading through the onslaught of messages exhausted Doaa, each one reminding her of the deaths she’d witnessed and reviving her sadness at losing Bassem and Malak. Then one text message, from a Mohammad Dasuqi, caught her eye: “Doaa, I think you saved my niece Masa.” A photo was attached of a baby girl in a blue dress with white pansies. Doaa looked closely at the picture. The toddler smiling at the camera was indeed the same Masa that Doaa had cradled in her arms for four days at sea.
Doaa held out the phone to her host mother and exclaimed, “Masa has a family!” With a huge smile on her face, Doaa felt a surge of happiness for the first time since the shipwreck. She replied to the message immediately, relieved to finally be able to give someone some good news: “Yes, that is the same Masa who was rescued with me!”
Doaa learned that Mohammad Dasuqi was the twenty-eight-year-old brother of Masa’s father, Imad, and was living as a refugee in Sweden with Masa’s oldest sister, Sidra, who was eight. He had only had enough money for the two of them to go to Europe and had applied to bring the rest of the family, including his own wife and infant daughter and Sidra’s parents and siblings, to Sweden through family-reunification procedures. But after a year had passed with no papers, Masa’s father had grown tired of waiting and decided to take matters into his own hands and book passage for his family. He believed that since Mohammad and Sidra had made it safely, the rest of the family was certain to reach Europe as well. Before boarding the boat, he had taken a picture of Sandra and Masa standing side by side, wearing bright orange life vests, Sandra’s arm slung confidently around Masa’s shoulders. He had sent the photo to his brother confident that they would soon be together again.
When Mohammad heard of the shipwreck, and that almost everyone on board had died, his heart sank. He knew that his brother, his sister-in-law, and their little girls were on that boat and that they were most likely dead. Then he read about the nineteen-year-old Syrian woman who had survived and saved a two-year-old girl. He saw a picture of the rescued child and compared it to the photo he had. Masa was alive!
The day after Doaa texted Mohammad confirming that Masa was safe, he flew to Crete, arriving at the hospital and demanding to see his niece. It would take almost a year for UNHCR and the Swedish embassy in Athens to confirm that Mohammad was related to Masa and to recognize him as her legal guardian so as to finalize reunification. During that time, Masa was cared for in an orphanage in Athens that specialized in treating traumatized children. She played with the other children and quickly learned to speak Greek. After DNA tests and court hearings, Masa was finally able to join her uncle, aunt, older sister, and a cousin, who had since joined him, to start a new life in Sweden.
*
Finding Masa’s family was a turning point for Doaa. The experience made her feel as if her heart might begin to heal. At fleeting moments she even believed she could be reunited with her own family and begin her life anew. But the news from home was grim. In the weeks after her rescue, media outlets from around the world had requested interviews with Doaa, questioning her about the circumstances of the shipwreck. A number of stories quoted her accusing the smugglers of ramming her boat, and of being responsible for the deaths of five hundred people. She didn’t understand the reach—or consequences—that these interviews would have until she received a distressed call from her mother.
“Someone threatened me, Doaa!” Hanaa told her in the same frightened tone that Doaa had last heard from her mother when the Egyptian men had threatened to rape Doaa and her sisters. “He said, ‘Tell Doaa to shut her mouth and to stop naming names. We know where you live.’”
It had been the first of many calls from unknown numbers, each one threatening to harm Doaa’s family.
Hanaa told Doaa she’d reported the calls to the police and contacted UNHCR, which took the threats seriously. They sent someone to talk to the family and advised them to change apartments. “I don’t want to move again,” Hanaa admitted to Doaa. Doaa assured her mother she wouldn’t give any more interviews, and they hoped that the men would leave them alone.
But a few days later, Doaa received another anguished call from her mother. She’d been home with the family when she’d heard a knock at the door. An elegantly dressed Egyptian man stood outside, politely asking for their passports, saying he was a police officer. Without thinking, Hanaa had retrieved the documents and handed them over. He flipped through them, reading the names aloud. “That’s when I became suspicious,” she told Doaa. Hanaa snatched the passports out of the man’s hands, asking him, “Why did you want our passports?”
“I was just checking if there are any Syrians here,” he said, then left abruptly. After he departed, Hanaa went to the local police station asking whether they had sent an officer to her place to check IDs. When they told her they hadn’t, Hanaa was worried. What if she had put the family in harm’s way? she wondered. Then she received a text message full of obscenities that said, “I know the names of your daughters.”
Not long after that, Saja and Nawara were walking home when they sensed that they were being followed. They turned to look behind them and spotted a tall, nicely dressed man with what looked like a knife in his right hand. They recognized him as the person who had come to their door asking for their passports and posing as a policeman. Terrified, they quickly crossed the street and joined a neighbor they knew who was nearby. Later, when the girls told Hanaa and Shokri what had happened, the family realized they had no choice but to move. Hanaa called UNHCR again, and legal officers visited them to learn more. She told them the entire story of what had happened to Doaa and the threats, including the sexual harassment the girls were facing, which forced Hanaa and Shokri to pull them out of school. The UNHCR officer told the family that they were qualified for UNHCR’s resettlement program due to their precarious situation. Sweden was one of the countries accepting “vulnerable” Syrian refugees. “Sweden,” Hanaa said, “that’s where Doaa and Bassem wanted to go.”