A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(65)
I met Doaa for the first time in January 2015 and spent several hours in her host family’s living room, drinking tea and interviewing her about her ordeal. I was struck by her determination to tell her story, and I soon realized she was entrusting me with it for two reasons—to help her and her family resettle in another country and to warn other refugees who were tempted to make the same dangerous journey. It soon became clear to me that she felt the responsibility that elder sons in Arab cultures would usually bear, that of having to take care of their families. Doaa felt that only she could change her family’s destiny. By that point, she had clearly lost trust in governments to help her and faith that the culprits who had sunk the boat would be found and brought to justice. “We Syrians have no one to support us except God,” she told me. “Maybe there is an interest in us, but only in words. I’m exhausted. I can’t go back to my parents; my family cannot come here. I have heard so many promises, but I want to see action.”
I was determined to bring her story to the world stage, but also to help her restart her life in Sweden. Her heroism had been widely recognized by the Greek press, and she had been given the annual award by the prestigious Academy of Athens a few months after being rescued. But I felt strongly that her story deserved the attention of a global audience, and I was sure it would capture their imagination.
My colleagues launched a formal process for her resettlement, unusual at that time for Greece, another EU country. But Doaa was treated as a special case—a traumatized young woman with a family at risk—and so they appealed for special consideration. There was a system in place for resettlement from countries like Egypt that hosted refugees, and given the family’s precarious situation, they met UNHCR’s “vulnerability” criteria. Doaa and her family’s applications were linked together, and a request was made that they be resettled to the same place.
I was with Doaa at an outdoor café in Chania, Crete, in October 2015 when I received the call that the Swedish government had accepted her and her family’s resettlement application and that she should be prepared to depart in a few weeks. For the first time since we had begun working on the book together, I saw a look of real joy on her face. As I ordered ice cream sundaes to celebrate, she ecstatically called her parents to relay the news.
On January 18, 2016, Hanaa, Shokri, Saja, Nawara, and Hamudi boarded a plane from Cairo to Stockholm, switching planes to the provincial city airport of ?stersund. They were greeted at the airport by the Swedish officials assigned to their case and loaded into a van that would take them to their new home a few hours’ drive from the airport in the tiny village of Hammerdal in the snowy northeast of Sweden. That same morning, Doaa boarded a plane from Chania to Athens, then to Copenhagen, Stockholm, and finally ?stersund. When she arrived at their new home around midnight, trudging through three feet of snow to the entrance, she was shivering from cold that she had never before felt. When she knocked shyly on the front door, within seconds, Hanaa threw it open, with her arms extended toward her daughter. Shokri stood behind her, his eyes full of tears. After one and a half years, Doaa finally felt the warm embrace of her mother, and she never wanted to let go again.
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Despite having lost everything that used to define them—home, community, livelihoods—refugees like Doaa refuse to lose hope. But what choices were left to Doaa and her family? To remain a refugee in Egypt, with little opportunity for education or meaningful work? To return to a war zone where the future was even bleaker and, on top of that, dangerous? Or to take a risk by taking to the sea on a so-called boat of death to seek safety and better opportunities in Europe?
For most refugees, there is nothing left to return home to. Their houses, businesses, and cities have been destroyed. Since the crisis in Syria began in 2011, fighting has progressively engulfed all regions, and the economy and services are in a state of general collapse. Half of the Syrian population (almost five million people) has been forced to flee their homes in order to save their lives. Another 6.5 million are internally displaced. Since March 2011, at least a quarter of a million Syrians have been killed in the fighting (some estimates double that number), and over one million have been injured. Life expectancy among Syrians has dropped by more than twenty years, and an estimated 13.5 million people, including 6 million children, are in need of humanitarian assistance. But half of those people in need are in hard-to-reach or besieged areas, making the delivery of aid very difficult, and in some places impossible.
At the time of publication of this book, the Syrian war rages into its sixth year, and five million refugees have made their way to neighboring countries to find shelter in bleak desert camps, makeshift dwellings, or crumbling city apartments in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq. Every day, they watch the news of their hometowns and cities being reduced to rubble and learn about the deaths of friends and loved ones, which has a profound psychological impact.
The once welcoming communities they live in are now overwhelmed with the burden of hosting so many people in need. In tiny Lebanon, a country struggling with poverty and instability, 25 percent of the population are now refugees. There are not enough schools, water systems, sanitation facilities, or shelters to support this swelling population.
After more than five years of conflict with little prospect for peace, many Syrians have now abandoned hope of ever going back to their homes. With nothing left and their places of exile under increasing strain, refugees feel compelled to travel much farther to find safe havens that would also allow them to educate their children and rebuild their lives, even if such a journey means risking death during a perilous crossing of the Mediterranean or Aegean Sea.