Good Morning!
I hope you’re doing okay. Before we start I wanted to take a brief moment to let you know that this newsletter contains some details that may be sensitive for some of you. There are descriptions of war, violence and the loss of a child.
This newsletter is meant to bring joy and warmth to your day and I promise I deliver on that, but I also wanted you to know up front that I will be touching on some more challenging topics today.
This letter is about my friend Reham, a Syrian refugee now living here in Saint John. I have 100s of pages of notes and several hours of recordings I took of my conversations with her a little over a year ago. I promised Reham that I would help tell her story, but as of yet I haven’t managed to.
This letter barely scratches the surface of Reham, but it’s a start.
I’m thrilled for you to meet her.
xo
-R
P.S. I made a holiday playlist, lol.
You know that thing people do when you move to a new place (or back to your hometown…) and everyone is like “Do you know this person? You should know this person, let me set you up with this person” and it… sucks?
I find it such a horribly stressful thing to be told that you will hit it off with someone, because… what if you don’t?
That’s what happened with me and Reham but with one added aspect… Everyone told me I had to meet Reham because we would hit it off aaaaand “she is looking for someone to write about her life”.
First of all, I don’t really write other people’s stories.
Secondly… what?
I write about other people, sure, but it’s always my specific view of them. I lamely refer to it as “writing portraits”. It’s okay if you just rolled your eyes reading that, I rolled mine while I typed it. Regardless of it being eye-roll-inducing, it is something I love to do, but only with people I know really love me and couldn’t possibly be offended by anything I have to say about them.
I have never written on behalf of someone else.
Before meeting Reham I knew approximately one thing about her: She was originally from Syria and came to Saint John with her children and husband as a refugee after her home became too war-torn to live in anymore.
Cool. So not only do I have no experience writing about other people but what right do I have to even attempt to dive into telling this story?
The answer is ZERO PERCENT.
Here’s why:
I am not married with children.
I have never been pregnant.
I am not a Muslim.
I have never seen/ heard/ felt a bomb go off.
I have never been pushed and threatened with a gun by a police officer.
I have never had a family member or friend shot by military police in their own home.
I have never had to sneak around the streets at night in order to get food for my family.
I have never been told that my loved ones will be killed if I didn’t sign a form that said a terrorist group murdered my baby when I knew full-well it was my own government who did so.
I have never had to bury a child.
I have never spent three years living in a refugee camp only to end up permanently in a country where I don’t speak/read the language, or understand the customs.
Reham experienced all of these things before she was thirty years old.
I was so hesitant to get myself involved with Reham’s project, but our mutual friends were so insistent that we meet that I couldn’t really say no. Plus I really needed friends and I couldn’t pass up the rare opportunity to socialize.
We were quickly set up on a “get to know you” date.
I was terrified, but nonetheless, on a Sunday afternoon in October 2019, Reham came over to my house. I prepared coffee and several types of tea- I even bought cookies. I hadn’t hosted a guest… well… ever in my life. I nervously primped and cleaned the house all morning. My social anxiety was turned all the way up to max.
She showed up precisely on time with a travel mug of her own coffee.
Prepared.
I invited her to sit down and she did. We sat across from each other on separate couches and stared while the obscene amount of tea and cookies sat awkwardly untouched in front of us.
Reham was tall like me. In fact, as I investigated her face, I could see similarities to my own face- her large brown eyes were dark, deep and familiar. She was visibly pregnant, but I wasn’t sure if it would be polite to ask her about it. She looked straight back at me, not shying away from eye contact.
She was soft-spoken and didn’t say much. I sensed she may have had her guard up but I had no reference point to know if this was how she always was or if it was just me.
One of our mutual friends, Michael, showed up a few minutes later to help break the ice. They met each other with vibrant, warm energy.
“Reham! Look at you, you’re pregnant!”
“Yes, Michael. I am so, so excited to have a new little baby. A girl too, you know!”
I could feel my hands shaking while the two caught up with one another. I didn’t know what the hell to start with.
Was this going to be an interview or a hangout? I had never had to interview someone before and it felt like it might be a bit much to just ask someone I had never even met before to share the worst, most fearful moments of their life with me.
Suddenly I noticed both she and Michael were staring at me expectantly.
Your move, Hebb.
“Okay. Um. Well. Thanks for coming over, both of you. Have a cookie if you like… Um. Okay. Uh. Well, everyone has been telling me that you’re hoping to find someone who will help you write your story. Why do you want to be written about?” I asked.
“Because nobody hears me when I tell them what happened to me,” she said as she looked me dead in the eye. “and I am tired of no one hearing me.”
Well, shit. Reham didn’t come to play. She wasn’t looking for a friend to hang with, she was looking for someone to help her communicate her frustrations.
“Is… is it okay if I record this conversation?” I asked her timidly. I knew that if I was going to do this it was only going to work if it came straight from her.
“Sure, go ahead,” she said, a little impatiently. Eager to get talking.
I opened the voice note app on my phone and placed it on the table amongst the boxes of teabags.
“Okay… and what do you want people to know?” I asked.
“That I did not move to Canada. I did not choose this life. I am happy and grateful to be in Canada, but I am a refugee. If I could, I would still be able to live in Syria but I can’t. I want people to know what it is to be a refugee. I dream of one day moving back home. People think all the time, ‘oh you must be so happy now, you’re safe in Canada’. I say to them all the time, ‘Safe does not mean happy. Safe means safe’. I want people to know why.”
“Okay…” I said, suddenly feeling overwhelmingly ill-equipped for the task at hand.
“Robin,” Michael broke in “do you know much about what’s going on in Syria?”
Oh boy. No. No, I did not. All I knew at the time was that it was dangerous and horrible and there had been a huge amount of refugees that had come to Canada in the last three years or so. I remembered the photo of the boy floating face down in the water that went viral a few years ago. I certainly didn’t have a grasp on why it was happening or how it started.
“Uhhh… not really. No…maybe that’s a good place to start” I let out a nervous laugh, wishing I could crawl up into my own ignorance and die.
“It’s fine,” said Reham, clocking my embarrassment “All I know about Canada before I come here was that you put cheese on everything. I don’t even know how I know that. But now I am here, and I can tell you I am right.”
We all burst out laughing. What a relief it was to laugh with her.
She proceeded to give me a brief history lesson. Here are a few excerpts from my notes in case you’re as unaware as I was:
New Brunswick is bigger than Syria in physical size, but there are approx. 30 million people living there. That’s like having the entire population of Canada living in NB.
She is from Dara’a in the southern part of Syria which borders Jordan. This is where the current conflict began.
Her childhood in Syria was positive, safe and happy, but the politics were… “not good”. I said “it’s a corrupt government?”, her eyes lit up “Yes! That is the word I meant, very corrupt”
Bashar al-Asaad used to be an eye doctor but has been the president since 2000. Before that, his father Hafez al-Assad was president from 1971-2000.
You had to vote, but someone with a gun would stand behind you to make sure you voted for the right person.
March 18th, 2011 is the day it all started. It escalated quickly, overnight. Her whole life changed.
In Syria, you do not talk about politics and you cannot say the name of the President in public. She told a story about telling a lady at a bank in SJ to lower her voice for saying she hoped Justin Trudeau wouldn’t get re-elected.
She speaks about not being heard a lot. Canadians don’t listen. The Syrian government didn’t listen. She’s always fighting to be heard. Remember that.
In 2011 the Arab Spring caused many Middle Eastern leaders to abdicate their offices.
A group of schoolboys in Dara’a wrote “You’re next doctor” in graffiti on a wall. This meant Bashar, the president who used to be an eye doctor.
The boys were arrested and tortured which caused outrage from the public. They moved the army in to control the people and that’s when everything got dangerous.
The history lesson didn’t stay impersonal for long. Thirteen of the eighteen children who were arrested for the graffiti were members of Reham’s family. The day the army rolled into town her sister was shot in her own home.
Reham lifted her third-trimester body from my couch to physically act out the scene. She explained the first time she had a bomb hit near her. She ducked down quickly, her body seeming to remember each moment. Both Michael and I begged her to sit down- she refused. She wanted us to understand it the best we could.
Of course, we could barely grasp the gravity of what she was saying, our privileged lives made it impossible for us to fully relate.
She recounted each beat the way I used to recite lines I was learning for a play. She was rhythmic, detached and data-driven. She was merely getting the words out- presenting us with the facts.
I tried to get her to describe the feelings but I was nervous to press too hard, unsure and afraid of the reaction I might get.
“So when the bomb hit and you saw the child on the street with his father was dead, how did you feel?” I asked.
“Definitely I was scared and sad. I cried for many days” she would say before moving on to the next part of the story.
On that first day in my living room, she briefly mentioned the fact that just before her family fled to Jordan she had been pregnant with twins. She told me that a bomb had been dropped on her house and she was blown backwards and went into labour. She told me she lost one of the twins but the other, her daughter, survived. She said they buried the other twin, her son, beneath her favourite lemon tree. A month later they left their home and became refugees. She told me they left their home partly because it was no longer safe, but mostly because she couldn’t bear to watch her children grow up knowing one of her children was buried in the yard where they played.
She told me this with the same conviction that I would tell you the weather report for the weekend.
It didn’t take very long for me to realize that the emotion of the story was going to be the hardest part to properly portray. I knew that if I was ever going to accomplish what she needed to be accomplished (having a western audience really listen and understand her story- in case you forgot) I was going to need to tackle not only what happened but how it felt.
I tried to write from her point of view- to say it was bad writing would be giving it too much credit.
I chalked up the lack of emotional description to her language capabilities. Maybe she didn’t have the words. That’s when I started watching videos of native English speakers explain how they felt when they lost a child (not a youtube rabbit hole I would recommend exploring) just to try and wrap my mind and heart around such an unimaginable loss.
Stop.
Did you read that?
“Such an unimaginable loss”.
I didn’t even mean to type that. I know better than to write that but even still it just flew from my brain, into my fingers, onto the page.
Here’s the deal- while I was watching the videos of these parents who had lost children I noticed many of them hinted at the same thing. When people would say to them “I can’t imagine what you’re going through” “I can’t imagine how you’re feeling” “I can’t imagine the suffering you’re experiencing” that was when they would feel the most isolated in the weeks, months, years following the death of their child.
This is a very Western thought process, isn’t it? When we are told something that hits us in the gut and we are forced to look the person in the eye, to see the sadness sitting front and centre, this reminds us how we’re barely keeping it together as it is. This terrifies us. Our minds start working at warp speed and instead of joining them for a moment in their sadness, we choose to shut it down. We literally tell the person “I am unwilling to imagine this pain because that feels scary, and so I will not even try. Good luck and best wishes”.
I know this is never what is meant, but that is the message we inevitably send.
Now, imagine learning English for the first time and taking everything you hear literally, not knowing it is the social custom to say things we don’t mean all the time (for example, asking someone how they are doing and being thrown off if they say something other than “Good thanks, how are you?”).
Imagine having just gone through some of the most traumatic things a person can go through, thinking you’ve found someone you can confide in and have them tell you “I can’t imagine how that felt”.
No wonder she’s frustrated. No wonder she doesn’t feel heard. We haven’t really been listening because we are too afraid it will make us uncomfortable.
I listened back to my recordings and I said it. I said it soooo much. She physically acted out these scenes for me and the best I could come up with as a response was “I can’t imagine that”.
A few weeks later we met again. I vowed to myself that I would try my best to not give her any empty responses. I would work to suppress my knee jerk reaction to fill the silences with things to lighten the mood. If I was left speechless by her stories I would remain speechless.
I would be the audience she needed.
We started the conversation as we always did- with a history and geography lesson. My only experience in the middle east was a 5-hour layover in the Dubai airport where I spent the majority of my time staring at ruby-encrusted Camel statues at one of the 6000 gift shops. Needless to say, I needed the education.
She told me about her family’s olive orchard and what it was like growing up with lots of brothers and sisters (another thing I don’t have experience with). She spoke gleefully about the various jobs she worked at. Reham is a self-proclaimed workhorse, obsessed with being busy and contributing to her community. She spoke highly of her husband and shared details of their courtship and wedding. She spoke about the joy they felt when they found out they were pregnant with their first son, and how they got to feel that joy a second time when a few years later she became pregnant with twins.
I asked if she would mind walking me through the story of the day she gave birth to the twins. She said that was the whole reason she was sitting with me in the first place. We both laughed.
I told her most women aren’t usually so eager to talk about things like this, especially with people they don’t know. She said, “I try to tell my entire story to everyone because every time I tell it I think I feel better.”
This was something I did understand.
She walked me through the events of the day.
Her family had received a tip that their house was going to be the site of a bombing. They were no longer living at that house and they had sought shelter elsewhere, but they had left their passports and other valuables in their family home since they had to leave so quickly. Her husband would likely be killed by snipers if he left the house to get them, so an 8-month pregnant Reham insisted she’d be the one to fetch them. Bombs began to fall while she was in the house and she was struck.
She walked me through it all beat by beat.
Realizing she was in labour and running behind houses to stay safe from snipers.
Her young neighbour running out into the street, knowing he would be shot but also knowing that it would be the only way Reham could get to safety.
She spoke about how even though he survived, his selfless act still haunts her conscience.
The moment she woke up in the hospital and saw her daughter. How she knew immediately the boy was gone.
She told me about arguing with the Syrian soldier who tried to force her to sign the papers saying it was ISIS who dropped the bomb.
Of being led out a secret door of the hospital by the doctor and running home carrying both newborns in her arms.
I listened and I imagined it. I put myself there with her. I held eye contact with her and I didn’t look away when it started to feel too much for me.
She starts to tell me about burying her son, and that’s when she broke eye contact with me. She didn’t look down, as if sad or in pain- she looked past me out the window.
She went silent and took a breath so deep I felt the room shrink. The cadence of her storytelling change. She stopped reciting facts and started remembering feelings she had all but forgotten.
“The next day we go out to the tree and on our knees, we start to make the hole with our hands.
The whole time I was talking to him. I was talking to the baby.
And I don’t know why but I started singing.
I remember…. When I put him in the hole something came… I don’t know… maybe part of my heart left me and went into the hole with him. A bit of my heart goes with him now.
I start to be crazy. Always I am beside him. When it rains, I am outside with an umbrella over him because I don’t want him to get wet.”
Her eyes glistened as she made her way back to me. Neither of us said anything for a few moments.
“I’m really sorry that happened to you,” I said.
“Thank you. I am too.”
Then suddenly she burst out laughing. The abrupt change in her mood made me jump.
“Look out the window,” she said to me “That is my Dad!”
Sure enough, her father walked past the window at that moment.
“This city,” she said, “It’s very small!”
Reham has made the best out of the worst situation any person can be in.
She is headstrong and stubborn and her heart is made of solid gold. She is constantly working to keep her family together while also giving back to the community. I have never met anyone like her in my life and I am so grateful that people forced us together despite my initial hesitations.
Her story is one of those once in a lifetime, extraordinary stories, and when it landed in my lap I will admit, I froze under the pressure. It is an honour to know her and to talk with her and her story deserves nothing more than the royal treatment. This was me dipping my toe in. There’s so much more to say.
Thank you for giving Reham your time this morning.
Thank you for listening and imagining and feeling.
Reham has been working the last two years to raise enough money to bring her husband’s family to Saint John from Jordan. She is so close to meeting her fundraising goal of $30,000 to bring 5 members of her family to live safely in Canada.
If you are looking for a worthwhile cause to donate to this holiday season please consider helping Reham to reunite her family.
How To Donate:
You can donate by cash, e-transfer, cheque, credit or debit.
Please make cheques payable to Forest Hills Baptist Church with the memo line indicating “Refugee Support”, or e-transfers to onefamilytogetheragain@gmail.com with password “RefugeeSupport”. Please include your full name and mailing address, phone number and email. They will also gladly accept a post-dated cheque for later in the year. Receipts will be issued by Forest Hills Church at year-end.