Last September I moved to Amman to study Arabic. During my year there people often asked me if I felt safe in Jordan. They were thinking about how close Jordan is to the war in Syria, ISIS and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
I usually replied that, for me, the impact of being so close to these conflicts was not to do with physical safety but with awareness: I did not feel unsafe in Jordan but I did feel as though my privileged ability to remove these conflicts from my mind was, rightly, being challenged. The conflicts felt close when I heard noises overhead and looked up to see a plane from the Jordanian air force heading to Syria. They felt close when ISIS murdered Muath. And they felt close every day because people all around me had lived, are living, through these conflicts. It was this, the presence of the refugees, that made it impossible for me to hide in the same way I had done. I had lost the luxury of forgetting.
The luxury of forgetting is what the refugees and the migrants in the camp at Calais are threatening to remove from the section of the British public railing in outrage at the idea that we should open our gates. They claim that their anger is the reasonable manifestation of rational fears due to us being “a small island without enough jobs”, but to me an emotional response of this strength is evidence of a more viceral reaction. Safely in Britain, we do not want to be reminded of the pain elsewhere and, most importantly, we do not want to be reminded that it is our responsibility to help. The people in Calais make us feel guilty. They force us to think. This is where the fear and the anger come from.
To deal with the crisis in Calais, empathy and compassion have to overcome the fear of engaging with pain. How do you get people to do this? Statistics can be powerful but it’s too easy to ignore a number; we have to keep sharing stories – we have to keep a human face on the crisis.
So here’s a modest contribution to those stories: the story of a Syrian refugee family living in Amman, in a small apartment in an old area of the city. It’s the sort of fashionably crumbling neighbourhood that houses both the poor and the bohemian — where artists live next to refugees next to organic-food cafes next to small shop owners next to students. This is where I lived when I first moved to Amman.
I remember the day I met the family well. I’d had some bad news the evening before and had spent the morning channelling my anger into the treadmill at the gym. I was stomping back to the flat with angry music blasting through my headphones when I almost bumped into a little girl by the main entrance to our building.
I took my headphones out.
“Do you live here?” She asked me.
“Yes. On the second floor. Do you live here too?”
“Yes. On the first floor.”
“What’s your name?”
“Emmeline.”
“What’s yours?”
“Nour.”
Nour was ten but had the air of a girl much older. She was confident and spoke quickly and directly with no hint of shyness. She seemed accustomed to speaking to people older than herself. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing a pink Adidas tracksuit.
Nour’s mum, Zainab, walked through the door.
“Mama, this is Emmeline,” Nour said. “She lives on the second floor.”
“Nice to meet you,” Zainab said, smiling at me.
“And you,” I replied.
Nour took me by the hand and began pulling me towards the elevator.
“Come!” She insisted.
“Oh… no…” I protested, thinking Nour’s mother probably didn’t really want me to come round and bother them.
“Yes, please, come for coffee,” Zainab said to me.
I went back to their apartment where there were two more girls waiting. Fatima, who was twelve, and Arwa, who was six. The apartment was the same layout as my own: an open-plan living room and kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms.
The girls sat me down on the sofa while Zainab made the coffee.
“Can I do your hair?” Nour asked me.
“Go ahead,” I replied.
“Where are you from?” The girls asked as they plaited my hair.
“Britain.”
“We’re from Syria,” Zainab told me as she put the kettle on.
“From Damascus,” Fatima added.
“Yeah, Baba’s in Damascus,” Nour said.
I didn’t know how to respond. What do you say to someone whose father is in Damascus? I had spent a morning wrapped up in my own issues, feeling sorry for myself, when all that time three little girls in the apartment below me had been worrying about their father in a war zone. In one sentence, this little girl asking me whether I wanted the pink sparkly scrunchie or the blue ribbon in my hair had put everything into perspective.
“Really?” I said. “I’ve heard Syria is a beautiful country.”
They all beamed at me.
“It’s much prettier than Jordan. Amman is not a nice city. Damascus is much more beautiful.” They said this almost in a chorus. It was the enthusiastic response of four women who missed their home with all their hearts.
I stayed about an hour with Zainab and the girls that day. They showed me pictures of all their friends and their home in Damascus and gave me origami swans that they’d made with the Japanese woman on the third floor. A few days later I went round for dinner and then I began to see them most days. Gradually we came to know each other well.
After a few weeks their father, Abdallah, came to Amman too. Zainab had been a teacher in Damascus and Abdallah had been a photojournalist and cameraman. Abdallah’s job meant that the family were targeted as soon as the civil war started and Zainab and the girls fled Syria in 2011. Abdallah had family in Jordan who were able to rent them this apartment cheaply and thus they managed to escape spending time in any of the refugee camps.
While most of their family and friends have also fled Syria, some people remain behind. I remember Zainab showing me a picture of an elderly woman.
“This is my mother,” she said, smiling faintly. “I haven’t seen her for three years. She’s still in Syria.”
Zainab’s voice began to crack. “I don’t know if I will ever see her again…”
She began to cry.
“I’m never going to see her again,” she repeated.
There was nothing to say. I hugged her tight.
“We have nothing here,” she sobbed. “We used to have a home, a car, a life. We don’t have any money. We need the food coupons but they keep cutting them with no warning. We want to work but it’s illegal. None of us have anything.”
She showed me another picture. This time I was looking at a baby, around six months old, with chubby cheeks and those big wide baby eyes that make you feel simultaneously as though they cannot understand anything and as though they can see every little part of you.
“This is my friend’s baby girl.” Zainab said. “She’s sick but my friend can’t afford the medicines. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
She was crying again.
“She’s so beautiful,” she said as she looked at the picture.
Just then Arwa stormed into the room in that melodramatic six year old way. She was upset about something. Zainab jumped up, wiped away her tears, and immediately saw to Arwa. Her children would never see her crying.
I became closer and closer to the family. I would play clapping games with the girls, watch Arab Idol with them and dance with them. Although I tried to refuse, knowing how little the family had, Zainab always fed me wonderful meals. When I was ill they gave me herbal medicines and teas. When I was sexually assaulted it was Zainab who cried with me and hugged me. The girls, too young to understand what had happened, held my hands and showed me videos of Disney princess songs until I was smiling again.
This woman who has known pain, so much pain, somehow still had time for my own. These children who have had everything taken from them, still found the love within them to show me compassion. I had never experienced selflessness to the degree that they showed me.
The girls were entitled to free education in Amman. Zainab and Abdallah devoted themselves to the girls’ work, encouraging them in all their subjects, doing homework with them, instilling in them ambition and drive. The life of a Syrian refugee in Jordan often seems without opportunity or possibility; higher education is incredibly expensive for a non-Jordanian and therefore completely unattainable for most refugees. Employment is completely prohibited. As long as the family remained in Jordan, the girls would be able to educate themselves and live as relatively equal citizens until the age of eighteen. After that, their lives would halt, the world around them sealed off. Zainab and Abdallah were painfully aware of that, but they never let the girls believe anything other than that the possibilities of the world were open to them.
It was obvious to the family, as it is obvious to many Syrian refugees, that Jordan, necessarily preoccupied with responding to the crisis in the short-term, trying to ensure that people have water and do not freeze to death in the tents in the winter, is not yet capable of providing the refugees with any meaningful long-term existence. They had to get out if they wanted a life.
They applied for asylum in Sweden and their application was accepted. I arrived at their home one day and they all rushed over to me excitedly.
“We’re leaving for Sweden at the end of the month!”
I believed them. We said an emotional goodbye when I left for the UK for Christmas. But when I got back to Amman in the New Year they were still there.
By the third time they told me they were leaving, I no longer believed it.
Months passed and the promise of a new life in Sweden began to seem like another cruel method of torture designed to slowly drain them of their vitality.
Abdallah looked increasingly exhausted. Zainab became quieter, more subdued. Unable to work, they were prevented from providing for their children as they yearned to, helpless to alter their situation. Day after day, they sat in the apartment waiting for a phone call from the embassy to tell them that they could leave.
It was heart-breaking seeing the suitcases sitting by the door, packed and ready for months on end. It was heart-breaking listening to the girls count from one to ten in Swedish, and heart-breaking watching Zainab sew a traditional Swedish dress for Arwa.
Then one day I turned up at their door:
“We’re leaving tonight!” They said.
It was actually happening. There was life in their eyes. The promise of a new start, of a home, a career, a future, was becoming a reality.
I can’t quite believe it, but the family is in Sweden now. It is not going to be easy. Zainab and Adballah will have to learn Swedish to a very good level before they can get a job that actually fits their experience and qualifications. The little girls will have to make friends in a new language and a new culture and deal with all the difficulties of being the one who’s “different”. They have never left the Arab World before — there is no doubt that this will be a tough adjustment.
But I have every faith that they will get there. Last week Zainab sent me a photo of the girls on Fatima’s thirteenth birthday, standing behind a fantastic cake that Zainab had baked herself, Arwa climbing on the chairs as usual.
This is how it should be: three little girls, who’ve been through pain that no child should ever suffer, smiling on a birthday, with access to all the opportunities that, for a few years, it looked as though they would be denied.
This is how it should be: when children are driven from their homes, we must follow Sweden’s example and show that we will not let this mark the end of their lives- that we will continue to care for the people on whom the world has turned its back. Jordan and Lebanon have reached breaking point with the influx of refugees. We need to play a part. We need to open our doors.
