We often encounter stories about Syrian refugees in the news. Sometimes about deaths and drownings. Other times, about scholarships and donations.
But finding personal accounts of how their heart aches for home, or about how they’re slowly but surely coming up from the ashes and reaching redemption, those stories are almost impossible to find in newspapers or websites because it’s not journalists who discover them.
It’s the volunteers who work countless hours with the refugees who get to hear them.
And these stories, they stick with you forever.
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It was early March when I went to the Riverside Resort and Conference Centre in Mactaquac to be a volunteer for the first time. I’d heard there were more than 100 refugees staying there before they got resettled into their new homes so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t know Arabic, how would I be able to talk to the kids and adults?
When we got together with the rest of the volunteer team in the first floor of the hotel, I noticed a little Syrian girl sitting beside me. She must have been around seven years old. She had curly hair tied into what once seemed to be two pig tails.
She was laughing at the silly faces that one of the volunteers was making at her. As I laughed along with her something wonderful happened. She looked at me and said something in Arabic that I felt like I could actually understand.
I looked back at her and replied, “Yeah you’re right. He is really funny.”
I worked with children from five to 11 years old for the rest of the day. I was amazed at how quickly I could read their facial expressions and sign language to understand what they were trying to tell me. I think it was easy for me because looking at them, I saw myself 16 years ago while I was starting to learn English back home in Honduras.
Just like them, I was a little girl using sign language and facial expressions to get my American teachers to understand what I was trying to say.
But that day, what struck me the most was a 10-year-old boy that sat in a bench with me while the other kids were playing soccer. I could tell he was tired so I didn’t start a conversation. But five minutes later, he took out a paper from his pocket and gave it to me. It was a drawing of five children on the left side of the paper. In the middle was a small boat surrounded with water and on the right side, he drew a girl with a frown on her face.
I pointed at the girl and shrugged my shoulders, asking ‘who is she?’ He put his finger on her and said something that sounded like “Ukt … Syria” and pointed at himself saying “Shaqiq … Canada.” Then, he put his finger on the girl again but this time slid it towards the boat and said, “Soon.”
This girl that had been left behind in Syria was his sister.
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Angela Youssef, a first-year computer science student at the University of New Brunswick, also volunteered with Syrian refugees. She began doing it over March break.
I asked her why she decided to become a volunteer.
“I really enjoy to help with anything that involves global issues. When it came up, I just took the opportunity immediately. Getting to know them was interesting because you do see on the news what is going on in Syria but you don’t really know or hear stories from other people. You don’t see things like that. And I’m from Lebanon. My country was prone to war too and when my parents were young they experienced a war just as bad as Syria and it went on for a really long time. It was kind of really close to home,” she said.
One of the moments that struck her the most was when she was working with the younger kids.
“They didn’t really know what was going on. They didn’t really understand. And I remember we would do little craft activities and one of them was this poster. The activity was to draw things that they liked on the poster. One of the ladies I was working with asked this little girl ‘can you write your name in Arabic?’ I translated for her and the girl said, ‘I don’t know how.’ I asked her, ‘What do you mean? Didn’t they teach you at your school?’ and she was like ‘Well, when I was starting to learn, we had to move because of the war.’ It’s just really hard to think about that, that they stopped going to school because they were literally forced out of their homes,” said Youssef.
The arts and crafts activities that Youssef mentioned were successful with kids. They loved to draw and paint and many times, it was their way to share their stories with us.
One day, a 12-year-old boy made a beautiful drawing of two birds, a red one with “Canada” written on the bottom of the page and a blue one with “Syria” written below its wings. He drew a heart in the middle of both and wrote “I love.”
I wasn’t volunteering the day he drew this, but other volunteers took pictures of this drawing and sent them to me. I remember looking at it on my phone for a long time.
For both Angela and I, the most difficult yet gratifying part of being a volunteer is hearing their stories.
“They have stories that are completely unbelievable. You can’t imagine if you aren’t in that situation. One of the boys that I worked with had a scar on his hand. And someone asked him, ‘what’s that scar from?’ He’s like, ‘oh, someone shot through my hand.’ That’s just another day for them which is insane,” she said.
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Having them share these stories with you – even though at times they make your heart ache and your eyes water – means after all the effort you’ve dedicated to helping them resettle in a country they probably never thought of even visiting, they’ve found a friend to open up to. And that is more than any donation you could ever give them.
We teach them English words like “hello” and “goodbye” and songs they clap along to. We teach them how to play hopscotch, how to draw the Canadian flag and how to write their names in English.
But all this time, the ones who are learning the most valuable lessons are us. The volunteers. We learn about strength, about courage and most importantly, about turning your rock bottom into a solid foundation to grow from.
