The Syrian Stories: Vignettes

Our time with Syrian families began to run together more with each home visit. We went to two or three homes a day, always with a long-term volunteer and always long enough to drink a tiny cup of the world's blackest coffee or a little glass of the world's sweetest tea.

There were children in every home, and pregnant mothers too. One mother was eight months pregnant and desperate to find payment for a C-section as she had been told that this would be necessary due to having her previous child delivered by C-section back in Syria. She was told it would cost around $1100. The church does not pay for medical expenses for the refugees, as the need is very great and the requests are constant. Apparently some registered refugees had been able to receive subsidized medical treatment at the local hospital through the UN, but this too had stopped.

During our week, we heard and witnessed stories of miraculous healings through prayer in Jesus' name.  We praised God that He is meeting medical needs directly in some cases, rather than through the hands of doctors or the work of medications, as these are all difficult for refugees to access and afford.

One afternoon we took a cab to the outskirts of town. The pregnant mom there requested prayers for her high blood pressure to go down. She was several months along and had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a one-year old. All were girls. Could we pray for them to have a boy so they could be done, she asked? They served us sweet tea and candy; the girls ate up the candy and the couple described how difficult it was to make ends meet on the ~$15 a month they received from the UN for each family member. It's hard to imagine how that would last, given that the diapers we brought them cost $11 and it would take them a $2 cab ride into town just to by $.75 of bread.

But some families seemed to have some money, although I never could figure out how. I know that we sat in some large living rooms, and some had shelves or decorations in addition to the ever-present floor mattresses and TV.

We met one family who had been approved to resettle in America. They were awaiting their marching orders. The young wife showed me how she was learning English on her DuoLingo app and the boys were running around like crazy while their father smoked in the corner and chatted with the men on our visit. The church volunteers had encouraged them to continue with the resettlement process to go to America when, several months before, she had resisted the opportunity in fear that they would be forced to learn a different religion in schools. It seemed to me unfair that so many were desperate to be resettled (in America or elsewhere) but had not been given the opportunity, and yet this young family had to be talked into it.

In one home, the patriarch lamented the good years he used to have and the success he once enjoyed. All his prosperity had vanished with the war. The church volunteer told him the story of Job and then quoted God's promise in Joel 2:25: "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten."

May it be so.

May it be so for Syrians, for Syria, and for all who have lost so much in this terrible war. 

This is the last in a short series on my time in the Middle East visiting Syrian refugee families. Read the rest here:
Part 1: Anne Frank Today is a Syrian Girl
Part 2: Small House, Big Hope
Part 3: The Second Household

The Syrian Stories: The Second Household

My group has moved on to the second visit of our day, another family with several young children living a few doors down in another apartment carved out of this converted store space.

The woman here, "H," is shorter, darker, and softer. She looks less like a Kardashian than the first mom we met, but her household looks about the same. We settle cross-legged on the thin mattresses lining the room, and H bends over a baby carrier near the TV. I see that there is a small baby, maybe one month old, cocooned in a tightly wrapped blanket. She hands the baby to me! I'm excited to hold such a tiny child, and puzzle over the dark lines drawn around his eyes. Is this month-old infant really wearing eye liner? I don't want to interrupt the conversation to ask, so I just look at him and rock a little while I sit.

H. sits down to visit with us, and our visit leader chats easily with her as I stare at my sweaty little bundle. Soon my visit leader (a middle aged local lady) takes the baby from my hands and begins unwrapping the blanket as she scolds the young mom for keeping her baby too hot.

I can't understand this Arabic small talk, and with the baby out of my hands I turn my attention to the children I can hear playing outside in the parking lot. A couple of the boys in the family keep coming in and out of the house, interrupting their play to ask their mom something or to complain about a sibling, I assume. Prior to coming here I had read articles about Syrian refugee families keeping their children inside due to fear. I'm glad these kids are playing outside. They're laughing and seem healthy.

Our visit leader asks us if we have any questions for H. before we go. I'm unsure whether it's a blessing or a burden to talk about their experiences, but still I'm curious, so I ask: "Why did you leave Syria? How did you end up here?"

She briefly tells her story.

The family decided to flee Syria about three years ago. They came by vans in the night, with headlights off to avoid detection. When the driver told them to, they got out and walked the rest of the way to the border.  However, once they got there, they were denied entry.  There was a pregnant woman in their group, and they thought that if they told the guards she was pregnant, they would be allowed in. However, the guards admitted only the pregnant woman, along with H. and her youngest child, leaving the rest of the group Syria-side.

Now H. was separated from her husband and her other children. She was brought to the large refugee camp just across the border and began desperately trying to contact her husband. Two days later, she learned that the whole group had eventually been given access to the country, and her husband and children were waiting for her at another camp.

They were somehow reunited and are now living here. He works undercover at night for a candy shop. Working here is illegal for refugees, and her husband will be returned to Syria if he is found out.

As we ended our visit with another flurry of cheek kisses and goodbyes, I reflect that H's story is a little tamer than the last family we visited. There was no violent arrest, no internal bleeding, and no very sick child. But there was still a frightening night-time flight from a homeland they will likely never see again, two days of frantic separation, and now an indefinite number of impoverished and uncertain years.

Is there any such thing as a benign refugee story?


This is the third in a short series on my time in the Middle East visiting Syrian refugee families. Read the rest here:
Part 1: Anne Frank Today is a Syrian Girl
Part 2: Small House, Big Hope
Part 4: Vignettes

The Syrian Stories: Small House, Big Hope

It's my group's first day of home visits to the Syrian refugees in this town just near the Syrian border. We've already been through orientation, learning how the refugee population has exploded from forty families in the first year of the Syrian war to now more than a hundred thousand refugees living in the town and in the refugee camp nearby. There are an approximately equal number of refugees and locals in this town now.

The church has been busy. When the war began in neighboring Syria, they had no organized plan for how to respond to the first few refugees, but they knew that outreach was "in the DNA" of their church. Now they carry out a wide range of spiritual, emotional, and material outreaches to the refugees in their city, partnering with international NGOs to maximize their impact.

I've been placed in a visiting group with a local church member and a couple other short-term foreign visitors like me. As she drives us through narrow city to our destination, the local lady explains that both families we will visit are living in converted store space. The influx of refugees has overwhelmed the infrastructure of the city, sending rent prices up and availability of good housing down.

I inquire about how the refugees can pay rent anyway, since they are gone from their country and aren't able to work here. The local lady doesn't know.

We arrive at the first home and heft a heavy bundle of food and diapers out of the trunk. But apparently that is not the main purpose of our visit. I had envisioned us delivering goods all day long, but the main thing we were delivering turned out to be friendship.

An elementary age daughter lets us into the home. It's small; just a room in a converted store. Thin mattresses line the walls and a few clothes hung on hooks near a door at the back of the room. The local lady indicates that we should sit on the mattresses, and as we wait, a little boy toddles out. Soon the mother of the house emerges from the door into the front room.

"This is a Syrian refugee?" I think. She's the first one that I have met, and nothing like I expect. Her hair is bleached and she wears a tight shirt and big, gold earrings. She's tall and young. I assume the head scarf and long garment hanging on the wall are hers, to be worn when unrelated men are in the house or when she goes out.

More children shyly emerge; there are six altogether. The two oldest are girls and they help their mother serve us tea on a platter which they set in the middle of the floor. I hardly know what to make of the tea; the surface is covered in half an inch of nuts (almond?) and coconut. I both drink and chew the sweet concoction while I listen to the local lady and the Syrian mom catch up with each other. They pause to translate for our benefit.

First the Syrian mom talks about how delighted she is to be in this home; they had previously lived in a place where they had trouble with their neighbors, but now she likes the place and she has both a window and a lock on her door. The local lady translates her comments: "She feels like it's a mansion."

There was an update on the children. They are in good health, and the older girls were finally allowed to register for school today. Not just an evening school, like many Syrian children are relegated to (as there is no space in the normal day school), but a regular school. They tested into third grade, and their mother says she is proud because they've only had one year of formal schooling and the rest is what she taught them on her own whenever she could find paper and pens.

At the end of the visit, we are asked if we have any questions for her, and I ask if she could tell us how she arrived in this town. She graciously launches into a story I'm sure she's told to many others before.

They were in a large Syrian city when the fighting there began to get bad about three years ago. Men arrived at her house to arrest her husband and her. They screamed and cried; Who would take care of the babies? One of the arresting men received a cell phone call that they just needed the man, not her, so they took her husband away and kicked her back into the house.

Because of being kicked, she began to experience internal problems and was not well enough to care for her children. A Christian lady from across town braved the fighting to come stay with her for a little while.

Somehow she and her husband were reunited and found their way across the border into safety. (She doesn't tell this part of the story, and she's so engaged in the next chapter that none of us ask.)

Their toddler son had a problem with his heart (possibly a hole). He wasn't walking and was very weak. Then members from the church came and prayed for his healing. And now he is walking! Indeed, through most of her storytelling she has been trying to guide his wiggly arms and legs into his clothes for the day, and now he's toddling across the room.

The local lady explains how God had been watching out for this family, holding them up at each important moment. She uses her hands to show how He has supported and propped them up. The Syrian lady agrees.

An hour or so has elapsed and it's time for our next home visit. We leave the home in a flurry of hand-shaking, cheek kissing, and kind words.

So ends my first visit to a Syrian refugee home.

This is the last in a short series on my time in the Middle East visiting Syrian refugee families. Read the rest here:
Part 1: Anne Frank Today is a Syrian Girl
Part 3: The Second Household
Part 4: Vignettes

The Syrian Stories: Anne Frank Today is a Syrian Girl

I went to a city near the Syrian border in September. We spent a week learning and partnering with a local church that has been faithfully reaching out to Syrian refugees since they first started coming to their city about six years ago.

More than 250,000 Syrians have died in the civil war and another 11 million have been displaced. You may find the BBC's "Story of the Conflict" helpful as a quick summary of the war, although please note that almost a year has passed since that was published and the situation has arguably worsened since then.

Several months ago I read Nicholas Kristof's April 2016 New York Times article titled "Anne Frank Today is a Syrian Girl." (Photo and caption below are from the article).

As is Syria today, Germany of the 1940's was a place of great peril and brutality for many ordinary citizens. Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, wrote to an American friend to seek refuge for his family in America. He wrote, “U.S.A. is the only country we could go to. It is for the sake of the children mainly.”

The article notes that this was not his only request for assistance in emigrating:

Along with the letter were many others by Otto Frank, frantically seeking help to flee Nazi persecution and obtain a visa to America, Britain or Cuba — but getting nowhere because of global indifference to Jewish refugees. 

We all know that the Frank children were murdered by the Nazis, but what is less known is the way Anne’s fate was sealed by a callous fear of refugees, among the world’s most desperate people.

What prevented the Frank family from finding safety in America instead of finding murder in a concentration camp? One factor was American self-protectionism. To again quote the Kristof article at length:

There were widespread fears that Germany would infiltrate the U.S. with spies and saboteurs under the cover that they were Jewish refugees.

“When the safety of the country is imperiled, it seems fully justifiable to resolve any possible doubts in favor of the country, rather than in favor of the aliens,” the State Department instructed in 1941. The New York Times in 1938 quoted the granddaughter of President Ulysses S. Grant warning about “so-called Jewish refugees” and hinting that they were Communists “coming to this country to join the ranks of those who hate our institutions and want to overthrow them.”

News organizations didn’t do enough to humanize refugees and instead, tragically, helped spread xenophobia. The Times published a front-page article about the risks of Jews becoming Nazi spies, and The Washington Post published an editorial thanking the State Department for keeping out Nazis posing as refugees.

In this political environment, officials and politicians lost all humanity.

It all sounds sickeningly familiar.

I've been to a border town near Syria. I've sat with the Anne Franks of today, and their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and infant siblings. I've watched in awe as the Lord demonstrated his faithfulness by meeting their needs in miraculous ways.

And I want you to have a chance to hear some of their stories. In the next week, I'll be posting a series called "The Syrian Stories," in which I share a few stories from our visits to the homes of refugees.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in May, “Syria is the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time, a continuing cause of suffering for millions which should be garnering a groundswell of support around the world." (source).

As I see it, the rest of us have an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of our Holocaust era heroes.

If today's Anne Frank is a Syrian girl, I want to be today's Miep Gies, who helped the Frank family into hiding and helped tell their story by saving Anne's diary.

I want to be today's Corrie Ten Boom, whose family sheltered Jews in their home until they themselves were sent concentration camps for the crime of giving refuge to desperate citizens.

I want to be today's Dietrich Bonheffer, who was imprisoned and later executed for his opposition to Hitler's cruelties.

And I want us to do it together. Stay tuned.


This is the first in a short series on my time in the Middle East visiting Syrian refugee families. Read the rest here:
Part 2: Small House, Big Hope
Part 3: The Second Household
Part 4: Vignettes