Giving

Today I got on the bus to start my Crystal City schlep and found myself standing over a woman and baby that I had given money to last week. An awkward exchange of hellos brought a flood of thoughts. I gave an enthusiastic greeting to her five year old. Did he remember me? I got a big smile. Was it for the cereal bars I gave him?

In an attempt to...I don't know what...equalize things? Not seem pitying? I asked how old the baby was. "Five months." She looked embarrassed. I felt embarrassed. Why?

Last week while making sure my dad didn't lock Austin in his car again, I heard a woman trying to get my attention. "Scuse me!" "Scuse me!" "Do you have a dollar?" She called from across the street. "No," I called, "I don't have my wallet." But rather than dismissing the exchange, I looked at her holding this tiny baby and with the small boy tagging along and I needed to act. She went a few more feet and called out to my neighbor. If she was doing that she must have been desperate.

Living in big cities means you have a personal panhandling policy. You try not to ignore a person on the street and maybe even smile a bit as you make brief eye contact without engaging them. You don't want to be the jerk that steps over someone, but you don't necessarily want crazy coming over for dinner either. The right thing to do is not give, because big cities like DC have good services and if a person is truly in need they can access the basics: water, food and shelter. That's all well and good, but sometimes your heart has other ideas. I usually give to someone performing a service or just performing, like a busking street band. Sometimes someone just looks sad or desperate, and, yeah I guess to make me feel better, I will give a dollar or two.

So I ran in the house, ran upstairs and found $10. $5 would have been ideal. I ran back downstairs, opened the closet and grabbed an unopened box of Austin's cereal bars and ran outside.

She was up the block so I ran to her gave her the money and gave the boy the box. She hugged me and said thank you. I said, "take care of these kids." And that was it, until this morning.

Hayden chastised me for all the reasons I mentioned above. But I figured that you don't aggressively panhandle with two kids in tow unless you are desperate. So whatever her situation is, in that moment she needed some help.

When my stop came up, I looked down again after riding in silence. The baby was asleep. The five year old was joking around with some kids. The mother had her eyes closed. I thought it best not to say goodbye.

Terrible Choices

Today we met Syrian women who were smuggled across the border to come to a women’s leadership training. They took this huge risk, because they are desperate to find a bright spot what is otherwise a bleak, bleak future.

One woman brought her 11 year old autistic son with her. Two girls, no more than 20, left behind protesting mothers. One woman tore her hands and feet crawling through razor wire, hiking up mountains and scaling walls. She is 6 months pregnant.

Today we met Syrian women from inside Syria. Everyone here is quick to make that distinction. There are, of course, challenges and pain for all Syrians, but for those inside, there is active war. There are daily “indiscriminate shellings,” to use a term that several used when describing life inside. There is poverty. There is depression and trauma. There is rape and death.

We spent the day crying with these women. A woman described how she had to lie to her 6 year old son, who she left in a town with the “indiscriminate shellings,” because the road she took was actually more dangerous than that. She told him she was in the village not too far away and would be back soon. This same son and her 2 other children had been living with her in Turkey for a while. Every day she would leave the house in this foreign land and look for work. She would tell her children to lock the door to their one room and not answer the door no matter what. She left them paper to draw on and eventually someone donated a TV. The children sat inside all day, from 7 to 7, freezing because she didn’t know how the Turkish heating system worked. They lasted a year and then went back to Syria.

“Camps are a humiliation,” said another woman who also went back to Syria, because camp life was handouts and mockery from the local population. Indeed, we had heard this from the refugees we talked with earlier in the week. They estimated that 10-15% of the camp population had left to return to Syria, despite the violence.

The women described their lives trying to make a living and hiding their fear from their children, alone, because the men are lost to fighting and death. As bombs rain down, they tell their children, “Do not to worry, because God is almighty and it is the word of God if we die.”

Raqqa

On Day 4 in Gaziantep I had a chance to turn on the TV after a long day and the top headline is that the prick from that terrorist group was killed. When they flashed a map to show where he was, it showed a spot in Syria that 4 days ago would have meant nothing to me. Now, fully immersed in learning about the conflict in Syria from Syrians living it here on the border, I know about Raqqa. I know that Medya, my lovely, lovely coordinator, who is working 24/7 to set us up with all of our meetings and tirelessly and graciously escorting us to and fro, is from Raqqa. She told me that Raqqa was known in Syria as a place where all types of Syrians: Arabs, Alawites, Sunni, Shi'a, Kurds, etc. lived in relative peace before the Revolution, but ran to their corners and built up walls to keep each other out once the fighting started.

We don’t hear these stories. This place is now on the map because of this jerk and his evil associates. We have heard that the Russians are bombing opposition forces and we talk about the proxy war and geopolitics. But we don’t talk about the young Syrian boys who want to run from refugee camps back into the hellscape of Syria and risk their lives to fight the Russians. Imagine these young boys with fists and rocks in the air, fighting the Goliath, but almost certainly without the biblical ending. We hear that women are absent from the political negotiations, but we don’t hear Masa’s story. Hers is that of many women, who were on the frontlines of the revolution when it began, protesting and supporting the fight, but returned home to be met by disdain and divorce from their husbands for neglecting their household responsibilities.

I have always been concerned about this conflict, especially because of my dear friend Hala. But, as always, when you meet the people who are directly suffering and hear the stories that aren’t sexy enough for the news, your heart and mind are overwhelmed. The most mind-blowing thing that I struggle to articulate here, and in so many other places I have traveled, is that these people are me. They love and hate like me. They take taxis, buy diapers and drink coffee like me. They are flesh and blood like me. They do not deserve this tormented existence of war.