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.”