Assalamu aleykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu, dear sisters!
I cannot stress enough, my dear readers, just how difficult daily life is in the refugee camp for women and children in Syria. Everyone wishes to escape that place and, to achieve that goal, there are several ways. Out of the available methods, my family chose repatriation / deportation. Quite frankly, I could not find any other way to set us free from the camp. Making this decision was difficult for me, because many of the states from which the refugees from the camps in Syria originate choose to prosecute and even imprison the citizens they repatriate.
I worried a lot about the possibility of going to prison after returning to my home country and I had many doubts before opting for repatriation. I was afraid I would get into trouble with the law, but, Alhamdulillah, my fears did not come true.
Usually, the refugees that were repatriating were announced about the date of their departure from the camp just a few days before. It was the same in my case. We would not tell anyone else about our departure until the very last minute. We would then buy fabrics to sew long hijabs and skirts.
In my case, a week before our departure I became ill and, during the first few days, I had a fever. I felt a weakness throughout my entire body but, despite my illness, I still had to prepare, as the day of departure was approaching. So, I had to sit down at my sewing machine, and make the necessary clothes for both myself and my daughter. Moreover, I have to pack my bags. We were only allowed to take with us just a few things, the bare minimum, so I offered everything I was leaving behind to some of the other Muslim Sisters that were remaining in the camp.
On the day of departure, I literally had a nervous breakdown as well as feeling completely powerless and drained physically. We woke up in the time for the morning Namaz and, after, we were supposed to head for the gates, from were we would be taken by the Guards and directed further in our journey. My eldest son usually ran away to stay and chat with his friends during Namaz and afterwards I was nearly impossible to find them inside the camp. Understandable, they were young boys and they got bored very easily. For this very reason, on that day I particularly asked him not to go anywhere, considering that we had to leave the camp immediately after Namaz. Of course, as soon as I blinked he was already gone. My nerves were stretched to the maximum and, as I searched for my son, I constantly thought that, if we were to be late when the car would arrive to pick us up, there would be nobody else to come afterwards especially for us and we would be stuck. This was our only chance to finally leave that place.
We started to prepare, to change our clothes for the road, all the while thinking one of my children is still missing. My anxiety reached a peak and I started having a full-blown panic attack. I could see very clearly that my children were also afraid about what was to come, of the unknown journey ahead, of what would wait for us at the end of this journey. For better or for worse, the camp was for them a familiar environment and it offered them a certain degree of stability, predictability and even some weird sort of comfort. But, there are times when children have to listen and obey to their mothers without asking any other question and they must act and behave as they are told. And this was one of them.
To come back to my story, I had exactly 20 minutes to find my son. I resumed my search for him, running and checking, in the most haste, with every friend of his I knew from the camp. All this time, I was doing Duas and praying to Allah the Merciful to find him. Alhamdulillah, just a few minutes before the departure time, when I had reached the last one of his friends from the camp, my son appeared next to me. I was extremely upset and angry at him, but I had to control myself. The most important thing was that I had found him in time.
We reached our tent, we took our things and we set out to the gates. It was early in the morning and the “street” inside the camp was almost empty. We had a close relationship with just a few Muslim Sisters from the camp, and except for them, no one else knew we were leaving. Because we could leave the camp without saying goodbye to them, they showed up to wish us farewell. We shed many tears as we took our leave, because he became very close to each other during all those years that we spent together inside the refugee camp in Syria.
After we said goodbye in a haste, we continued making our way to the gates. It would be a long journey to our much-awaited freedom and, as we would come to realize later on, it would also be quite a perilous one as well. We were, in total, 11 families that had to be repatriated to their countries of origin. At the set time, we all gathered together and we waited for the soldiers to come and pick us up. And so, we waited for a few hours. The temperature outside was rising, it became very hot and suffocating, and the children grew tired and started crying. My youngest son, who was 3 years old at the time, was also crying that he is tired and started screaming that he wanted to go back to the camp. We kept repeating that we wanted to go back “home”. I did not pay much attention to him, due to all the anxiety I was experiencing in that moment and, as the cars were approaching and I got distracted for less than a minute and took my eyes off him, as I turned back around I noticed that he was gone. My youngest son was now missing. I started to tremble and shake nervously, and I ran and began to search for him. Finally, I found him, he was 5 meters away from the gates to the camp, hiding in a corner. He simply got scared and, because of that, decided to run away and hide. I took him by his little hand and comforted him, after which, we finally proceeded to the cars.
It’s been more than a year since my departure from the camp, but all the memories are still fresh, as if everything happened today. I can still remember all the emotions I experienced, all the worries and the fears I felt. May Allah Almighty offer redemption to each and every Muslim and protect them from evil.
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