The Boy on the Beach

by Tima Kurdi

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Then I’m going to work.”

  I should have said, “Put on a hat and gloves,” but I didn’t. Alan was already an adult. He could take care of himself. He didn’t need me. But I knew that was only half the truth. We always need our mothers.

  With Christmas just around the corner, I could have been baking my son’s favourite cookies and shopping for gifts for my family. But I had other duties that day. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was visiting Vancouver, and the local media had planned a small town-hall-style meeting. I was invited to participate and ask him a question related to Syria.

  When my time to pose a question arrived, I stood and addressed the prime minister.

  “Thank you for bringing more than thirty thousand refugees to Canada and saving their lives,” I said. “But there are still millions of refugees suffering around the world who need our help. What can Canada do to help find a political solution to end the war in Syria?”

  “Don’t thank me,” Trudeau said. “Thank the many Canadians who helped sponsor and support the refugees. There are millions of refugees who still need help, and I wish Canada could accept them all. But we just can’t help everyone.”

  I waited for Trudeau to continue explaining. I hoped he would tell us how Canada was doing its best, or how it was planning to take in more refugees. But instead, the town hall moved on to the next question. I sat back down, confused and disappointed.

  Afterward, Trudeau shook hands with everyone in attendance. When it was my turn, I stretched out my hand, but he gave me a hug, saying, “I’m so pleased to meet you. Thank you for what you’re doing for refugees.” At that moment, Trudeau the politician disappeared and I could see a kind, caring father expressing deep sorrow for my family’s tragedy. Then he moved on to shake hands with the next attendee.

  A few mornings later, I was at the kitchen window once again, hypnotized by the snow that never seemed to stop and thinking about my family in Turkey and Germany, as well as the poor refugees that I had met in the camps. I worried about how they would survive another cold winter. Alan broke the spell once again.

  “I’m graduating today. I’m done,” he said. It hit me that since the tragedy, I’d paid almost no attention to my son or my husband. Depression had been running my life, eating away at me. “Wake up, Tima,” I told myself. “You’re missing so much.”

  I grabbed Alan and kissed him and hugged him, saying, “I’m so proud of you.”

  I’d always been incredibly proud of my son. He had always been a considerate and thoughtful soul. When I was a broke, single mom, he never whined for expensive gifts. He loved Lego, but even as a young boy, he understood it was very expensive; if he pooled all his savings, he could buy a small tub of Lego, and that was okay with him; he was always patient and giving. Once, as a little kid, he counted out all the savings in his piggy bank and gave the money to me, saying, “I want to give it to kids in need.” I couldn’t have asked for a better son than Alan. In return, since the tragedy, or maybe even before that, after my trip to Istanbul in 2014, I’d been a neglectful mother.

  I was white-knuckled as I navigated the icy streets to my salon. I’d never learned how to drive in the snow. I thought about turning back, but I told myself, “Just keep moving forward.” I had only a few appointments booked. I knew how to promote my business, but I wasn’t trying. I had a dozen long-time clients, but otherwise I left things up to chance walk-ins. My salon was losing more money every day, and I was too preoccupied about Abdullah and my family to figure out a business solution, which was a vicious cycle, because every wasted dollar filled me with guilt. A few hours later, a pretty woman entered the salon. She wanted to freshen up her highlights for a big party.

  I could pay attention when I was working because I was a professional and because my tools were scissors and bleach. I never forgot that first bleaching job with Lina. I’d been scrupulous and careful ever since. But I didn’t love my job anymore. I didn’t even understand it. Why did people care so much about superficial things? I had once been like them. Sometimes I wanted that person back. But I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t forget all the beautiful, brave refugees. I couldn’t forget my people. War changes people.

  One day that winter, I received a surprising phone call at the salon. It was Chris Alexander, the former immigration minister. Almost two years after I wrote to him, sending many emails begging him to reconsider the restrictions on refugees, he called to say that he was sorry for my family’s loss. He wanted to meet me for coffee during an upcoming trip to Vancouver. A few days later, we were sitting across from each other at a table. He brought his cousin, a lawyer, who presented me with a plant wrapped in a pink ribbon. We were discussing the refugee crisis. “People called me a child killer,” he said. He said that my family’s tragedy caused his party to lose the election.

  “I would never call you that or put the blame on you or any single person; I blame us all,” I told him. “But I wish you had listened to my letters and that you had done something to change the impossible restrictions for Syrians. Then we would have been able to bring Abdullah’s family to Canada.”

  “I did instruct my office to call and tell you to resubmit Mohammad’s family’s application,” he said.

  Alexander went on to say he was now listening and that he wanted to work with me to stop the violence in Syria. I was all ears.

  “I don’t support violence and I don’t take political sides, one way or the other. I’m on the side of the people stuck in the middle,” I said. “My message is about peace. About laying down weapons and sitting down at a table to come to a compromise. It’s about letting the citizens of Syria return home and decide their own fate.”

  Our meeting ended after Alexander’s cousin took a photograph of the two of us. The exchange left me with a feeling that was all too familiar since the tragedy and my trip to the UN in Brussels: doubt. I had come to doubt that politicians would act on their promises to prevent more senseless deaths. I felt once again like a pawn on a chessboard, with each square a slightly different shade of grey. I’d become less naïve about the fact that millions of people were caught up in a power struggle controlled by the rich and the influential—a struggle causing the sacrifice of many pawns.

  It’s the poor people who suffer most, at the hands of the powerful, the mighty who pull the strings and the levers. Those puppet masters aren’t just oblivious to the suffering of the poor: they create it and line their pockets with it. They step on people’s heads and shoulders, pushing them down, crushing them into the ground, ripping their roots from the soil and tossing them into the wind. It’s like that everywhere, from Canada to Syria. The poor are always victims of injustice. They are the casualties of war.

  Shortly after my meeting with Alexander, the United States became caught up in the controversy of the so-called Muslim ban. I was deeply upset when I first heard the details. It brought to mind an old Arabic expression about hypocrisy: “. We killed the person, but we mourn at their funeral.”

  A few weeks later, I found myself in Washington, DC. American congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard had invited me to be her guest at President Trump’s inaugural congressional address on February 28. My instincts told me that Tulsi had a beautiful soul and that we shared the desire for a peaceful end to the Syrian war. Her message to the American people was simple: Stop arming the Syrian rebels with weapons, because those weapons have too often fallen into the hands of terrorists, causing the death and displacement of innocent Syrians caught in the middle.

  My seat at Trump’s address to Congress was on the balcony level, directly across from Trump. I’ll admit that I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying; I doubted he would address the war in Syria. When it did come up, all he said was that he would defeat ISIS. The following day, I did many interviews with the media. It seemed the whole world wanted me to pick a side, but I delivered the same message I’d been repeating since the first day after the tragedy: end the war in Syria; sto
p pointing fingers; help those caught in the middle. Because I was in America, a country that has taken in so few Syrian refugees, I also said that if the United States stopped bombing my country, the Syrian people wouldn’t have to come to America. To finish my trip, I did a talk at George Washington University. I loved the lively discussion with the students most of all. They were earnest and thoughtful, eager to do something to effect change, but they admitted they felt overwhelmed about how to go about doing it.

  “I want to help financially, but I don’t have much money,” said one young woman. I told her that even if she set aside a dollar every week, by the end of the year, she’d have enough money to help a refugee family in Turkey.

  I returned home to find that, after the comments I’d made, some people had made death threats against me. I had grown somewhat accustomed to attacks from critics filling the comments sections of online news feeds with nasty comments about me and Abdullah. Yet these new rants were even worse than usual. These detractors felt I didn’t have a right to voice my opposition to the arming of rebels or anyone who took up arms and inflicted violence upon innocent civilians. Some critics told me to shut my mouth, that I had no right to voice any opinion at all because I was a woman. How dare I call for a peaceful solution to end this war?

  I was shocked and heartbroken to hear those hateful words, some of them from my own Syrian people. Their sentiments were in stark contrast to the Syrian belief I grew up with—the belief in living side by side in peace and tolerance. Did the war do this to my people? These attacks made me consider backing out of the spotlight. But once again, Rocco and Alan lifted me up.

  “You can’t pay attention to the haters,” said Alan. “You can’t give up, that’s what they want. You can’t let them win. You should be proud of yourself. Your voice helped bring so many people to Canada and countries all over the world.”

  I took my son’s advice. But how do you win when hate has weapons of modern warfare on its side?

  I realized that I needed to commit myself completely to advocacy. I decided to close my hair salon. I found someone to whom I could sublease it. My final day was March 29, 2017. It was sad to lock the door for the last time, but people have a lot of dreams that don’t always work out. And my heart was never in it, because it happened at the wrong time. My only thoughts now were about how I could help refugees and use my voice to try to stop the war.

  The following day, I flew to Ontario to do a talk at the University of Waterloo. Soon after, I went to Philadelphia to give a speech at Temple University. It was still hard for me to talk about what my family had been through, but it was heartening to bring awareness to young people, and I found that being around young adults was very inspiring. They were often shocked to hear that my siblings were all still living a life of poverty and hardship as refugees in foreign lands.

  In early April 2017, Abdullah went back to the dentist in Turkey. His new implants were finally ready. He was about to get them installed when he saw photographs of the chemical attack in Syria—so many innocent children maimed or dead. Abdullah called me in hysterics.

  “How on earth can any human being be so evil? How can they harm children and elderly people?” he said. “Wallah haram. It is forbidden. How many more shocking images of children does the world need to see before they stop this war?”

  That night, I woke up to a terrible sound. My forty-litre fish tank had somehow ruptured, flooding my living room. I rushed to the room and found that my three fish—Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan—were dead.

  Epilogue

  Jasmine-Scented Air

  It’s been six summers since the uprising in Syria began, and my family continues to try to find its place in an ever-changing world. In December 2016, Hivron’s family got out of the shelter in Germany. They were granted a year-long asylum, which enabled them to move into a furnished house in a town near the shelter. When they arrived at their new house, the family was greeted with a large basket filled with fruit on the dining room table—a welcome gift from their neighbours. Hivron sent me a video: a tour of her new home. “It makes me hopeful, but it also fills me with ghorbah,” she said.

  Hivron has since made some wonderful friends and allies in that small town. It’s the kind of place where everybody knows their neighbours and everyone is friendly, no matter what racial background you come from.

  “My neighbours here are just like the ones back home,” Hivron said to me. “Yesterday, my washing machine broke, and my German neighbour took all our laundry and washed it herself.”

  A few other Syrian families live there as well. They meet once a week at the local church to receive German lessons. Hivron’s husband, Ahmad, does workfare jobs for the government. One day he plants flowers in the public gardens, and the next day he does janitorial work, all as part of a practical work training component of his asylum.

  “I can’t find a job,” Hivron says. “And I wonder if we would be better off in a larger city. But my neighbour keeps saying, ‘I think your family is safer here.’ ”

  The most important thing is that their kids have been able to enrol in school and her younger children have adapted well to Germany. Eighteen-year-old Abdulrahman found it very tough initially. He was bullied at school by a handful of mean teenagers. “Go back to Syria, you terrorist!” they taunted.

  “Auntie, they say we’re bad people,” he once said when we talked on the phone. “Why don’t they understand that we’re here because we’re peaceful? That we’re here to escape violence and war. That we’re just looking for a safe place to live?”

  It is no wonder that my nephew struggled with school.

  “I want to learn a trade and start working and making money,” he continued. “I want to be a man and take care of my family.”

  At the same time, the trauma that he and Shergo suffered in Sham as young boys haunts him. He misses his uncle Abdullah, and he remains heartbroken about the loss of his cousins.

  Hivron’s most traumatic flashbacks are a result of her many attempted sea crossings. When her German neighbours invited her family to a day at the beach in the North Sea, she happily accepted.

  “Fatima, as soon as I was there, I got right back in that sea. I was always such a good swimmer before,” she says. “Next thing I knew, I felt like I was drowning. I had a complete meltdown. Everyone must have thought I was a total kook.”

  Shireen and Maha and their kids remain refugees in Izmit, Turkey. Shireen has her two young sons with her. Farzat isn’t in school because he has to work, but Maleek is going and he enjoys it. The Turkish government has recently started providing aid to refugees, making life much easier than it was before. Shireen gets three hundred lira a month to cover her daily expenses, and I’m still helping with her rent. But her husband remains in Sham, and her eldest son, Yasser, is still in a shelter in Heidelberg. As an unaccompanied minor, he receives extra resources, like language classes, and he’s also taking acting classes; he recently wrote and performed a play about his life. But whenever he talks to his mama, Yasser tells her how much he misses her and his baba and brothers.

  Maha’s husband recently suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak and paralyzed in one arm and one leg. He couldn’t eat for two weeks, and it took more than a month for them to get a wheelchair so that Maha could move him to the bathroom or out to the balcony to get some fresh air. He will need surgery to unblock a vein in his neck, and he will also need intensive rehabilitation to relearn how to speak and regain the use of his limbs. Maha is worried that these health resources will be impossible for him to get in Turkey. Now her eldest son, Adnan, is the only working member of the family, so I still help them financially too. Her daughter Barehan remains in Kurdistan and her son Mahmoud in a German shelter.

  Mohammad and his family live around the corner from me in Vancouver. The best news is that the kids are adapting well to life and school. Their eldest daughter, Heveen, plans to become a dentist one day. Both Heveen and Shergo are working part-time. Baby Sherwan’s
teeth are coming in now. When he turned two, we had a nice party for his birthday.

  “How old are you?” I asked him in English, holding up two fingers as a hint.

  He responded with baby talk.

  I said, “You’re two. Tell me how old you are.”

  It only took a few tries before he said, “Two!”

  He was thrilled to blow out the candles on his birthday cake. He loved it so much that he wanted the candles relit ten times, just so he could blow them out again and again. That boy brings me so much joy. When he calls out, “Auntie,” it is music to my ears. Such a smiling, happy little boy—I know it isn’t fair to him, but every time I see his beautiful, smiling face, I think about Alan.

  My father is still in the house at the top of the mountain in Damascus, living with his adopted daughter, Duaa, and her young son, Youssef, two Syrians in need whom my generous father could not turn away. But his heart aches for his own kids and grandkids. Being a grandfather has always given him a lot of joy. The war took that from him. It gives me some comfort to know that Baba still has Duaa and her young son living in the house. Youssef’s learning disability is a challenge, but he’s loving and innocent, always happy and laughing—a ray of sunshine every day.

  Baba and some of my Syrian friends have said that Damascus has been relatively peaceful recently. “The city is bustling again,” he says. “I miss you and I want you to come for a visit.” Other Syrians are returning to the country no matter what the situation: they’d rather die in their homeland than live and die as poor, starving refugees in a foreign land. I hope that my baba is right and that peace is finally taking hold.

  Duaa took a photo of Baba recently, sitting on his cushions under the picture of Mama. He looks gaunt and his eyes are sad and wounded. He’s our family’s precious old treasure, and I pray each day that he will survive, just as millions of others pray that their remaining treasures—their grandparents, their grandkids, their nephews and aunties—will survive to see the end of this war.