by Dean Hughes
“That’s my corner. I told you that a long time ago.” Both boys laughed. Hadi was reminded again that he could joke about it now, but Malek was there every day still listening to drivers insult him. “So how is your family doing?” Hadi asked. “Are you managing all right?”
“Well… not really. Emil and Klara have gotten a little help for us—some food and clothing. And sometimes I walk over to see Garo and he sells me fruits and vegetables cheap, the way he always did for you. But I don’t know about rent this next month. My father has been… I don’t know, upset. He put a lot of hope in finding work, and it just hasn’t happened so far. My brothers and I are bringing in more than we did in the winter, but with Kamal taking a lot of what we earn, it’s just not enough to live on.”
The boys were silent for a time, but then Malek smiled. “At least I’m still handsome.”
“Yes,” Hadi said. “And smart. Almost as smart as I am.”
“Oh, so now that you’re in school, you think you’re smarter than me.”
“I certainly do. Miss Saad tells me every day how fast I learn.”
“But if she saw me, she would fall in love with me. She couldn’t help it.”
“She’s about forty years old. So I don’t think so.”
“That doesn’t matter. All women fall in love with me.”
“I guess I’m lucky,” Hadi said. “Girls don’t pay any attention to me.”
“Actually, you look good. It seems like you’ve grown, and it’s only been a month or so since I saw you last.”
“I’m eating better food,” Hadi said. “And Mama said I’m standing up straighter. I guess that might be right.” But Hadi knew he had to do more than joke with Malek. He needed to encourage him. “I’ll tell you the truth, Malek,” he said. “You’re still the smartest guy I know. And you’re going to do great things in your life. I still know you will.”
Malek nodded a couple of times. “I keep telling myself that,” he said. “I hope it will happen.”
But he didn’t sound confident, and that worried Hadi. “I thought nothing would ever change for me,” Hadi said, “and you kept telling me not to think that way. I really believe things will change for you, too. You have to believe that.”
“I know. I’m trying.” He raised his head higher, and Hadi could see that he didn’t want to let himself give up. “I’m still reading those engineering books, and at least my father’s been willing to help me understand them. He says I’ll do well if… or when I get a chance to go to a university.”
“That’s right. And I hope we can get together once in a while now. I keep reading my book, but I still don’t understand most of it. You always made more sense of it. It would be great to read some chapters together and then talk about the ideas.”
“So what are you thinking now?” Malek asked. “Do you still want to have a shop of your own?”
“A bookstore, and I want to read every book before I sell it.” He laughed. “But how can we do it, Malek? How can you become an engineer, and how can I open a bookstore? Mona, the woman who helped us get this apartment, told me that we can never get jobs in Lebanon—not good jobs—even if we go to school.”
“I don’t know. I still think things will change. The war in Syria has to end someday, and engineers will be needed to help rebuild everything. And people will read books again.”
“It’s nice to think that will happen,” Hadi said.
Malek was wearing a shirt with a picture of a bottle of Pepsi-Cola on the front—no doubt something given him by a charity organization. He crossed his arms over that picture now, and he shut his eyes. “We have to keep hoping, that’s all,” he said. “And do everything we can for ourselves. We can’t always depend on other people to make things better for us.”
That sounded right to Hadi, but it was Garo and the Risers—and Mona—who had pulled his family out of the trap they had been caught in. “Let’s remember what we’ve talked about,” Hadi said. “Let’s help each other, and then, if we become what we want to be, we’ll help other people—people like us.”
“Sure. It would be good if we could do that.”
“I know we can’t solve all the problems in the world, but if we helped a few people, and they helped a few, that’s at least moving things in the right direction.”
Malek was nodding. “Sure. That’s right.”
“I need to help you stay in your apartment. That’s what you need right now.”
“But that’s not something you can do, Hadi. You can’t worry about it.”
“I’m going to do something. I’m just trying to figure out what it is.”
Malek was looking down again, and Hadi thought he knew what he was thinking—that Hadi was only talking, that there was really nothing he could actually do. “I’m just glad things are going better for you now, Hadi. Maybe, before long, things will get better for me, too.”
But this struck Hadi hard. It was like the two of them had been drowning together, and someone had pulled Hadi out of the water and left Malek behind, about to go under. Hadi had to pull Malek up now. Somehow. So Hadi said, “We promised, Malek. I’ll think of something.”
* * *
After Malek left that afternoon, Hadi couldn’t stop thinking about their conversation. Malek was laughing again by the time he left, and Hadi had laughed with him, but all evening a picture kept coming back to Hadi’s mind: Malek sitting with his head down, his voice more than his words admitting that he was discouraged.
Hadi kept asking himself what he could do, and mostly he thought about the Risers and how they might be able to find help from a charity organization. But that could take months—or might not ever happen. Hadi needed to do something—do something himself. He had known for a while what it might be, but it seemed far too little to help very much, and it was the last thing he wanted to do. It was not until he was sitting in school the next day, enjoying a book—and thinking again of Malek back on the corner—that he knew he had to do it. Maybe others could help more, but Hadi had to do what he knew how to do.
After school, Hadi walked to a little market down the street from where he lived. He had seen Chiclets for sale there and had laughed to think of what they had once meant to him. But today he asked the manager if he could get a discount if he bought a whole carton of them. He bargained a little, and he got a good price. He still had a bit of money left over from the cash he had hidden away in his shoe before he had left Beirut, and it didn’t seem likely his family would need it now. He bought the carton, walked to a bus stop, and rode a bus into the busy part of Jounieh. When he spotted a “flower tree” thickly laden with pink blossoms, he thought it was a sign, and he got off the bus at the next corner.
Hadi stood at the corner and waited for the cars to stop at the streetlight. Then he walked to the driver’s side of the first car. He showed the driver his boxes of Chiclets. The driver wouldn’t look at him, so Hadi walked to the next car, and the next, and then on up the line. No one bought his gum at first, but he kept trying for a couple of hours, and he earned a little money. His plan was to work every afternoon and into the evening and save all he could before the end of the month. And then he would find a way to get the money to Malek.
He would keep his promise, the same as he knew Malek would. It felt to him as though he had found at least a small way to give of himself.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My wife, Kathy, and I lived in Beirut for a year and a half, from 2016 to late 2017. As part of a humanitarian effort, we taught free English classes. The majority of our students were refugees from Syria or Iraq. While many think of refugees as living in camps, only a small percentage of refugees in Lebanon are housed in the tent cities often used in other countries. The majority receive minimal help from nongovernmental organizations and primarily rely on whatever jobs they can find—usually low-paying menial work—or on such makeshift enterprises as selling trinkets on the streets.
Not far from our apartment, at a major intersection, we saw o
ne such boy on the corner selling Chiclets virtually every day, no matter the weather. We wondered what his story was, but he couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t speak Arabic. We bought gum from the boy every time he approached our car, and he always thanked us and blessed us. We began to wonder about his life, whether he went to school and whether he had a family.
Eventually, through a translator, I was able to interview the boy (I won’t use his name), who was thirteen at the time, but he said he had started selling on the street when he was eleven. We knew by then that many of these street children were younger than he was. I learned, by talking to the boy, the outline of his history, but this book is not his story. It’s my imagination of such a life, based on what he told me and what I learned through research. Most refugees in Beirut, like this boy, are people who lost everything to the wars in their nations but who are amazingly resilient. It was from them we learned the word “inshallah.” It was also their resilience that became my inspiration to write Displaced.
Lebanon is a beautiful little Mediterranean country, full of wonderful people. They never stopped surprising us with their hospitality. It’s next to impossible to enter a Lebanese home without being fed. And what excellent food it is! One of my fears is that readers of Displaced will come away with the wrong impression of the many welcoming, loving people we met in Beirut.
And yet Lebanon is a complicated place, with a great mixture of people from different cultures, religions, and ethnic backgrounds. The country has outlasted its own fifteen-year civil war and has worked to rebuild itself. More recently, since the Syrian war began, Lebanon has accepted approximately a million and a half Syrian refugees into their tiny country, and that influx has become almost overwhelming. About a third of the people living in Lebanon have fled from other countries, and while NGOs, churches, and charity organizations from all over the world have tried to help, budgets of all these organizations have tightened, and emigration for Syrians to other lands has been mostly closed off. Poverty among the refugees is clearly evident, and it’s painful to see. At the same time, Lebanese feel the loss of a once thriving economy that inspired the name “Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East.” It’s not surprising that some of the Lebanese people resent the influx of refugees, but it’s also no wonder that those refugees feel helpless in the face of their reality.
We observed some local people venting their frustration on the children who approached their cars. But most did not. Still, a few insults a day to children caught in such a difficult situation is surely heartbreaking. And this is the reality I hoped to convey in the stories of my fictional characters: Hadi and Malek.
As Americans, Kathy and I always knew that we were understanding the complexities of the Middle East in only a superficial way. But we know what we experienced in our English classes: Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis—people of many faith traditions—all sitting down together, laughing and talking and enjoying one another. We met in our classes skilled craftsmen, laborers, dentists, professors, teachers, engineers, university students, computer specialists—people of every background. But as refugees, they had no opportunity to work in their chosen careers. They had been waiting months, and often years, to receive the chance to emigrate, but only a few nations have left their doors open—slightly—and the options for Syrians have almost disappeared.
All our students were trying to improve their circumstances. We learned, as we have experienced before in many places: Governments may contend, but people can almost always find common ground and understanding. We were always moved by the gratefulness our students expressed in spite of their circumstances.
Those who found their way to our classes had often brought some savings with them to Lebanon, or they had obtained some sort of menial work. They could find the time, mostly in the evenings, to take our classes. But the poor who have immigrated to Lebanon often live in slums, or in makeshift hovels, and they try to survive in circumstances too overwhelming to overcome on their own. We came away feeling that the world simply must not forget them.
At the beginning of this book, I quoted Patrick Kearon. He is an international leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the organization that asked us to offer humanitarian help in Lebanon. Let me remind you of his words again, but in a larger context:
Being a refugee may be a defining moment in the lives of those who are refugees, but being a refugee does not define them. Like countless thousands before them, this will be a period—we hope a short period—in their lives. Some of them will go on to be Nobel laureates, public servants, physicians, scientists, musicians, artists, religious leaders, and contributors in other fields. Indeed, many of them were these things before they lost everything. This moment does not define them, but our response will help define us.
Patrick Kearon also spoke at a meeting of faith leaders at a European Union summit in Brussels in 2016. He said:
We have learned that, for our own people, their attitudes toward refugees have been determined by the way they have reached out to them. When you interact with and help somebody, you grow to love them, and that is what has happened.
That is also what happened to us. The circumstances for many refugees are far too dire for anyone to expect them to find a path back to solvency entirely on their own. What we learned, however, is that when we offered a bit of help, their resilience and faith blossomed. They began to hope. The worst thing we can do is to fear them as “the other” and turn our backs on them.
Kathy and I think often of the boy on the street we watched for eighteen months, and we wonder what is happening to him now as the refugee crisis grows only worse. Surely he deserves a chance at an education and a path to a better life.
I wrote the book, but Kathy has collaborated with me at every stage of its progress, and I thank her for her support as well as her unguarded critiques and corrections. I also appreciate the help and guidance I have received from my editor at Atheneum, Alexa Pastor, who has lovingly but not always tenderly advised me toward better writing and a better book. And finally, thanks to authenticity reader Serene Dardari, who helped me with my Arabic and some of the details about Beirut.
More from the Author
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Search and Destroy
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Missing in Action
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DEAN HUGHES is the author of more than eighty books for young readers, including Search and Destroy, Four-Four-Two, the popular sports series Angel Park All-Stars, the Scrappers series, the Nutty series, and the widely acclaimed companion novels Family Pose and Team Picture. His novel Soldier Boys was selected for the 2001 New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age list. Dean Hughes and his wife, Kathleen, have three children and nine grandchildren. They live in Midway, Utah.
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ALSO BY DEAN HUGHES
FOUR-FOUR-TWO
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SOLDIER BOYS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division • 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 • www.SimonandSchuster.com • This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. • Text copyright © 2020 by Dean Hughes • Jacket illustration copyright © 2020 by Darren Hopes • All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. • Atheneum logo is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. • For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. • The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring autho
rs to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. • Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data • Names: Hughes, Dean, 1943– author. • Title: Displaced / Dean Hughes. • Description: First edition. | New York : Atheneum, [2020] | Audience: Ages 12 Up. | Audience: Grades 7–9. | Summary: Toma and Malek, two thirteen-year-old Syrian children living in Beirut, struggle to provide for their families in a country that can be hostile against refugees like them, but they maintain hope that there is a way out of their seemingly impossible situation. • Identifiers: LCCN 2020012974 | ISBN 9781534452329 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534452343 (eBook) • Subjects: CYAC: Refugees—Fiction. | Syrians—Lebanon—Fiction. | Lebanon—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Belonging (Social psychology)—Fiction. • Classification: LCC PZ7.H87312 Di 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 • LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012974