Aliaa is now living in sanctuary after a brutal journey that nearly killed her. For more:
We sat outside of Aliaa’s small house, flicking through the pictures on my laptop, pointing at faces, exchanging gossip about friends – something we had done many times before. Normally, it would have been on a patio or terrace in Damascus, with the sound of the Muezzin in the distance, but these days it is in a quiet town in southern Germany. Aliaa has lived quite a life since we last met.
A friend who had a berth in another house knew of a private teacher and she made the connection. Over coffee, after about thirty minutes, Aliaa had explained more to me about the rudiments of the language than I had gained in two weeks in the classroom. I learned about the root structure, how the baffling letters changed shape depending on where they were in a word, but Aliaa also imbued a love of the language.
It was all one large field trip, often taking the Arabic out of the classroom and onto the old streets of Damascus. We were at weddings in Yarmouk , parties in Mezzeh, and we had our lessons everywhere. So difficult was the language, and yet so much fun was the life there, that I extended my time. But in my second year, life started to change around us.
Aliaa was at first reluctant to leave. Syria was her home, she was originally from the north, but Damascus was her place. “I’m staying here,” she would say, and more than once she said quietly, “Once this is all over it will be great, there will be a hafleh" using the Arabic word for party. I kept telling her she should leave, that there would not be a party, and that if the Assad regime fell, as we expected then, there would be fearsome bloodletting.
These were pictures that by then were familiar to me, to the world, of desperate men, women, and children clinging to rubber dinghies that sat low in the water. Except in this case they were friends of mine, reduced to a desperate gamble. “You don’t think about the risk you are taking,” Aliaa told me as we drank tea. “But the moment the smugglers said, ‘To the boats,’ is where the drama started.
I was back a few months later when friends from all over convened for a boisterous and entirely typical Syrian wedding. Aliaa and Mohamed were then married, loud Arabic music pumped out all night long as once again the Syrians taught the ajanib , myself included, how to dance the traditional Dabkeh, as we had done many times in Damascus, Homs, and Palmyra.
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