The last Christmas in Syria (2010) Photo: Hayro, membre de la rédaction vaudoise de Voix d’Exils

My last memories of the magic of Christmas festivities in Syria

The end of each October and the coming of November and December had always been a period of special significance to my family. It was the arrival of an event which we all had been eagerly waiting for: the informal declaration of the Christmas Season at our home in Syria!

My wife, but specially my two children were insisting every time that we started the preparations for Christmas season as early as November. I myself, although sensing the same excitement as the children, usually protested at first, alleging that it was a bit early. A protestation that was proving to be vain

As a matter of fact, they had every reason to be so enthusiastic. This was an opportunity for the family to escape from the everyday cares and worries of the year, into an imaginary wonderland of our own creation.

Preparations meant a lot of work to do. First, I had to manage to bring from the attic the big artificial Christmas tree and the many small and big boxes containing Christmas decorations and ornaments. Part of them were painstakingly made by my wife throughout the years, accessories like, small pretty lanterns, Nativity sets, wreaths of different shapes and materials, colorful Santas and so on. Each of them was bringing sweet and cherished memories from the past.

The last Christmas in Syria. Photo: Hayro, membre de la rédaction vaudoise de Voix d’Exils

The decoration of the tree was taking two, sometimes three days and it was mostly done by me, but certainly not far from the watchful eyes of the children who often kept pressing me with their never-ending demands “Dad, hang this there, replace this with that this does not fit here”.

In fact, it was necessary that all the ornaments, balls, bells, pinecones, vessels, ceramic angles, snowflakes, be well fitted and balanced on the tree. Then, before the finish, the gold and red Christmas lights had to be symmetrically placed and finally, the glittered star of Bethlehem was fixed at the top. With the first twinkling of the lights on the tree, I would sense the eyes of children shining with ecstasy and joy.

Then, it was the turn of my wife to put the final touch. She added, with great love and care, different accessories to every room as well as balconies.

Even the books in the library and the paintings on the walls had their share of the small pretty ornaments. Nonetheless, it couldn’t be complete without the charming lyrics of Bing Crosby’s album “White Christmas” that was reverberating through the house into filling the air with cheers and warmth.

By the end of November, the house was dressing up for Christmas and this was immediately followed by the shopping sprees. Soon the refrigerators would overflow with various kinds of exotic produces and food that showed up only in December, and the house would smell strong spices and herbs bringing out the flavor of the season. The convivial atmosphere would reach a crescendo during the period between Christmas and the New Year’s Eve, where all the extended family members and in-laws would gather to feast and rejoice until the early hours of the morning.

This much cherished family tradition went on until 2010. That was my last Christmas in my country Syria, one year before the outbreak of the vicious circle of the war that has shattered homes, split families and wrecked all aspect of life.

Now, Christmas is approaching, it is already very cold. I am walking in the city center of Lausanne, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Store windows along the street “Rue Saint-Laurent” have Christmas dressings. Shoppers hustle and bustle everywhere. Not very far, at St. Francoise square, pop up cabins offer hot chocolate drink and roasted chestnuts. Few meters away I hear a street music-band caroling:

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas just like the ones I used to know”

A song that immediately touches a strong nostalgic chord in my heart.

Hayrenik Dono

Membre de la réduction vaudoise de Voix d ‘Exils

la ville de Qamishili. Source: page Facebook de Qamishili.

An important part of my job as a legal translator in my city Qamishli, situated in north-eastern Syria on the border with Turkey, was working with asylum-seekers and refugees, especially Iraqis who had fled their country following the American invasion in 2003 and wanted to find refuge in the asylum countries. 

I was preparing their dossiers: translating the documents, fixing appointments with the embassies, filling the formulas etc. Hundreds of families came to my office, each had an extremely painful story of deportation, persecution and displacement. It was very distressing to hear the narratives of these unfortunate people, who once had lived a fairly stable and comfortable life, then all of a sudden their world turned upside down and having lost everything they found themselves homeless refugees in other countries.

Being myself a descendant of a refugee family, their stories were not totally strange to me. My grandfather was the only survivor of an extended family massacred during the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman government against the Armenians and the other Christians of Turkey during and after the World War I. In 1920, like many of his compatriots, my grandfather could only survive by miracle, traversing on foot the enormous territory separating his ancestral village situated in the province of Diyarbakır in southeaster Turkey and the Syrian border town of Ras al Ayn. Therefore, tales of displacement and mass killing had always haunted my memory since I was a child.

Nevertheless, putting myself then in the shoes of the Iraqi refugees, I could not help thinking of what might happen to me and my family had we experienced the same devastating war in Syria? The mere thought of it was terrifying and nightmarish.

But, what I then thought as something incredible soon became a reality in 2011. The civil war started in Syria and the Pandora box, with all the evils of the world, was opened widely. This time, the troubled faces of my countrymen started streaming into my office, carrying alongside their precious documents, gruesome stories of kidnappings, lootings and killings as the entire security system in the country collapsed, the vital services completely crumpled and considerable territories surrounding the city fell into the hands of Daesh ISIS.

Ironically, the grandchildren of the refugees who one hundred years ago had founded this beautiful frontier city as a safe haven from persecution, were now frantically fleeing from the impending apocalyptic devastation and killing, by seeking refuge in Sweden, Germany and other European countries.

The lights of the lively, multi-ethnic, prosperous city of Qamishli suddenly dimmed, the buzzing activities died down and the streets became deserted and lifeless.

Another sad story of the rise and fall of a city in the endless game of the thrones.

DONO Hayrenik

Membre de la redaction vaudoise de Voix d’Exils

Infos:

Version française de l’article parue le 21.09.2016 sur voixdexils.ch

« The cries of death » by the syrian painter Eissa Mousa.

At the beginning, she turned the television up so her child would not hear the gunshots and explosives nearby. She trained her child to close his nose and stop breathing as they passed by the piles of garbage in their district. When there were scenes of torture, she pointed out to a far area in the opposite direction saying: “there are swings there ». As gunshots became closer, she hugged her child putting her hands around his ears. As their neighbor’s house was destroyed and their flesh was spread everywhere, she covered her child’s eyes with her hands. When she was taking her child out of the wreckage, his eyes, his ears, his nose, his mouth and his hands were all open, and there was no need to close them anymore. She opened her mouth and did a loud scream, so everybody all around the world could hear her, but it was so loud that they needed to close their ears.

Ibrahim Rami

Membre de la rédaction neuchâteloise de Voix d’Exils

Photo du camp de Yarmouk. Dr Moawia.

Speaking with you as Dr. Mohawia, I’m a specialist in Urology and genitourinary disorders since April 2012. I live in Yarmouk camp, once the largest community market in Syria. It’s in the capital Damascus and was built in 1951 as a camp for Palestinian refugees. 5 years ago, about half a million people lived in it. Now, there are only a few thousand, as most of its inhabitants moved to neighboring areas or left the country. Yarmouk camp has been under total siege from the 15 of July 2013 till this date. These conditions oblige me to work as a general practitioner, treating people with diseases other than urological ones. What I’m trying to do with this presentation is to brief you with an overview of the situation here, concentrating on medical aspects.

I’m often asked, what exactly do you need? I once wrote, trying to answer the question as briefly as possible, we need everything to be anything! No one in Yarmouk, including me of course, has the least basic right as a human being. Am I talking about the right to liberty? Freedom of speech? Freedom of belief? Maybe, but I am talking basically about food, about survival. What is called hunger, we live as starvation. One hundred and seventy seven people died of starvation during the last two months of 2013 and the first two months of 2014. Most of them were elderlies with chronic disorders like diabetes mellitus and hypertension, or infants, especially new borns who may have a birth weight of no more than 4 pounds (1.8 kg) and whose mothers suffer from malnutrition, preventing them from getting enough quantities of natural milk. Especially since there was, and is still, a severe deficiency in powdered milk. There are those who died of hunger. But all the habitants in here are affected by starvation in all aspects of their health. For weeks their meals may not be more than spiced water and blends that cause many cases of acute renal failure.

To make things worse, water supplies have been cut off for 9 months now. People are forced to drink from wells, which are polluted by sewage. This is causing daily cases of intestinal infections, with protozoaires like entamoeba, histolytica and giardia lamblia. Severe diarrhea worsens existing malnutrition. In addition, oxalate, which this water is rich with, is causing urinary stones. These diseases and others are a real challenge due to severe deficiency in medication.

Photo de l’unique hôpital qui fonctionne encore à Yarmouk. Photo: Dr Moawia.

On the subject of diseases, people are suffering from many chronic and infectious diseases. On the top of the list of chronic ones, we found diabetes mellitus and hypertension. Patients, with almost no treatment for long periods, develop well-known complications of these disorders such as acido cetose, diabetic feet, angaina angor, cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular accidents. Starvation also causes episodes of severe hypoglycemia that leads to many deaths. I still remember a man in his fifties who we lost because of hypoglycemia. If we had had dextrose syrup, we would have saved him. But, this proved to be a third conditional “if” as we had to watch him dying before our eyes. The unavailability of many basic laboratory and radiology investigations hinders us from diagnosing many diseases and so we stand disabled in front of them. Patients with cancers can’t get their chemo and radiotherapies. Abu Raid was one of them. A seventy year old man who had a prostate carcinoma with pulmonary and vertebral metastasis; he suffered severed pains with dyspnea, deep vein thrombosis and cachexie. After months of symptomatic treatments, and psychological support, we were able to send him to Jordan. Just to die there, in a hospital in Aman, 5 days after admission. While chronic diseases are limited to some people, everyone here is prone to infections.

I’m going to mention some numbers but it’s to be clear that theses are only the cases which have been diagnosed by me since May 2014, as I’ve examined about thirty seven hundred patients since then. I’ve diagnosed seventy-eight communicable cases of typhoid fever. The first of them was on the 12 of July 2014. 20 cases of pertussis tuberculosis, poliomyelitis and three hundred cases of infectious hepatitis A. Many of the victims were children. As it might be expected from unique and extreme conditions like this, the mind is not safe from disorders that invade the body. The most prevalent diseases in Yarmouk camp are psychological ones. Neuroses are the star of the movie. The most common cases of are major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, phobias and panic attacks. But it (I mean neuroses) may be signs of psychosis.

Amal is a 23 year old young woman, her name means Hope, Esperanza, Nadejna, and it’s Elpius, or the Spirit of hope that we found in the bottom of Pandora’s Jar according to the Greek myth. She came with her mother to my office the first time on the 4 of June 2014. She spent most of the 20 minutes of the meeting speaking with the sphygmomanometer that was on my desk. Nothing in her medical history, she’s a lover of painting and English language, suggested that she would one day develop visual and auditory hallucinations, a distorted perception of reality and acute mood fluctuations. I had to treat her with Risperidone, a schizophrenic drug, for six months, so that she could get herself back. She’s much better now, albeit not completely normal.

Photo de l’unique hôpital qui fonctionne encore à Yarmouk. Photo: Dr Moawia

I’m sorry I’m taking a long time, but I ask your permission to allow me to sum up what we need medically. First of all, we need qualified staff as I’m almost the only physician here and most workers are volunteers. In Yarmouk camp they are used to doctors who practice fields they didn’t originally study. We need surgeons and physicians from all specialisms. Second, medication of all sorts: antibiotics, painkillers, cardiopulmonary drugs, steroidal and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, nutritional complements, and in brief, all drugs. Third, vaccines, as the camp still sees new births and there are hundred of children in here. Although some organizations provide vaccination campaigns from time to time, this is hardly enough. Fourth, power supplies. Electricity has been cut off for 2 years now. We depend on generators, run with poor and expensive fuel, derived from plastic. We can’t supply the place I work in with electricity more than 3 hours per day. We have to run devices and accomplish all our duties during these hours. Everything to be anything, as I said earlier. I hope that the image is as clear as possible. I thank you very much for the time you have given me, on behalf of me and all the people here. Thank you again.

Dr. Mohawia

The only Doctor of Yarmouk camp, Syria

Amar: a child from Yarmouk wounded three times

Amar: l’enfant de Yarmouk blessé à trois reprises.

Children are particularly the victims of abuses that occur in the Yarmouk camp. This is the story of Ammar Alaa Akla, a 4 year old child. He was wounded three times in the Yarmouk camp. The first time, it was at the bones of the left hand by shrapnel from a shell, three operations have failed. The second time, a sniper shot him in the knee. And the third time, a piece of shrapnel hit his left foot. In addition to operations, Ammar needs today expensive medicines, but his family is short of funds.

Amar: l’enfant de Yarmouk blessé à trois reprises

Amar: l’enfant de Yarmouk blessé à trois reprises

Photographer: Niraz Saied
Graphic artist: Moaz Sabbagh

While you are reading these words, a blockade by the Syrian regime on the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in the south of Damascus, still goes on.

For more than 500 days, the Syrian regime has been blocking food, electricity and medicines for the Yarmouk camp. For more than 100 days, water is no more distributed. This situation is increasing the continuous suffering of more than 20,000 civilians with no hope of it ending.

More than 170 people have already died, including children according to Yarmouk News. Children of this siege are living in the worst nightmare imaginable. They no longer have the luxury of playing in the streets. Now their days are consumed with the fear of being targeted with bombs.

We should not forget that millions of Syrian children live in the besieged area as well as in refugee camps in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. Their childhood is being wasted. They have no hope for the future, nor a chance to relive their childhood the way it should have been.

These posters are letters from children who live in the Yarmouk refugee camp.

The pictures below were taken by the photographer Niraz Saied, who won the 2014 Youth Wins UNRWA / EU Photography Competition and Moaz Sabbagh is the author of the posters.

Moaz Sabbagh

Membre de la rédaction valaisanne de Voix d’Exils

Photographer: Niraz Saied.
Graphic artist: Moaz Sabbagh

Photographer: Niraz Saied
Graphic artist: Moaz Sabbagh

Photographer: Niraz Saied.
Graphic artist: Moaz Sabbagh