Margotlog: A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea
This is one of the most powerful accounts of hope, loss, and suffering that I've ever read. Melissa Flemming, the author, and also chief spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, spent hours interviewing Doaa Al Zanel, a young Syrian girl who grew up near the Jordanian border. As Doaa became enlightened to the oppressive regime, she confronted soldiers on the street. Her large, loving family suffered increasing poverty. It was 2011, and the army had taken control of her town. Curfews, power outages, water shortages, air raids, and violence created tension and danger.
Her father's employment as a barber became more and more problematic--his shop destroyed, his clientele terrorized, and citizens in general afraid to venture into the street. Finally after agonizing uncertainty, Doaa and her family decided to escape to Egypt. Here she fell in love with a Syrian freedom fighter Bassem, who'd also escaped from Syria. In the crowded hospitality of relatives, Doaa and her family found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. The Egyptian "welcome" deteriorated, and she and her family along with many other Syrians were terrorized and reduced to prejudice and extreme poverty. All she had saved from her betrothal gifts and jewelry became the only hope available to her and Bassem.
Selling her jewelry and other items, she and Bassem gathered the thousands of dollars necessary to buy their way onto the often leaky and unreliable ships that would cross the Mediterranear Sea and bring refugees to Italy. From there, she and Bassem hoped to reach Sweden where Syrian friends wrote that it was possible to make new lives.
Doaa and Bassem tried three times. Waiting on deserted beaches, shoved into claptrap busses, robbed, beaten, their promised escape soon loomed like a nightmare. But they persisted, returning to other pick-up points, hoping to push their way onto a boat. Finally, having had half their money stolen, but still holding enough to buy passage, they found themselves at sea. As if in a Shakespearean play, storms shook the leaky craft. Eventually it broke apart, scattering the refugees into the welling sea.
Bassem had bought Doaa a life ring. As she clung to that, bodies gasped, choked, and drowned around her. The waves of cold water were very high. Bassem tried swimming to stay warm. Bobbing all around Doaa were individuals in peril. One woman with a baby begged her to take the child and hold it on the life ring. Moments after Doaa settled the baby, the mother disappeared in the waves. Bassem himself, after trying to stay afloat, sent her his love and also sank. A father with an infant begged her to take it. Now Doaa became very cold, but she had the two babies to protect. She clung to her life ring.
When there remained perhaps only ten or twenty survivors from the broken ship, Greek sailors on a Merchant Marine vessel spotted them. For a time, afraid to come near or unable to believe there were live people in the water, the sailors eventually pulled Doaa and the babies, along with her cold, exhausted compatriots out of the sea. She was hysterical. One of the babies had died and the other's life was in peril, as was her own.
This is a story of unforgettable determination and heroism, but also a story of horrible loss and suffering. It brings to life what until now may have seemed far removed from us, in the middle of the middle of our large and essentially prosperous country. That is, until we ask ourselves, how many in the United States may not also be desperate enough to press hope into the shape of escape, yet have nowhere promising enough to go.
