Sisters of the War by Rania Abouzeid

Author:Rania Abouzeid [Abouzeid, Rania]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2020-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

In Turkey, there was no gunfire or nighttime shelling. No snipers real or imagined for Ruha to fear. She could play in the street again outside her temporary home, a fourth-floor walk-up the family shared with wounded Free Syrian Army relatives from Saraqeb. In Turkey, the parks were still playgrounds, not new cemeteries. Ruha hadn’t been on a swing or a slide for almost two years. Her mother, Manal, would sit on a bench and watch her children laugh and run and play without fear of something falling from the sky and exploding. Fifteen days came and went. Ruha’s baby sister, Tala, had pending medical appointments, but away from the war, the toddler’s strange hormonal condition seemed to be slowly clearing up on its own. Turkey’s playgrounds were nice, but they weren’t home. Ruha kept asking Baba when they would return to Saraqeb. She cried when she learned they were staying. “We came to treat Tala,” Manal told her eldest daughter, “but now the warplanes are as permanent as the birds in the air. We can’t take you back to that. We have to try and keep you safe.”

“Nobody dies before their time,” Ruha replied. Submitting to God’s will was a ready-made phrase intrinsic to her Muslim faith and her best argument for going back. It didn’t work on her parents. She’d cry when she spoke over Skype with her aunt Mariam, her grandmother Zahida, Uncle Mohammad and his wife, Noora. Her father, Maysaara, had bought the relatives in Saraqeb a satellite internet device. It was their only connection to the world outside their war zone. Their landline coverage did not extend beyond the limits of Idlib Province, disconnecting them from the rest of Syria, and the regular internet had been cut for years.

Mother’s Day 2013 was difficult for Ruha. It was usually her favorite day of the year. “We’d make sweets, give my grandmother gifts, we’d all play,” she remembered. “I love my grandmother. I know that I’m spoiled, that she spoiled me. When will I see her again?”

The sisters often reminisced about their family in Syria. “Each one of us had a favorite uncle,” Ruha once said. “Mine was Ayham, Alaa’s was Manhal.”

“And I had them all!” little Tala replied.

In Turkey, all the children developed a new habit. At bedtime now, the lights had to stay on. They feared being in the kind of pitch-black of that cornfield the night they sneaked across the border. Ruha and her siblings spent their days watching cartoons on an old laptop, or with crayons and coloring books. They made friends with the Turkish children in their building. They couldn’t converse, but somehow they understood one another the way children often do. Maysaara didn’t enroll them in school. “How can I put my children in school, as if life is normal, when there are children in Syria who can’t go to school?” he said. “My children are no better than those in Syria.” It was his form of survivor’s guilt.

Ruha was happy not to be in school, but the apartment was cramped with the recuperating Free Syrian Army fighters.

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