Sarah Rahim, a Syrian student at Watertown High School, feels very closely connected to Syria. This is because both of her parents were born and raised there, and she visited Syria a lot as a child, usually every other summer. All of her extended family still lives in Syria, except for one of her aunts. “I feel that I can say it’s my country,” says Sarah.
When asked how the uprising started, Sarah says that children wrote the word “freedom” on the walls of their school and the Syrian government blew up. Government officials physically tore out the nails of these small, innocent children - and this isn’t the worst thing that’s happened. Soldiers will steal girls and young women and call the father saying that if they want their daughters back they have to pay a massive amount of money.
Sarah retells a story of a family friend in Syria: “there were seven people in the house and soldiers came in and stabbed them, killing them, while they were sleeping.” When Sarah talks to her family, they’ll say things like “another bomb just went off and ground shook – we felt it.”
What’s happening in Syria is a tragedy, and it needs to be stopped. Sarah says that every morning she wakes up and hopes that it was all just some terrible nightmare, but every day she has to face the fact that it’s reality. Sarah says that because of everything that’s happened in Syria, she looks at the word differently and she feels more thankful for what she has. “I feel the need to help people because I realize that people have it so much worse than I do… It made me wake up to reality. It’s gotten me more depressed; I don’t show it at school.”
Sarah stays on Face Book constantly, watching the little green dots next to her family members’ names. If the green shows up, her family is safe and alive. Then, the Syrian government shut down the Internet and Sarah felt her world come crashing down. “I couldn’t handle it,” she says, “I live in [the] fear that I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Looking back, I walked the streets; I’ve gone to the stores that they’re bombing. It’s my country and I can’t go back there anymore. It’s not going to be the same – not now and now when [Bashar Al-Assad] is gone – and that scares me so much.”
Sarah says that when she told her cousin, who lives in Syria, about the recent shooting in Connecticut, her cousin wondered why that was getting more publicity than Syria. “The blood in Syria is as common as water [and] it’s like no one even cares,” Sarah says, almost in tears.
Sarah’s eyes light up when she talks about the old Syria, the one that she loves to remember, and the United States needs to wake up and bring that Syria back – for Sarah and all of the citizens of Syria. American reporters aren’t allowed in Syria, so the U.S. can’t spread the word through the media, but the people of our country can talk about it. Fundraisers are happening everywhere, you just have to open your eyes to it – food drives, coat drives, and raising money all help more than we might think. There are insane amounts of protests in Washington D.C., Boston, and other big cities around the country. It’s time to wake up and get to work.
Click here to view a slideshow about Syria from NBC.
Map of Syria and bordering countries.
Click here to view a video of children in Syria telling "horror stories" of what's happening to them and their families.
No comments:
Post a Comment