write story :- [Two friend - one married, other unmarried - boat hits a rock - sinks - only one wooden plank - both hold it to save their lives - plank can support only one - unmarried friend leaves - drowns - the surviving friend supports the other's family]
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I had never been on a boat before.
When I was 12, I was on holiday with my cousins, and one of them pushed me into a swimming pool. I’ve been terrified of water ever since. My hometown, Raqqa, in Syria, did not have many swimming pools, and it’s pretty unusual for children to learn how to swim. Sometimes we would go to the lake at Ja’aber castle near Raqqa with my family on weekends or to Lattakia on the coast for holidays, but I would never try to swim. I always stayed near the shore.
I had made the decision to try to leave Syria but didn’t have much of a plan of where to go or how to get there. My father wasn’t keen, but in the end so many people we knew had left that we somehow got used to the idea. I had thought of going to the UK because I could speak English well and knew something of the country, but it seemed so far away. Most of my information came from other Syrians who were also planning to leave for Europe. They knew how to prepare for the sea crossing and said that you could call the coast guard to come and pick you up.
The people who really knew how to get to Europe were the men who started working as smugglers. They were said to know all the best routes to get across the Syrian border to Turkey, across Turkey to the coast, and then on to Greece or Italy by boat. I was told that if you paid these smugglers, they could get you all the way there. I knew it involved crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
If you’ve never had to find a people smuggler, you might think they are quite hard to find. I thought so. But once you start asking, you’d be surprised how many there are. Talking about leaving and how to do it had become a common topic in Syria, especially in border towns like Kobane. I heard a guy in a bakery shop in Kobane talking about a woman who had left, so I asked him if he knew someone that could get me over the border. He gave me the name of Mohammed Khoja.
The Turkish border was a half-hour walk from Kobane. Friends told me that in the past two or three years, Turkey had built very high fences with barbed wire to keep Syrians out and had soldiers, with guns, patrolling the border.
When I first called Mohammed, he said he would pay one border guard so that I could cross safely. I had no way of knowing if he was telling the truth, if he really would pay the border guard. But I had already decided to put my soul in his hands, and it seemed a less painful choice than continuing to live with the risk of being killed at knifepoint or buried under rubble in Kobane. That is what I thought.
I remember Mohammed now. He didn’t look like a bad person — certainly not how I expected a people smuggler to look. Like me, he was a Syrian Kurd, and he brought his son with him when he met me, so he seemed nice. Normal, somehow. As if taking a large amount of money from desperate people was the most normal job in the world.
He said he would help 10 people cross into Turkey and that he charged $300 per person to cross this narrow no-man’s land.
Just before I left Kobane, I had a bit of a lucky break. When I went to my aunt’s house, a Norwegian journalist named Anders Hammer was there interviewing my cousin. His translator was struggling a little, so I jumped in instead, and when he asked if I was planning to leave Syria, I told him my plan. I wanted to document the whole journey to Europe on my phone, I said.
But Anders had a better idea — he gave me a small GoPro video camera with about four hours of recording time and spent several days teaching me how to use it. Eventually Anders directed and produced the whole film, so we were able to document the whole trip.
I was often asked during the journey why I was filming everything. I always said the same thing: The real story about escaping a war zone needs to be told by the people who have done it. All of us have the right to tell our own stories. They should come from us.
Much of the coverage I saw on TV or on social media misrepresented us. They called refugees “migrants” — as if we had a choice, as if we were moving just to try to make some money or scrounge some benefits.
Because calling us “migrants” would make the people watching feel better about not helping us and lessen their responsibility toward us as individuals. The media represented us as having a choice, when we really had no choice.
So I wanted to tell my own story, to be the narrator of my own escape. Coming to Europe was not a dream that came true; it was about me finding a way to survive and live with dignity.
It took four attempts, over the course of a month, to get into Turkey.