Her Routes and Roots: “To Decide What I Want,” YP’s Story
Her Routes and Roots is a series on journeys of displacement undergone and told by young women, focusing on their resilience and pivotal moments of strength. Stories are drawn from in-depth narrative interviews conducted during Her{connect}Her, a global voice program by Footage Foundation.
(YP is from Syria and currently in Greece. Her story has been edited for length and clarity. Content warning: physical violence).
YP: When the bombing started, and we saw people dying in front of us, just then, we recognized what war is and what it means. We lost safety, our schools… Then, one day, we decided to go to another village.
When we left, Daesh (ISIS) came to my village, and we lost everything. They made us leave our houses. I was 14, and they [tried to] force me to get married. They asked all the men to fight with them, but my father and all of us refused.
Then, my father arranged with someone, a smuggler, to help us get away from there by paying money.
When we arrived in Damascus… everything was dangerous there for us — to go to school or to go to work. We could not handle the economic situation, because everything was expensive, and we did not have that much money. Everybody inside the house had to work to live. So, a friend of my father from Dubai sent us money so we could leave.
We started our journey to leave with our uncle. We gave so much money. When we arrived in Aleppo, we tried five times to get to Turkey. When we finally arrived in Turkey, we stayed there for seven days, and then, we came to Chios, Greece… The people in charge put people in the camps. They told us, “Leave, go away, anywhere you want. We cannot put you anywhere. You are in charge of yourselves.”
My family and another family stayed out, but everyone else got into hotels, because it was very expensive for us. We stayed with the police, and we showed them the fragments in our father’s arm because of the bombing. Because of that, someone from the camp came and put us inside the camp. We were with another family. We were 12 people in one room. We stayed there for three months. Then, we went to Larissa, and it was like the desert there. There was nothing to buy; there were no stores.
Someone told us about this camp (Skaramagas). They sent us pictures, and we saw that it was better there. But, in order to come here, we had to go [outside the camp] and apply for our papers. In Larissa, if we wanted to go out of the camp to buy something, we had to tell the police what we were going to buy and why we were leaving. In Larissa, many Greek people refused refugees… We arrived in Skaramagas and have been here six months now.
When you arrive, you see that you cannot understand anyone and they cannot understand you. Then, I started school and they taught me how to speak a little English in the beginning, and from [an organization], I learned most of my English.
[In Syria], they stopped school. Every 10 days, we went once, so we stopped completely. [It has been] five years, plus one year here, so six years with no school.
Other girls my age are in school now. I am not. They are on their way to do what they want, to go to college, to study what they want. But, I am not in a place to decide what I want to do. This idea is very difficult for me.
We traveled all these dangerous roads, because we have a slight hope of a normal life. But, unfortunately we do not get this life. Why can’t we live this life?
-Y.P in her digital story
If I have my permanent papers, I can go to school in Greece. The schools here are not prepared to take you if you do not know the language already. They did not teach me grammar, the basics. They told me to learn the basics, and I can go back.
Watch the digital story YP created while participating in Her{connect}Her here.
“No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile — not even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who had said it.” (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope)
Series editing and art direction by Kathryn Weenig, Impact Consultant
Illustration and branding by Lillian Parry, Design Intern
Interview conducted by Dr. Kristen Ali Eglinton, Executive Director
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