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…
