Watanili: Syrians Rebuilding the Idea of Home From the Turkish Border
At the far end of a dusty road veering off Reyhanli’s main boulevard, a large Turkish flag perches over the gates of a schoolyard filled with the din of young voices singing in Arabic. Aligned in their rows, hundreds of students are alternating between popular children songs and patriotic anthems from Syria.
Watanili, ‘my homeland is mine’
The morning bell rings — though instead of sending the pupils off to their lessons, today signals the start of a fresh round of activities with Watanili, a grassroots NGO armed with a creative agenda. Established in May 2014 by Yara Tlass, a young Syrian MBA graduate based in Dubai, Watanili implements art therapy and educational programs for displaced Syrian children in Southern Turkey and Northern Syria. Meaning ‘my homeland is mine’ in Arabic, Watanili’s latest interventions in Aleppo and Reyhanli point to the scope of needs on both sides of the border. Under difficult conditions, a project called Underground Aleppo Activities has been providing two recreational events every week to children, including a very popular mobile cinema. Since September, over 700 children have been reached and granted moments of reprieve from the surrounding destruction. At the other end of the well-trodden road to exile — the Turkish border — Watanili has set up base in a newly acquired space that will serve as a learning center.
Juggling her laptop and a pile of t-shirts to hand out to the team of volunteers who just landed in Reyhanli, Watanili’s Damascus-born founder and executive director Yara talks about leaving the start-up business world when the Syrian revolution broke out. A recent 26-year old graduate in Paris at the time, she and a group of friends felt compelled to shed light on the civilian cost of the conflict. ‘’When things started becoming really messy and I found myself being carried away by the news, I decided to start Watanili. At first, our idea was to promote advocacy through the media, and we produced documentary videos about refugees and life inside Syria. We later expanded into a different direction, with a heavier emphasis on empowering young people.’’ Given the catastrophic proportion of Syrian children missing out on formal education for over four years, Watanili remodeled itself into a non-profit providing hands-on educational support on the ground.
The five-day Watanili workshop in Reyhanli took place at the Al-Salaam School, a temporary education center that follows the modified Syrian curriculum and stands out for its culturally syncretic, emotionally sensitive philosophy of education. Operated by the Canadian NGO Syrian Kids Foundation, the school was the brainchild of Quebec-based Hazar Mahayni to provide ‘’a Canadian quality of education with Syrian values.’’ In 2012, it was the first school to open for Syrians in Reyhanli, back when it was a small town with one street. Hazar recalls their apprehensive beginnings: ‘’On the first day of school we expected only 300 students to show up for registration, but 900 came. All the Syrians in Reyhanli were here!’’ The students looked insecure and depressed, she added, and reenacted demonstrations during every recess period. ‘’We’ve come a long ways from that. We practice the rules of nonviolence. It’s not useful for the teachers and students to stay in the war mindset; I want the children to forget everything that’s happening outside school. Today we have 1,600 pupils — most of whom don’t want to leave at the end of the day.’’
During the week the Watanili volunteers took over, small clusters of students could be seen in every corner of the school immersed in handiwork. In one classroom, the ‘Matisse’ team was making paper cut-outs, the exploratory medium of expression that the French artist made famous. In an intimate space upstairs, another group was learning how to create sewing patterns. Meanwhile out in the playground, teenage girls were lying on the ground dramatically enacting short skits for the theater workshop.
Dashing through the school’s olive tree garden and small animal farm, photography students were engrossed in practicing their composition skills on digital cameras. At the end of the week, it was their turn to get in front of the lens for a fantasy portrait-taking session, decked out in makeshift costumes impersonating famous characters.
A border predicament
Situated just five kilometers from the busiest Turkish-Syrian border crossing, Reyhanli offers a prime window into Turkey’s fraught entanglement with the war to its south. Straddling two countries, frontier towns bear a double marginality. Lingering on the peripheries of the state and serving as the unregulated crossroads with another, places like Reyhanli have the maligned tendency to be identified as neither one thing or the other.
While the current war in Syria made border populations harder to pin down, the region’s geographical ambivalence goes back to a historical border dispute. Official Syrian maps still show Reyhanli, in the Hatay Province, as belonging to Syria despite the demarcation of the international border in 1938. Holding the view that the land was illegally ceded to Turkey by France at the partition of the Ottoman Empire, Syria in fact never formally relinquished sovereignty over it.
The porous line has been recast into the limelight in recent years, as the landscape incurred new changes. In less than two years after the start of the war, Reyhanli’s small town population doubled to 150,000. Arabic can be heard everywhere. Wounded men fill the sidewalks, gingerly learning to walk again with new limbs, or missing limbs. Children sell tissues and matté tea to passing cars, while community workers try to offer them an alternative to the streets. Flows of people and goods between Syria and Turkey had once been dynamic, but tensions in Reyhanli started flaring over rising rents, strained public services, and a deadly downtown car bombing blamed on Turkey’s political involvement in Syria. Throughout Turkey’s Southern provinces, the proximity to Syria turned the ambiguity of the borderland against itself, linking frontier towns to the war’s spillover onto Turkish territory.
Initially, Turkey had extended a generous open border policy towards Syrians — an exception to its Arab neighbors — and set up ‘5-star’ refugee camps near the border. Under the temporary protection policy, Syrians were admitted into the country as ‘guests’, though cracks soon appeared in the legal meaning of the term and their implied obligations for the Turkish government. While camps offered impressive services, 85% of Turkey’s two million Syrians have settled in urban areas. Left to their own survival strategies, families face a legal stalemate over the right to work and receive social assistance while personal savings run out
Of issues affecting non-camp refugees, education is one of the worst as detailed by the latest Human Rights Watch report. Despite Turkish public schools and Arabic-language temporary education centers being accessible to Syrians, according to the findings only one in five Syrian children in Turkey attends school. While the Turkish government has done much to remove legal barriers to schools, hidden obstacles persist. Of these, economic hardship faced by families often means children are expected to become a source of income for the household rather than enroll in school. The report stresses that children’s right to education is contingent upon Syrian adults’ legal right to work in Turkey.
‘Syrian child labor in Turkey will almost certainly continue to persist until refugee families are offered a meaningful opportunity to make a living wage.’ (‘When I Picture My Future, I See Nothing’: Barriers to Education for Syrian Refugee Children in Turkey, HRW Report, November 2015)
Looking to new horizons
From Reyhanli, the smooth hills of Syria are always visible in the distance, engulfing the quiet town in a nostalgic embrace. So close to a homeland they are unable to return to, in limbo in a host country with less and less resources to sustain refugees, and often left with little choice but to attempt the risky crossing to Europe, Syrians in Turkey are hemmed in by multiple boundaries.
While returning to Syria remains nothing short of the collective ideal, women leaders like Hazar and Yara believe in putting more energy into propelling young lives forward during their protracted exile. ‘‘Syrians have been away from their land for five years and need to work like normal people, establish human relations and rebuild their lives’’, deems Hazar. As such, Al Salaam School not only keeps children in school by ensuring a completely cost-free education for their families, but actively seeks to provide a therapeutic environment for children to work through their fears and move forward.
Rashid, a French-Algerian volunteer who coordinated the English workshop, sees Watanili’s work as a way of transforming the very real physical border into a juncture of new possibilities. ‘‘We are trying to broaden horizons from here, despite the demarcation line being a restriction in itself. It’s restrictive yet at the same time can be challenged — the idea is that the kids go beyond borders.’’
As the week drew to a close, Yara secured the new learning center she had been fundraising and preparing for five months. The achievement officialised Reyhanli as Watanili’s base for the time to come. From this side of the border, the hope to contribute to the rebuilding of Syria is summarily captured by Thawab, a Syrian-American volunteer with Watanilii who comes yearly -
‘When we asked kids what they wanted to do when they grew up, all of them said they’d like to return to Syria and rebuild it. As for whether I see myself as a part of rebuilding Syria, I think the key to that lies to those that grew up in Syria, they know what’s best for their homeland. I’m simply there to assist where I can, to stand in solidarity. I too, would love to return to Syria. We used to spend our summers there. To me Syria was always summer . I never knew its winter — its cold nights, harshness and oppressions. Those who are going to rebuild Syria need to know its “winter” as well as its summer. They need to know the good times and the bad times. Within those that fled the war in Syria, who sparked the revolution, or who remain in their homes, within them lies the key to the future. Even though as Syrian diaspora we have a right to our homeland, we owe an even greater right to listen to our fellow Syrians. When we listen, we regain our hope as well. In between my volunteer trips to Reyhanli, I tend to lose hope! It’s only when I come back that it is sparked again.’
To learn more about Watanili check out their website here:
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