My passion in life is teaching and raising a good generation.
Even if your dream, is far in the horizon and you feel you are further away from it, stop and think what you are doing and see you actually are not that far. —
Her story
My passion in life is teaching and raising a good generation. I am dealing with the human mind, with people who have hearts and souls. I always want to learn what someone’s background is, how he is thinking, what he needs and what he dreams about. My teaching depended on this, although I was ‘just’ an English teacher. I refuse to call the place that I worked at a school. It is about much more than just an education, I want to build a generation that can think and act differently. My times in my classroom where my happiest times, it was great. Some students still contact me about this. I wanted to build my own foundation, but this was hard, because nobody supported me in this idea. However, I started to work on my dream. I selected my friends to see who could help me with this. I started this dream when I was 25 and I thought that when I would be 40, I should have my own foundation. But then the revolution started and I had to leave.
Besides my work as a teacher, I worked in a humanitarian organisation in Syria. It was something that I never expected to end up at. I gave psychological support to young girls who didn’t have education, got married much too young, or who didn’t have a home. I worked for this foundation that assists displaced people. Unfortunately, these kind of organizations are considered as criminal in Syria because the people that we took care of, were often ‘displaced’ by the government. Within the foundation that I worked, five people were arrested and three of them died in prison. They were both men and women, they died because of torture. Dying in prison is really my biggest fear, it must be worse than any other death. After this news, I stopped eating and sleeping.
I started to have health problems. I had to stay in bed for six months without moving, because one of my legs was paralysed. My psychological being was completely destroyed. I couldn’t sleep well. I took many medicines and painkillers that would make me stop thinking, so that I could sleep a bit. However, I started to think and to worry, because I knew that people were being taken from their houses. Even though I know I didn’t do anything wrong, if they’d come to my house I would have a problem. I was stuck in my bed and I wouldn’t be able to escape even if they came for me. After these thoughts I knew I should leave. After my leg got better, I was finally allowed to leave. I came to Turkey in July 2015. Now that I’m here, I feel like it is much harder to achieve my dream. If I will achieve it from abroad, I definitely have to make a branch in Damascus.
My first day at the airport my luggage was stolen, and later my money was stolen. At the same time, my family was still in Damascus and I’m still suffering from health problems. Anyway, I found a job as a teacher in a private school. There I met kids that I would have never met if I was still in Syria. I worked really hard, I worked 12 hours a day, but while I was working I got more convinced with the idea that I should really do something for the kids. They didn’t have any passions, dreams and motivation. All they thought of was to pass the school year, although they were just five to twelve years old. I collected many ideas and experiences in order to establish my dream.
But at the school that I worked some people didn’t like me. They talked behind my back that I was ‘too open minded’ or something like that. They thought I wasn’t good for their children. My managers wanted to keep me, because I was good at teaching, but she wanted to change me personally. They told me to remove photos from facebook for example, sometimes she called me after 1 am, because there was a photo of me and my friends smoking nargile. She tried to disconnect me from my students. But you can’t do these kind of things. They gave me a new contract, with some adjustments, but I didn’t sign it. They tried to take advantage of my dependent situation, but I refused. Within four days I found a new job in a humanitarian organisation.
New ideas started to flourish in Turkey. I met many girls that were victims of domestic violence in my current job. Maybe, that is why my dream became even bigger here. I want to give young people the skills to dream and think and to have the motivation to do something for our community in return. Eventually we should go back to Syria and do something there. Our country, Syria, gave us a lot and we should and have to rebuild it one day.
What I would like to say to my fellow Syrians is: love each other, because if you are incapable of accepting each other as brothers and sisters from the same country, you can’t expect people from another country to accept you as one group.
