[At first, it was extremely difficult for Damascus]
[But it became the usual and they got used to it]
[When people think about Syria, they think of war and death]
[Yes, that is true]
[But we still manage to deal with the situation]
[Despite it all, Damascus is coping. Thanks God!]
[A rocket!!]
[- Did you hear it? – Wow, very close, wasn’t it?]
[That’s it … It fell]
It’s New Year’s Eve 2017.
It’s almost midnight.
I’m lying in a very cold bed,
I’m wearing three layers of clothes,
two pairs of socks, and a big scarf.
I just have a hand outside the blanket
to answer all my families and friends, all the messages they send me,
before the electricity goes out for the next five hours.
Suddenly, I hear gunshots, and I feel the building shaking.
By the time I go to the window to see what’s happening,
the electricity is cut off
leaving me without Internet and without the small electric heater,
left alone in this empty and dark hotel room,
with just one question popping on my iPhone screen:
“What the hell are you doing in Aleppo instead of being here with us?”
A simple question that kept me awake all night.
What drives me to do these things?
We all experience in life events that change our lives.
Some of them are the consequences of the choices we make,
and can be exciting and fill us with expectations.
But it’s clearly the unexpected events that haunt us,
those events changing our lives from a given moment.
What has been happening in Syria for the past five years
has changed my life.
My world has changed since the beginning of this war
that spares nothing and nobody.
In 2011, when everything started in Syria,
I was a student in politics and international relations
here in Brussels.
Even though I was studying conflicts,
I never thought I would be directly affected
by the most complex conflict of the 21st century.
I was seeing on TV my country exploding 4,000 kilometres away from me.
I was born in Brussels, but I grew up in Damascus, Syria.
But this, this is not the Syria I know.
Syria is not limited to death, guns, and bombs,
and it’s hard to believe
that what was one of the safest countries in the world
is now a synonym of fear and hatred.
As the time passed,
I realized that what was happening in my country
haunted me and obsessed me more and more.
There was something,
something so powerful that I can’t describe it:
something that connects me with Syria,
something that pushed me to go there
several times during the first year of the conflict.
But every time I came back I felt even more disturbed.
Behind my smiles, a constant melancholy was hiding,
and a feeling of being powerless became more and more difficult to manage.
I blamed myself for living in safety here
and for being able to close my eyes
when I can no longer see the nightmare over there.
I really wanted to do something about it.
The only thing I could do in this situation was to –
I was trying to communicate the suffering of this country
so that others here could feel it.
Because Syria is no longer Syria,
because a lot of people want to know what’s happening there,
and because my Syria is falling apart day after day,
I wanted to fix it with the only weapon I had: words.
But after writing down many times all those emotions,
I soon realized that words were not strong enough to express how I feel.
I try my best to explain it,
but the constant flow of four images shown in the media
seem to be really disconnected from the human realities on the ground.
At the heart of the war,
there are men, women, and children,
everyday heroes who are trying to continue to smile at life.
I therefore decided to put a camera in my suitcase
and to look for those missing images myself.
I was going to make a documentary,
to give a voice to those we never hear.
I was quite bored when I did that but –
(Laughter)
so that, in Damascus, that hope is all that is left,
began to exist elsewhere than just in my head.
I really wanted to focus on the human beings that make up Syria,
so I began filming everyone who crossed my path,
sometimes, people who were living the worst time of their lives,
but who were still trying to keep their heads up.
My feelings were mixed between the past and the present,
the present and the future.
I was lost between the fear of the unknown,
which was visible on people’s faces,
and fleeting moments of happiness stolen from time and war.
But I felt that I was back where I belonged,
that I had to be there.
But this time there was no screen
between me and all the victims of this conflict.
While I was learning a new profession,
I also learned the price of humanity and suffering.
At first, I was terrified of everything I saw, heard, lived, and felt.
I was overwhelmed by my emotions, and I couldn’t control them.
Then I told myself
that I had to live like the others, even if I might die like them.
And slowly, I learned to love with them
the roar of the planes and the whistling of the shells.
The situation was extremely confusing,
but,when you leave it, nothing is surprising,
nothing is surprising any more.
When people feel they can die at any time,
they live their life in the deepest and most complete way possible.
There is life there, more life than anyone could imagine,
in all this chaos,
in this Syria in which it has become so difficult to live,
this exhausted society is trying to preserve what remains of hope.
This war has taken much more than what we had.
This war has taken our memories, our roots, our dreams,
but it will not succeed in destroying everything.
Despite the scars,
people continue to smile, to love, to get married, to have children,
because the most powerful weapon against this war is hope and resilience.
If I could point out one thing,
it’s that this conflict has made me realize the power of the human mind.
We learn a lot from war.
By spending time there, sometimes in very harsh conditions,
I learned what fear is when day looked like nights,
or the feeling of lacking something, when you no longer have access to them,
the most basic needs.
Only then do we truly realize
the importance of the things we take for granted.
This war also gave me incredible life lessons.
In the middle of this chaos,
I saw how ordinary people help each other out.
It told me also so much about myself.
It allowed me to discover my emotions and my reactions,
and forced me to control them, so I could protect myself.
Just to see the world through the lens of the camera
doesn’t make the situation easier.
There is no magic button to –
to press to clear the vision of suffering and pain.
It told me all those things through all the people I’ve met,
people I might never have met in another life.
People who are constantly in my dreams
that sometimes keep me awake all night.
This little girl is one of them.
I met her two years ago in a village somewhere in Syria.
I watch her for a few minutes,
she was playing with her friends,
and she was wearing this cute little dress,
and she was full of life.
The battery of my camera had run out,
so I told her that I would come back to see her later.
And she looked at me, and she smiled, but her smile was full of sadness.
And you know what she told me?
She said that time passes and people go away,
before adding that she might no longer be here by then,
because here, death can strike at any moment.
She said that I shouldn’t postpone what I want to do or say,
and to forgive in my life,
because sometimes later never comes.
Her name was Miriam,
she was six when I met her,
and she was a war orphan.
I still see her very often in my dreams.
Nothing will be the same as before,
we will never be what we used to be.
I accepted the idea that this conflict had become a part of me,
shaping who I am.
This world made me question my personal and professional life.
I decided to work on issues that have a meaning for me,
rather than having a regular income and a stable life.
I was lucky enough to cross the path of people
who believed in this project, who supported it,
and who put all their energy into making it possible,
people who helped me humanize this conflict.
I know very well that I won’t be able to stop this war,
but to give a face and a voice to the victims of this war
is the least that I can do.
I’m not a war reporter or a humanitarian;
I’m only a witness of the dirt of war that destroyed my country.
If now I ask myself this question again:
What drives me to do all of this?
I just think of them out there, and the smiles on their faces,
when I tell them that, yes, their lives and their stories
matter to other people around the world.
Thank you.
”
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