Written by Lay Sion Ng @ Issues Under Tissues

Chinese Malaysian, American Literature at Osaka University, Japan.

Accounts Of A Teenager Inside Syria’s Battleground

Part #1

“I was sleeping in a place where rats were running everywhere. The living condition there was so disgusting and awful that I could not believe my life would have become like this. In Lebanon, I worked in a restaurant about thirteen hours a day only for five dollars. After four months, I decided to return to Syria because I could not stand this anymore.”

After returning to Syria, Iboo found out that his cousin had also escaped the city. What came after this news was the heartbreaking news in which his little cousin was shot to death by a sniper during the war. Unable to take in this fact, Iboo cried like a baby and blamed himself on his little cousin’s death by wondering: “why should I stay life then?”

Nevertheless, the instinct to live and the family responsibility urged Iboo to stay alive. In order to stay alive under the circumstance that he was wanted by both political parties in Syria, he fled to Turkey in the winter in 2014. The path to enter the Turkey border was particularly challenging because the border policemen were incredibly violent in dealing with refugees. As Iboo claimed, “They don’t care about refugees at all. I saw someone was hit, kicked and stepped by the policemen on their faces until they died.” After a few months, when Iboo found a job and a flat, he asked his family to come over to Turkey. Of course, the scene of watching his family cross the border was unforgettable. As Ibu recalled, “I will never forget the look of my family when they walked out from the border: such a long journey to cross the border and all they had was some plastics bags with them.” “If all this had never happened,” Iboo lamented, “together with my parents, my three sisters and three brothers, my family would have had a normal and happy life in Syria. The costs that we have to pay for this political chaos, these wars, are way too much. And in fact, many of us are innocent.”

The life in Ankara, the capital of the Republic of Turkey, was indeed, very tough. As Ibu claimed, “I worked like an animal for one year in a chicken farm, seeing dead chicken bodies and smelling the chemical substances that had injected into them.” Unable to bear this kind of slave-like life any longer, one day, Iboo took a bus to Istanbul and looked a job based on his luck. However, after sleeping on the cold streets for several days, still, Iboo was unable to get any job. Feeling homeless and depressed, Iboo gave up his plan and took a bus back to Ankara. Surprisingly, on the bus when he spoke to a person sat next to him about his situation, he was offered a job by that kind person. “This time, I was not treated like a slave. It was a hard job, that I was taught to make equipment for chicken farms in a town called Bursa, but people at there were nice to me,” Iboo recalled. Although the long hours of working and the long distance between Bursa and Ankara were really tiring, Iboo devoted himself to both work and family. “Almost all of my salary was given to pay the rent for my family. I restricted my monthly expenses to no more than thirty dollars a month,” Iboo said.

During the six months working in Bursa, an idea of going to Europe kept appearing in Iboo’s mind. After he settled his family down in an awful flat in Istanbul, Iboo decided to travel to Greece. At that time, a one-way boat trip from Turkey to Greece costed nine-hundred euro, which was unbelievable expensive. But there was nothing Iboo can do to make a change. Luckily, at this time, a German lady who had been chatting online with Iboo for several months, decided to help him up by lending him money. The trip to Greece was extremely dangerous and chaotic.[…]

Continue reading: Accounts Of A Syrian Teenager | From Fighter To Refugee | Part #2