As I watch the kids quietly take off their shoes, eyes wide and timid, the depth of trauma and deprivation that they have gone through hits me again, like a jackhammer.
Most children toss off their shoes and run into these “child-friendly” spaces, knowing that it means a fun time. But the children of the Damascus suburb of Daraya have never seen a space like this. They aren’t familiar with the standard colorful, soft flooring or the variety of options or really any of it.
“Is this for us? Can we play here?” one little girl asks me.
“Yes,” I respond. “It’s for you. There will be lots of activities here.” Her face breaks out into a smile. “Do you want to color the playhouse?”
I set her up in a corner and before I can turn around half a dozen other girls have crowded in to help out. I’m struck by how gentle these children of Daraya are, how polite.
“Can I play with this?” they ask over and over.
“Yes, of course, it’s for you,” we find ourselves reassuring them, as we set up different activity sections.
I love kid chaos, but I’ve never been in an environment where it takes this long to create. Most of the time, once children realize it’s a free-for-all, it literally becomes a free-for-all. I breathe a sigh of relief when the scene becomes more familiar. In one area there is a cluster of children around some building blocks, in another some with Lego bricks. An older girl sits reading a book, smaller groups are drawing and balloons and bubbles are flying all over.
For years, like many other parts of the country, Daraya was besieged, bombed and starved.
I’m in Syria on a trip with my charity, International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance (INARA), which I established in 2015 while I was still a senior correspondent for CNN. I’ve covered Syria extensively over the last 13 years. Like many foreign journalists who reported from the “rebel side,” the areas I was able to access in Syria shrank over the years. We were all blacklisted from regime-controlled Syria, and by 2016 that quickly included most of the country.
Being back in Syria, despite the joy in the streets, the “wow, can you believe what is happening, that Assad is gone,” it’s still so emotionally heavy. No one can escape what was lost, what was sacrificed to get to this point: more than half a million dead, more than 150,000 disappeared, the millions internally displaced, the millions more made refugees in countries that never really wanted or accepted them.
My thoughts collide with my memories of the past. It feels like my brain is a pinball machine with multiple players. I remember the little red cheeks of children on the run, children who should be crying from the fatigue, the cold and hunger but are just silent. I remember the father who spoke with longing of what he missed the most from “home” — being able to lean back.
“You can’t lean back in a tent,” he explained when I looked at him blankly. His children and countless others don’t know what it is to have a couch to lean back on in your living room, don’t know what it is to have a living room, a proper bed to sleep on, a private toilet, a hot shower.
I see the children I met in hospitals whose lower levels were the only ones in use because of the bombs, the doctors who turned caves into makeshift operating rooms, the mothers who carry the inexplicable anguish that comes with not being able to keep your children safe.
My mind lingers on a girl I met in Idlib province a few years ago, Inad, and her words, or lack thereof. She had lost her left leg below the knee when she inadvertently set off a daisy-chained mine. She barely spoke, mostly giving one-word answers to my questions. Her father disappeared a decade earlier, at the start of the Syrian war. She saw him blindfolded as she was tossed to the ground.
Her grandfather says he feels like she’s just gone blank.
“Do you dream about a life without war?” I had asked.
She shook her head.
“Do you know what that even looks like?”
She shook her head again.
The family doesn’t know what happened to her father. He disappeared like so many others into Assad’s prisons. In Daraya alone, the estimate is that some 15,000 fathers, brothers and sons disappeared. Women have had to be both mother and father to their children.
How does a mother answer that question, explain to a child that “daddy disappeared,” that he’s probably dead, in an unmarked grave, a number — that they may never know where to go to pay their respects?
A person doesn’t “recover” from this level of pain, this level of loss. The psychological work with both children and adults is to give them different tools of self-expression, to teach them how to process, how to live with the hurt so that it’s no longer suffocating or drowning them. But it never goes away.
Children lack the words to express themselves. They do it best through art and other mental health and psychosocial support activities. It’s the starting point before moving on to group sessions and, one-on-one, more in-depth work.
I look over to the cluster of mothers watching their children in this space we’ve created, in stark contrast to the muddy, rubble-filled streets outside. We’ve shifted over to painting one of the massive walls, and I urge them, the mothers, to also paint if they want to. Like their children, they, too, are tentative at first but then start grabbing brushes.
By the end of it, the wall is a mess of handprints and scribbles, a smattering of more realistic depictions of butterflies and flowers, a child holding a schoolbook and Syria’s new flag, imperfect INARA logos, a bunch of blobs of I-don’t-know-what, “Free Daraya” and “Free Syria” slogans (those words that used to get people killed). It’s a beautiful pandemonium of bright, bold, uninhibited self-expression. But I cannot escape the heaviness of the realization that it’s going to take so much more to bring color back to Syria and its children.
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