Rasha and Lara traveled from Syria to Lebanon, back to Syria and then to Turkey and then Greece. They made these pictures and told me this story while living in Athens Greece, in February 2017. At that time Rasha was 10 years old and Lara was 9 years old.
This is a picture of when I was in Lebanon. I loved to sit on the balcony. We lived in a place where there was fighting between groups and once there was lots of shooting and bombs and my mother said “don’t be afraid, it’s only fireworks, like Happy New Year”. These lines are the bomb on the ground. I am inside with my mother and my sister is outside throwing the rubbish and I call her to come in because there are a lot of bombs and she comes in the house. Then we moved to Beirut for a week because there were so many bombs, and then we came back to that house.
This is my big sister, me and my sister and my mother and my grandmother all walking in the long grass to Turkey. It was very tall and I was very tired and it was difficult. And there were a lot of planes in the sky and I was scared because my mother was saying the police could catch us so we should go quickly. When the planes came the smuggler told us to stay still in the grass and not walk, so the planes could not see us. We kept walking untill morning then we stopped. A police car came to take people back to Syria but they did not see us, they took another group and we kept walking to Turkey.
This is the journey from Turkey to Greece. The waves were very strong and the water came inside the boat. I was crying a lot because I was afraid of the sea and I was afraid to be inside the boat. We had life-jackets but I cannot swim.
This is the big boat that we took from the island to Athens. It was very difficult because there were a lot waves and we were afraid because it went up and down. I slept a little on a chair and when I woke up I read the Koran because I was afraid. When we got to Athens we stayed on the street untill someone came to take us to a camp.
The picture above is us on the train. The other is a picture of us eating here in the house. My mother is cooking lots of food. We helped her with the cooking and we made sweets and then me and my sister played untill it was ready. We cooked mjadara. It’s delicious: it consists of lentils and we put salt on it. the butter and eggs are all in the picture. We eat in our room. This is my mother and sisters.
