Beads

Last night we were invited to an iftar, a Ramadan fast-breaking at sunset. Our hosts were a group of refugees from the mountains to the West of us who arrived in town soon after the bombs started falling in their home area. They fled a couple of months ago, leaving loved ones behind and dodging government checkpoints along the way, arriving in our little town with little more than the clothes on their backs. Over two hundred are here now, thirty or so of which are practically camping on an NGO compound at the base of the mountain. And these were the ones who invited us to share a meal with them. 

Bryan and I arrived a little later than we had planned and food was served only minutes after we got there. Dan and Bryan were ushered to a courtyard with the other men where there were mats laid out for praying and eating. Laura and I stayed behind a woven grass wall in front of a mud hut with several other women where food was brought to us on a round metal tray. While we started into a dish of dates I joined in the conversation but watched out of the corner of my eye as Annabelle (“Hanna”) was bounced from one pair of arms to the next. She was long overdue for a nap and as I monitored her sleep-heavy eyes taking in her new surroundings, I prayed she would be gracious to these kind people. And whether by God’s miraculous grace or her infantile self-absorption, she drank up the attention, flashing a few groggy smiles between kisses and cheek pinches. At one point a stately woman began walking down the path away from us with my baby still in her arms. Dusk was already gently draping itself over us and I could just make out Annabelle’s white head bobbing contently against a black shoulder, moving slowly away from me before disappearing into the dark mouth of a small house. I returned to my food but kept glancing down the path, wondering if I was supposed to follow my child or stay where I was. I knew she was still within ear shot, and though the thought of watching a stranger in America walk away with my daughter into an unfamiliar house makes my stomach churn, it seems somehow perfectly natural in this setting. Minutes passed and then the woman carrying Annabelle reemerged and brought her all the way back to my arms. Annabelle sank into my lap and looked up as me as chuffed as a four month old can be because around her neck was tied a strand of black and white striped beads. “She’s a baby from our mountains now!” the woman declared and everyone laughed in approval. Annabelle was even rechristened “Kaka” for the evening, the name given to firstborn daughters in the Central Mountains. 

We ate together as the world sank into darkness, Khawaja and North African, Muslim and Christian, friends and strangers. And when the table was cleared we sat and talked. These women came from a place where the Arabic is much better than what is spoken here and I struggled to understand everything they said, especially when they were speaking to each other. But they were unbelievably gracious with my fumbling, letting misconjugated verbs and ill-prounounced vocabulary lay where they fell as the conversation moved on. After Laura and I exhausted our small talk about family and food and babies, the women began speaking amongst themselves about their home area. I had heard earlier that the government has started using chemical weapons against the inhabitants of the mountains and had read only that morning that 200,000 people have now been displaced, injured or killed in the conflict. As the women softly talked to and over each other my ears ached with the strain of trying to understand. But it was like someone had held a match to a story in front of me, and I was left snatching singed fragments out of the breeze and trying to piece them together myself. I heard words like, hiding in the mountains, on the radio, antanovs dropping bombs, my people, your people, airplanes…

I was grateful for the dark at this point, as though hiding my face also hid my emptiness of words. Words in any language. All I could find was, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Malesh. Because really what do you say? And if you do say something, what would it mean to those who heard it? What do you say to the fasting refugees who lay their food in front of you and give gifts to your baby even as their homes are being destroyed and their loved ones killed? Do those words even exist? All I could find was thank you and I’m sorry. But I pray they could hear more than that.

Some time later when I rose with my sleeping baby to go, I glanced over the grass fence and saw Bryan huddled around a small computer screen with the other men, their faces lit blue by the screen. On the drive home he told me they were looking at photographs and video footage of the conflict in the Central Mountains. Someone had collected the images and smuggled them out. And amazingly, Bryan had come with a flash drive in his pocket and now, these images were with us too. After we put Annabelle to bed we sat around our own computer screen in the dark of our home and looked through them. I didn’t want to. To be honest I was terrified of what I was going to see. But I felt like it was all I could offer. I can’t protect these people from bombs. I can’t stop planes from flying overhead. I can’t even talk to them deeply in their own language about how they feel or what they think. But I can look at the pictures and see that their pain is real. I can take the singed pieces of story that I have found and show them to others, like you. 

I was right to be scared of the pictures. They were some of the most awful things I have ever seen. They were of women and children huddled in caves, hiding. They were of men on rope beds with holes torn through their bodies. They were of women lying twisted in the grass, their bloody tobes covering their faces. And there was a picture of children I cannot even bring myself to describe. Small children. With black and white beads around their necks. 

You know that feeling you get when you stub your toe really hard? There is an instant before the pain rushes up your foot that everything tingles and you feel the dread of the pain that is coming. That is how I felt, and still feel. Numb. And waiting for the pain to hit. And in this numbness I find myself wondering when it feels real. It didn’t feel real reading the news in America two years ago. It didn’t feel real hearing stories of what was happening a few hundred miles away from me now every day this week. And it didn’t feel real seeing the pictures of dead neighbors of my dinner hosts last night. When does it feel real? Would it feel real if bombs started falling here and I was running with my baby? Does it feel real for them? Or are they still waiting for the pain to hit too...?