Afrasianet - Maryam Mashtawi - Every time one thinks one is used to images of borders, barbed wire, soldiers, and immigrants carrying their ages in small bags, one scene rearranges the heart.
He was crying heartburning, begging a Spanish soldier not to bring him back with the migrants. politicians, not in the language of international conventions, and knows nothing about asylum and immigration laws.
He spoke the only language that all human beings have understood since the beginning of creation, the language of fear! What attracted me the most in the scene was not the crying of the child, but the soldier's hand, how strange this hand is!
It was only here that I realized that a person can be greater than his role, a soldier is not just a soldier, and a policeman is not just a policeman.
Boundaries are not always boundaries, sometimes a man triumphs over a job, and the heart triumphs over instructions.I think a lot about this child, I don't know his name, I don't know where he will sleep tonight.
I don't know what he will say to his mother if he goes back to her, nor if his mother even knows where he is, but I know one thing, that when he cried, he was not crying alone.He was carrying the tears of thousands of children who did not cry One of them chooses his place of birth.
None of them chose to be born in a country that pushes their children into the sea, and none of them chose to make the word "migration" the first word they learn before they learn to read!
But the truth is that the number does not cry, the number does not tremble, the number does not call its mother, the number does not sleep hungry.
That is why I am always afraid of statistics.They turn a person into a box in a table, while each one of them carries a whole life, a house, a family photo, a song he loved, and a small unfulfilled dream.
That child is not only a human condition, he is a whole lifetime walking on two small legs.I remembered watching all the children who were robbed by wars, poverty and hunger, in Gaza, children running after water, and in Sudan, running after a piece of bread! In the Mediterranean, they run after a boat that may arrive or be swallowed up by the sea.
How painful it is for a child in this day and age to need what is most important, not a new toy, not a school bag, not a bicycle, but an adult to reassure him.
I know that states have laws, they have the right to protect their borders, and they have undeniable security responsibilities. But I also know that laws should not forget the human being, for whom they were written.
Ruthless justice turns into injustice. Between the two, a little boy stands, holding only his tears, waiting for the adults to decide which side he will belong to.
When we look at an immigrant, we see nothing but an administrative file, we have forgotten that every human being has a story that began many years before he reached these limits.
I hope he just remembers the hand that was put on his shoulder. Perhaps, in the midst of all this political noise, and all these endless debates, the simplest lesson is the truest one: the world does not always need a new agreement. Sometimes he just needs a heart that isn't afraid to be human.
When Survivors Become Strangers
I was not struck by the words of a young Sudanese man that he had crossed the sea, nor that he had walked thousands of kilometers, until he reached Ceuta.
What really shook me was the sentence he said with a calmness that resembled surrender: "Maybe there are only three of my family left, or maybe one person." I stopped at a word, perhaps.
A person who doesn't know how many of his loved ones are alive is no longer living the same tragedy as we know it. He is living a different kind of pain, a pain that is not like loss, because loss needs to be Certainly, while he is caught between hope and fear, between life and death, between news that has not yet arrived, and a message that may never arrive.
We read about clashes, displacement, and famine, and then we turn the page and go on with our day. Behind every headline, there's a woman waiting for her son in front of a door that no one knocks on anymore. A child tries to remember his father's features before time steals them.
A young man, like the one we saw, remembers an entire city that no longer knows if it still exists. It makes a person a stranger to his homeland, then a stranger in exile, and then even a stranger to himself.
Then try again the next day. The next week, the fear begins to grow, because in time of war silence is not an ordinary silence. In our daily lives, we worry if someone we love is an hour or two late in responding.
Those who live in the midst of war learn to wait weeks, perhaps months, without knowing whether the silence is caused by a power outage, a grid outage, or the interruption of life itself.
It has always been said that home is the place where we are born, but I believe that home is where you know that the people you love are still there.
When a person loses this certainty, the whole world becomes temporary. He no longer plans for the future, he does not plant a tree. He lives as if he is ready to leave again at any moment, because those who have been uprooted once know that the wind may return.
No: We are tired... No, we are afraid. Their conversation always begins with others. Mom... My brother... My children... My wife.
It is as if a person, when faced with a disaster, forgets himself first, and begins to search in the memory for the faces he fears he has lost. He was not looking for a more luxurious life, nor for a brighter future.
He was looking for one news that would reassure him that his family had not been erased from existence. To find someone who is still waiting for him.
Maybe that's why I don't like the word "survivors"... But the truth is that those who survive wars do not come out of them unscathed. They carry it with them, in their voices, in their sleep, in their looks, in their constant fear of a phone ringing that might carry news they don't want to hear. At that moment, exile is not the distance from the earth, but the distance from certainty.
When the interview ended, the young man's face was not left in my mind, but only in the face of the young man: How many people in this world sleep tonight not knowing if their family is still alive?
But we will find it in the eyes of those who arrived on the other side only with their bodies, while their souls remained there, searching among the rubble for a name, a face, or a voice, confirming to them that someone, somewhere, was still waiting to return.
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Maryam Mashtawi - Lebanese Writer
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