A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea
Melissa Fleming
To Peter, Alessi, and Danny, my parents, and the over sixty-five million people who have been forced to flee from their homes.
ONE
A Childhood in Syria
The second time Doaa nearly drowned, she was adrift in the center of a hostile sea that had just swallowed the man she loved. She was so cold she couldn’t feel her feet, and so thirsty her tongue had swollen in her mouth. She was so overcome with grief that if not for the two tiny baby girls in her arms, barely alive, she would have let the sea consume her. No land was in sight. Just debris from the shipwreck, a few other survivors praying for rescue, and dozens of bloated, floating corpses.
Thirteen years earlier, a small lake, rather than the vast ocean, had almost taken her, and that time Doaa’s family was there to save her. She was six years old and the only one in her family who’d refused to learn to swim. She was terrified of the water; just the sight of it filled her with dread.
During outings to the lake near their home, Doaa would sit alone and watch as her sisters and cousins splashed and dove and somersaulted into the lake, cooling off from the sweltering Syrian summer heat. When they tried to coax Doaa into the water, she steadfastly refused, feeling a sense of power in her resistance. Even as a small child, she was stubborn. “No one can ever tell Doaa what to do,” her mother told everyone with a mix of pride and exasperation.
Then, one afternoon, Doaa’s teenage cousin decided that she was being silly and that it was past time for her to learn how to swim. As Doaa sat obliviously drawing shapes in the dirt with her fingers and watching the others splash around, he crept up behind her, grabbed her by the waist, and lifted her up as she kicked and screamed. Ignoring her cries, he swung her up over his shoulder and carried her to the lake. Her face was pressed into his upper back while her legs dangled just below his chest. She kicked hard against his rib cage and dug her fingernails into his head. The children laughed as Doaa’s cousin stretched out his arms and released her into the murky water. Doaa panicked as she smacked facedown into the lake. She was submerged only up to her chest, but she was paralyzed with fear and unable to position her legs to find footing. Rather than floating to the top, Doaa submerged, gasping for air but instead gulping water.
A pair of arms pulled her out of the lake just in time, lifting her to the shore and into the comforting lap of her frightened mother. Doaa coughed up all the liquid she’d ingested, sobbing, and vowed, then and there, to never go near the water again.
Back then, she had nothing else in her world to fear. Not when family was always around to protect her.
Six-year-old Doaa couldn’t remember any moment when she’d ever been alone. She lived with her parents and five sisters in a single room in her grandfather’s two-story house. Her father’s three brothers and their families occupied the other rooms, and each moment of Doaa’s life was filled with relatives: She slept side by side with her sisters, ate communal meals, and listened to spirited conversations.
The Al Zamel family lived in Daraa, the largest city in the southwest of Syria, located just a few kilometers from the Jordanian border and about a two-hour drive south of Damascus. Daraa sits on a volcanic plateau of rich, red soil. In 2001 when Doaa was six, it was famous for the bounty of fruits and vegetables the land yielded—pomegranates, figs, apples, olives, and tomatoes. It was said that the produce of Daraa could feed all of Syria.