When he saw Doaa’s condition, the doctor demanded that she be released and admitted to the hospital right away. After several phone calls to his higher-ups, the police officer in charge received permission, and two officers from the detention center drove Doaa and the doctor to the nearest clinic, thirty minutes away. Doaa felt humiliated being accompanied by the police and self-conscious from the stares of the people in the waiting room.
The policemen, all men in their fifties who reminded Doaa of her father, had grown fond of her and told everyone that she was no criminal. They asked the hospital staff to take her in for tests. A nurse took her into an examination room for an X-ray and helped her take off her clothes. She took one look at Doaa’s body and started to cry. “You are so thin!” she said as she guided her to the scale and recorded that Doaa weighed only eighty-eight pounds. Doaa confided in the nurse her story about how she’d ended up in jail. The nurse admitted how she despised Bashar al-Assad but loved the Syrian people. She then placed ten pounds in Doaa’s hand for a sandwich and began reciting a prayer from the Quran. Doaa was deeply touched by the nurse’s kindness. When the doctor entered the room, the nurse instructed him, “Take care of her as if she were your own daughter.” During the examination, the doctor ruled out appendicitis, but he diagnosed Doaa with kidney stones and a stomach infection and decided to keep her in the hospital overnight for observation.
When she returned to the prison the next day, the guards were protective of her, knocking on the door to the women’s cell to check whether Doaa had taken her medication. Bassem visited, too, when they would let him, counting her pills and asking the other women to keep an eye on her. After ten days, they were released once more. “Don’t try escaping Egypt again,” the presiding officer told them, “and good luck.”
Doaa again decided that they should make another attempt to leave for Europe. Her experience in prison had been demeaning, but it had changed her perspective. The idea of resuming their life in Egypt seemed intolerable. Bassem was more reluctant to try again, but the smugglers still had their $2,500. So Bassem made the call and was given yet another address in Alexandria. It was the same scenario, but a different apartment. They were greeted by another Syrian family at the house—a husband, wife, and four children, refugees like themselves with the determination to risk their lives for the hope of a future better than the limbo they lived in now.
EIGHT
Ship of Horrors
At 11:00 a.m. on September 6, 2014, the call came. Doaa carefully packed a change of clothes for Bassem and herself, their toothbrushes, a sealed large plastic bag of dates, and a big bottle of water into the Mickey Mouse backpack she’d kept from her school days back in Syria. She carefully wrapped their passports and engagement contract in plastic wrap, then dropped them in a sandwich bag and folded over the end. Next, she wrapped her mobile phone and wallet with the five hundred euros and two hundred Egyptian pounds that they still had from their previous escape attempts in a separate plastic bag and secured each bundle underneath the straps of her red tank top, the first of four layers of clothes she had carefully selected for the journey. The plastic immediately made her skin sweat in the humid late-morning heat.