The day after meeting Doaa, we traveled to Heraklion to visit the University Hospital where little Masa had been treated after her rescue, and met with Dr. Diana Fitrolaki, her supervising physician. She confirmed to me that Masa “was close to death” when she was first admitted. “We gave her glucose, liquid, oxygen,” she told me. “And we sang her songs, hugged her, took her into our arms, and walked around. After two days, she started to smile. She always asked to be picked up. She wanted to be held all the time. The staff were always touching and holding her. They love all the children but had never seen a case like this before.” I left the hospital that day convinced that it was not just modern medicine that had saved Masa but the love that Dr. Fitrolaki and the University Hospital staff showered over the little girl from the moment she was admitted.
After having left the hospital, Masa was being cared for at an orphanage, the Mitera foster home in Athens. During my visit there, I spent a couple of hours playing with her and speaking to the manager and staff of Mitera. It was clear to me that the bubbly toddler who had quickly picked up the Greek language was in the best place possible to overcome her trauma and the tragic drowning of her parents and sister.
Later, at UNHCR’s Athens office, I conducted a Skype interview with Mohammad Dasuqi, Masa’s uncle who was living in Sweden. His wife, two children, and Masa’s elder sister, Sidra, darted in and out of the frame as we spoke. Mohammad was awaiting the outcome of a legal procedure that would confirm his genetic relationship and ability to care for Masa so that he could bring her to Sweden to join her older sister and his family and so he could become her legal guardian.
That same afternoon, my colleagues arranged for one of the other survivors, Shoukri Al-Assoulli, to meet us at our Athens office. Shoukri was in a terrible state when we met with him. The Palestinian National Authority had stopped paying his small monthly stipend due to a lack of funds, and a few days before, in a park in central Athens, members of the right-wing extremist group the Golden Dawn had beaten him and a friend badly because they were foreigners. They both landed in the hospital. He was penniless and broken, and crying as he showed us a photo of the pretty pink bedroom his deceased daughter used to sleep in back in Gaza. Shoukri wanted to share his story, and we agreed that Jowan Akkash, a Syrian journalist he had befriended who was translating for us, would ask him my interview questions when the time was right. This interview, along with another session months later, when Shoukri had returned to Gaza, corroborated further details and added description of what transpired during the boat journey and during the time they struggled for survival at sea.
Once I had finally gathered enough information to write the script for my TED talk, I shared the text with the curators of TEDxThessaloniki, Katerina Biliouri and Elena Papadopoulou, who were immediately convinced that their Greek audience would be deeply moved by Doaa’s story while also gaining a wider understanding of the reasons why so many refugees were dying on their shores. In the lead-up to and aftermath of the event, Katerina and Elena made special efforts to promote the talk. Bruno Giussani, TED’s European director and curator of the TEDGlobal conference, also offered to review the script and provided insightful advice and helpful edits that significantly improved the shape of the script. I am also grateful to Mark Turner, who helped to make the words sing. I rehearsed the talk over and over, and my colleagues, especially Sybella Wilkes, Edith Champagne, Christopher Reardon, Alexandre St-Denis, and Médéric Droz-dit-Busset, served as patient and active audience members for rehearsals and provided lots of feedback. Speaker coach T. J. Walker supported me throughout the process, critiquing rehearsal videos and keeping me on a practice regimen. When I delivered the talk on May 23, 2015, the audience listened in rapt silence, then stood to applaud once I finished. Many were in tears. A fellow speaker and prominent Athens businessman, Alexis Pantazis, was so moved by Doaa’s story that he granted her a scholarship in the name of his company.
I decided to send a link to a video of the talk to literary agent Mollie Glick, then of Foundry Media, now at CAA, who had previously reached out to me about writing a book after she had seen my first refugee-themed TED talk. “Is this a book?” I asked her. Her response was clear: “Yes!” With Mollie’s passionate outreach and strong belief in the timeliness of a refugee story like Doaa’s, we set to work on coming up with a proposal, and she recommended Dorothy Hearst, an experienced nonfiction editor and successful novelist, to help me with the proposal process and the writing. Mollie’s assistant, Joy Fowlkes, who had brought my first TED talk to Mollie’s attention, managed all the contacts in different time zones, and Foundry’s Kirsten Neuhaus secured eight foreign publishers on the basis of the book proposal and is working on more.