Sara's Story
Like Hani, Sara is one of the millions of Syrian children who have had their lives uprooted and turned upside down over the past four years. During a visit this summer, one of our communicators met her and was powerfully affected by Sara’s experiences. Below she tells her story.
“Before the war started, nothing worried me. Everything was ok.”
Sara grew up safe and secure in a middle class family in Damascus. She describes their house as being so big, ‘you could remove the moon and put the house in its place.’ She spent her childhood playing barbies and dolls, cycling with her cousins, and playing pat-a-cake with her brothers and sisters. When her Dad came home from work in the evening, he would take them swimming at her grandparent’s house, and they would go to the orchard to pick fruit.
Sara describes her father as a short, good looking man with a big heart, and she obviously adores him. “He used to love me the most" she says unabashedly.
When Sara’s family ran, she took just two things with her, her watch and her photo album. The photos could be those of any middle class child from the UK – a long table of smiling children and cake at a birthday party, photos with smiling brothers and sisters acting out skits and posing with cuddly toys.
“But then our home got bombed.”
As the fighting escalated, Sara and her family experienced the worst of human nature as homes were bombed, women kidnapped, and the air of her once quiet neighbourhood in Damascus became filled with the sounds of guns and people dying.
“One day, the armed men came. They used to enter the houses and arrest people. I would be sleeping and I’d wake up. Shooting, fighting, people dying. They bombed our houses. It was horrible. It wasn’t a life there – it was nothing at all.” Sara comments softly. It’s strange to listen to this small fourteen year old speak so matter-of-factly of what she’s seen and heard – children having their fingernails ripped out, electrified corpses, and people stubbing out cigarettes on stranger’s backs.
“When they got to the centre of the village they would cut off people’s heads.”
Sara was terrified that her family would never escape Syria. But the worst came when the violence finally reached her family.
“My dad got kidnapped. They shot him, and then they burned him,” she says, “...Oh wait – they ran over him, and then they shot and burned him.”
It’s easy to hear the calm, almost clinical way that Sara relates the story, and to miss the enormity of what she has experienced. At fourteen years old, Sara has seen things that most of us never will, and her poise and strength as she talks about her father’s killing are heartbreaking.
Her father died two years ago, and with him, Sara says, her birthdays died too; she hasn’t celebrated one since. From a beautiful marble house, now destroyed in the bombings, Sara and her family have ended up in one of the tent cities that have sprung up around the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Around the tents trash blows in the dust like tumbleweeds and children run around in ill fitting hand-me-down clothes.
They arrived in the tent city three weeks ago, Sara says, and just started going to school again three days ago. In Damascus, Sara loved maths, but here she says she has trouble understanding and paying attention to what is going on in the heat of yet another tent used for lessons.
“There are no bombs – there’s nothing here, so it’s a bit better than Syria. I just want my father to come back.” Sara explains.
This October, World Vision UK’s A Night of Hope campaign is raising money for Sara’s lessons and Hani’s school – money to help Syria’s millions of displaced children continue their educations and achieve their dreams. All the fundraising in the world would not be able to give Sara her biggest wish, to see her father one more time. However, with everyone’s help we can make sure that Sara succeeds in becoming a minister one day, so that this poised young woman can indeed stand up for other people’s rights, and ensure that the horrors of war she has experienced do not happen to another generation.
You can text HEART to 70060 to donate £5 and help change their future for good.
*This is a charity donation service for World Vision. Texts cost £5 plus your standard network rate message. World Vision will receive 100% of your donation. If you have a question about your payment call 0203 282 7863. If you would prefer we didn't contact you again in future, text NOCOMMS WORLD VISION to 70060. Charity no England and Wales (no 285908).
*Sara and Hani's names have been changed to protect their identities and keep them safe.