“I never imagined this could happen to us! We are just normal people minding our own business.”
Anna-Carin Öst, UNHCR Poland Representative tells Ishaq’s story from besieged Damascus:
I have been working for refugees with UNHCR for 18 years now. In 2012 the words “no one wants to become a refugee” took on a different meaning for me.
I was working for UNHCR in Damascus and the situation in Syria was becoming more difficult. But during weekends we often spent the afternoon in the Old City. Shopkeepers were now our friends as all the tourists were long gone. A special friend among them was Ishaq, specialized in marquetry, producing beautiful traditional wooden chests. We used to have long discussions covering everything from the long proud history of the Eternal city to politics of today.
One day when I visited him he looked different and only wanted to talk about the future of his children, especially his oldest son who was about to finish university. “There is no future for them in my beloved Damascus” he told me while his eyes filled up with tears. “I never imagined this could happen to us! We are just normal people minding our own business” he continued and pulled me inside the shop when a man with a walkie-talkie passed.
“I will sell the shop and the house and take them to safety,” he said as we sat down inside. The house he was talking about is built into the Old City wall close to Bab Sharki and has belonged to his family for more than 350 years. In the silence that followed, we could clearly hear the relentless sounds of mortars falling on the outskirts of the city. When security was better, I visited Ishaq a couple of more times. His family was already in safety in Lebanon and he was waiting to sell the house. I got a wooden box as a memory and he told me that even when peace comes back to the city no one will make marquetry like this again as his people will never be able to return.
Next time I went there the shutters were down and the café owner across the street told me that Ishaq is gone and that it is useless to come back to look for him. For two years, every time I looked at the box, I would wonder about Ishaq and what became of him. Is he now only a mere number among the 1 million refugees in Lebanon? Then about a month ago I got an e-mail from Ishaq in Canada…
