BOOKSHELF: A Story of Refugees and the Things They Carry

 

Author Stephanie Saldaña grew up in San Antonio, studied religion and journalism, and lives with her family in Bethlehem and France. She recently spoke at Saint Thomas More Catholic Church in Saint Paul about her book What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refugees and the Things They Carry. The book encapsulates her conversations in 2016 across the Middle East and Europe with refugees from Syria and Iraq. More than half of Syrians were displaced, and millions of Iraqis were uprooted by ISIS.

In her book, Saldaña shares the stories of people who found a way to save a connection to their past despite losing everything. Many escaped without being able to take anything from their home. “The war introduced me to the terrible goneness of things,” she writes in her prologue.

The people she features, Saldaña says, taught her that even in the face of immense violence and loss, “there is always something small to be carried, some act to be done, and that these little things transform history in ways we only later understand.” She quotes an Arabic saying, “Awal al-shajara bithra” — a tree begins with a seed.

 

 

Saldaña’s talk was ineffably cheerful — a broad smile rarely left her face — even as she talked about experiencing depression in her home in Bethlehem. “Everyone comes to the church more than they usually do,” she said. “Folks would say they only leave the house to go to the church. In moments like these, we discover our faith in a new way. When we reach our human limits … we turn to the examples of other people who have lived through times like these.”

She wrote the book to tell the stories of people who had escaped war and “somehow rescued something of their hope.” She also said that after conflicts re-escalated in Gaza, the refugees she met for her book were among the first ones who called her to see if she was okay.

 

How the Book Began

Saldaña lived in Syria before the war, in 2004, where she learned to speak Arabic. “I fell in love with the region, with the food, with the art, with the people. When the war started in 2011, it was a war that was happening to my friends and my neighbors and my teachers. Of course, when I saw it on news, it didn’t feel that way — the stories were just about numbers. By 2014, so many people had died that the United Nations stopped counting them, so they weren’t even numbers anymore.”

She read a story about a young violin player who wrapped his violin in plastic wrap and took the dangerous sea route to escape. Fellow voyagers were scared and cold from the sea voyage, so he unwrapped his violin and played “Ode to Joy.” Saldaña wondered what would happen if we could hear more stories like that. So, in 2016, she began to travel around the world, meeting people from Iraq and Syria who had escaped war and ask them what they had saved.

She talked with people originally from Qaraqosh, the largest Christian community in Iraq (known traditionally as Baghdeda), who had all sung in one of the city’s seven church choirs. They uniquely sang in Aramaic — one of the world’s oldest languages, used by Jesus — which is now endangered as a spoken language. As one person told her, “Now that Qaraqosh has been taken, our language will likely disappear. When the people of Qaraqosh leave for Australia or Canada, who will keep speaking it five years from now?”

The singers began to learn about each other after ending up in Amman, Jordan. “We left everything in a single night: our studies, our homes, everything,” one of them said. “I was an engineer. We waited to see if we could return, but ISIS destroyed everything.”

The singers had all been involved in a different church choir in Qaraqosh. In Amman, they found each other and created their own choir. They sing together in Aramaic.

 

Saldaña also met the mother of three children who was not able to carry anything when they escaped war abruptly. After she understood that she would never be able to go back home — to a town her family had lived in for centuries — she began to buy threads in the colors of the color of the water in her well, the roof of her church, the color of her trees. She began to make an embroidered dress that depicts dancers from her town, religious figures, wheat and grapes she grew up with on her father’s farm.

As she wrote in the book, “I had been expecting to find a fragment — a recipe, a song. Instead, Hana seemed to have shown me the story of herself, with her trees and language and memories of dancing. She had walked me through an entire town, now gone.”

At her talk about the book, Saldaña said, “Every single one of us is unique — an entire world — which is why both the Quran and the Talmud teach that to save a single life is to save the entire world, and to take a single life is to destroy the entire world. Hana contains an entire world, and she’s a reminder for me of our human dignity today.”

One in every 69 human beings today is forcibly displaced, Saldaña said. “It’s easy to get lost in those numbers. Hana reminds me that each one of these human beings is unique. I often think, what would I sew into my dress? What would you sew into yours?”

 

 

Being of Service to Others

Saldaña also told a story that took place on the island of Lesvos in Greece. “It was a very terrible camp for migrants and refugees, where thousands of people were kept in horrible conditions on purpose. The idea was that if they made it bad enough when refugees arrived, they would choose to go back, or they would tell their relatives that war is better than coming to Europe. So, it was crowded and dangerous and cold.”

She was in Lesvos in 2017. Initially she was concerned about being identified as a writer — which was journalists were forbidden — but she simply walked in “and nobody looked twice at me. It was the first time I realized that there is no difference between us and a refugee. Nothing. I spoke Arabic, and the guards looked through me as they looked through the refugees. I didn’t exist.”

There Saldaña met a young man named Munir, from Mosul. He had helped his three sisters complete their computer science educations in safety. “It was so dangerous that I had to take them by my hand to the university and wait for them at the door to take them home.” During escape, he helped carry people’s bags and children. In Lesvos, he helped the elderly set up and fix their tents. Munir told Saldaña that since he could not finish his own law degree because of war, he would “be the candle” for others.

People lived there as refugees from Gaza, Basra, Kuwait, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In her book, she writes that Munir was Sunni Muslim, friends with Murtada who was Shiite Muslim. At least in Lesvos, they told her, they could be friends. Said Murtada, “In Iraq, they were trying to get us to kill one another.”

As she explained in her talk, “In a time of difficulty, Munir discovered who he is. During war, lots of doctors can’t be doctors anymore. Lawyers can’t be lawyers. Farmers can’t be farmers. We’re forced to find the vocation deepest in us. Munir was a candle, and nothing could take that away from him — not war, not exile, not poverty, not humiliation. He illuminates for us the profound beauty of giving our lives every single day. That is about hope.”

Saldaña also shared the story of a young man in Syria, who grew up seeing how his community welcomed Iranian refugees. “His family gave these visitors their food and a bed and clothes. He’d never been any place out of his village, so he thought the whole world was like that. So, when he escaped Syria, he was looking for the family like his, who would receive him and give food and clothes. Instead, he was put into a prison camp. The damage to him was not the cold or the humiliation. It was the shock that everyone was not welcoming.”

 

Medicine of Compassion

Saldaña visited refugees in Amsterdam, including a young couple that had opened a pharmacy in Aleppo, Syria. There they had two sons and were happy — and then the war started. After the husband heard gunshots near work, he went home assuming he would get back to work the next day. But by then the building had been destroyed and the pharmacy had been looted. With the loss in income, they lost their rental home. They moved into an uncle’s house after he left the area.

Doctors and pharmacists also were leaving. Neighbors needed medicine, so they opened a new pharmacy in their garage. They found broken chairs and shelves to fix. They bought supplies to sell, one or two at a time. They created rules: be open early in the morning, until late at night, because people needed access and dependability. They learned everyone’s names, including names of children. They offered coffee.

“They felt like kindness was the most special thing about their city,” Saldaña explained, “and it was disappearing in the war. They wanted a place where they would simply be kind. Aleppo had become the front lines of the Civil War. Neighbors were becoming exhausted. No one had a family in which people hadn’t left the country.”

They listened to people’s stories: My son never comes to visit anymore. My husband left the country and now I’m alone with the children. Soon their clientele was not necessarily looking for medicine. “They just wanted somebody to talk to. Somebody to whom they could say, I’m tired. This was medicine for the soul. The medicine of compassion.”

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Lessons Learned From Refugees

Saldaña says some of the lessons she learned from the refugees she talked to:

• When things are so difficult and confusing, we can feel overwhelmed. It is easy to feel it is the end of something — but it also is the beginning of something else.
• Listen to what makes you restless. Sometimes we mistake anxiety as an urging into action. Hope causes not rest, but unrest; not patience, but impatience. Listen to what you love — where you can apply the gift of yourself.
• Face reality. We cannot change anything unless we look at reality first and then with the eyes of creation. We see possibility, a new horizon. We see possibility, a new horizon.

Hope is what allows us to look into what seems to be the ruins and discover that there lies everything we need to build something new.

She shared the story of a Syrian dish called Makdous — a small, pickled eggplant stuffed with walnuts and peppers. After escaping, Syrian refugees learned they could not buy the eggplant for this dish. They asked the second wave of refugees to bring eggplant seeds. By the time she met them, the displaced community was growing eggplants together.

Saldaña noted at her talk that “incredible creativity can come out of despair. Every person finds hope when they realize they have something to offer someone else. Because it’s not for ourselves that we keep going, but when we realize we have something to give. That’s when people find answers — when they want to save their neighbors, like the pharmacist, and they want to get their kids back in school. You find a way, even if you don’t know how. You keep struggling until you get there. And that’s really a precious thing. It is profound.”

Saldaña added that when the war in Gaza escalated, and everyone was scared, she found her neighbors buying seeds for their garden. People with little money started giving away bread for free. Taxi drivers who struggled to pay for gas gave her son rides home for free when he was walking home alone. “That’s hope. Hope has a different logic. It lives life in the other direction. I think all of us are invited in times like these to live life in the other direction.”

 

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