Baladi - Newspapers
When Abu Bakr al-Rabeeah and his family arrived from Syria to the Canadian city of Edmonton, many challenges were waiting for him, starting with learning English and ending with the fulfillment of his secret dream. He wanted one day to tell his story to the world, especially those who see his family only as refugees.
Eight months later, he has become a published author. His book, Homes: A Refugee Story, was set to be officially released on Saturday -12 May by an Edmonton book publisher.
“It’s unbelievable, to be honest,” says Abu Bakr, 17. “I can’t believe it.”
The book captures his experience of growing up in the Middle East. He was nine when his family moved from Iraq to Syria to escape escalating tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims. A year later civil war broke out in Syria, punctuating memories of being surrounded by family and playing video games with the horror of car bombings, attacks on schools and late-night explosions.
He wrote the book with Winnie Yeung, the schoolteacher with whom he first shared his dream. Initially they planned a short presentation for his peers. “I could tell he was feeling quite alienated,” says Yeung. “He was saying that his fellow classmates really had no idea where Syria is, or what’s going on in the Middle East. They were asking him: ‘Do you have chairs in classrooms there?’”
With permission from his parents, the pair got to work. Using the few English words he knew at the time, he began sharing all he could remember of his childhood. Yeung soon realised that their project was bigger than a class presentation.
During lunch hours and after lessons, Yeung would frantically scribble notes as Abu Bakr recounted his childhood. Struggling to navigate the language barrier between them, they got creative. “There was a lot of charades and pantomiming,” says Yeung. “I got a lot of things wrong, we misunderstood each other quite a bit. It took so long to get the stories right.”
Google Translate became their go-to app. They looked up events on YouTube and news websites, transporting Abu Bakr back to the streets of Homs through Google Earth’s street view.
Yeung, who learned “the most basic” Arabic, also spent hours interviewing his family in order to contextualise his experience.
At times the stories pouring out of Abu Bakr, a young man with an easy smile and warm laugh, left her in shock. The horrors of war were woven into the fabric of his childhood memories: flying homemade kites amid the rubble of destroyed buildings, playing with bullet casings he found on the street. “It was so matter of fact for him, so normal.”
Abu Bakr hopes the book will help keep attention on the crisis unfolding in the Middle East.
“I really hope people will read my story and enjoy it,” he said. “And I hope they will get the main idea of it – how hard it is leaving home and how hard it is to live in a civil war.”
Source: The Guardian