With childlike innocence said the girl:
“I wish that snowfall were cotton
So I could weave a robe for my doll.”
Tears came into her red tired eyes, which brought me to a shock.
I wanted to give her a reason for the cold-
She interrupted me to say, “It’s cold because of your rusty worn out humanity.
‘Therefore you have to lay the blame on humanity, not on the snow.
‘This white snow is like my wedding dress in the future.
It’s made my plundered and burnt house more beautiful.
Snow purified my route, which you have polluted.
It is not the snow to blame… lay the blame on your worn-out humanity.”
-Mamoun Abu Naser
Mamoun Abu Naser was born “stateless” as a Palestinian refugee in Syria. While he made a comfortable life for himself working as an English teacher at UNRWA, (the United Nations Relief Agency for Palestinians in the Near East), his stateless status left him without much options for his future aside from having the choice to move back to Palestine, which, of course, due to the tumultous political situation there, was not much of an option.
“When I reached the Netherlands, I thought, ‘this is the last step for me- to begin the first step for me- and my family.'”
When war broke out in Syria, it became clear, that for any hope for a better future, let alone, survival, he would have to move himself and his family to Europe. So, once more, Mamoun was made a refugee when he opted to flee war-torn Syria in 2015. After making the difficult decision to leave his wife and kids behind (the youngest just 2 months old), Mamoun spent a year traveling from Syria to the Netherlands, mostly on foot, in search of a land to call home for him and his family. Hear his words of courage and optimism as he recounts his journey.
This episode features music by Ketsa (copyright) http://ketsamusic.com/ using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License
