Refugee Camp, Syria

Amara

The sun blazed in the dusty, arid sky. It cast its shadows across the tattered tarpaulins that made up the only shelter for the thousands of souls dwelling in the camp. The smell of charred wood and dust had become the backdrop of the inhabitant’s life. Amara tied her faded scarf tightly around her head to keep the dust out of her hair. She moved with purpose through the camp’s narrow lanes, carrying a dented metal pot of lentils she had cooked that morning. 

“Mariam, where are you hiding today?” Amara called out, peering into one of the smaller tents. A little girl, no older than seven, poked her head out. Her hazel eyes were wide with hunger. Amara smiled, setting the pot down. “Eat, habibti [my love],” she said, handing Mariam a small bowl of lentils. “We’ll start lessons after this.”

The makeshift school was Amara’s refuge for the last three years. It was a small tent where she taught the camp’s children to read and write. She believed that in a world that had taken everything from them, their homes, families, and even the sense of safety, education was the one thing she could still give them. It wasn’t much, but it was something they could hold on to.

When the lessons ended, Amara returned to her own tent. She lit a small lantern as the sun dipped behind the mountains. The camp was quieter at night. The hum of voices faded into the distant sound of wind rustling through the wreckage. This was her time to write. 

She clutched the journal that had traveled with her through bombings, escapes, and heartbreak. It held more than words. It held lives. Each name written on its yellowing pages was a thread connecting Amara to the people she had met. It was her way of ensuring they weren’t forgotten, even if the world seemed determined to erase them.

She opened the journal and flipped through the pages, running her fingers over the names she had written. Some were in Arabic, others in the uneven scrawl of children just learning to write. Some names written from stories she had heard in the camp, some even before she had arrived here. Each name had a story: a father lost to an airstrike, a mother holding her child’s hand as they fled through the desert, a boy who still cried for his sister, a baby whose whole family was lost in shelling while he was left to be adopted by the camp.

But there was one name she never got around to write. Samie.

She had vowed not to let go of the memory of her husband. He was one of the ‘White Helmets*’ who stayed behind in Aleppo to help children trapped in the rubble of a school. She had begged him to leave with her, but he had refused. “You go, Amara,” he had said. “They need me here. You’ll be safe at the camp. That’s what matters.”

He had kissed her forehead, pressed a photograph of the two of them into her hand, and walked back toward the crumbling city. She hadn’t seen him since. She didn’t know if he had survived, or if his name belonged in the unspoken section of her journal that was reserved for the dead.

She looked at the picture that was the only testimony of the life long bond she had shared with him. Samie, in a pastel green kurta with pink and green hand embroidered collar and cuffs, was glowing. His hair combed away from his broad forehead. The week-long stubble trimmed and groomed to perfection. He reflected a proud gleam in his eyes. By his side stood Amara in a black head scarf with red bold flowers. The kohl lined eyes sparked with the glint of youth. Her henna coloured hands held the promise of a future together. 

But now, this is the future. Amara brushed away a stray tear with the back of her hand. The weight of an endless, uncertain wait pressed down on her chest. The only thread holding her together was the time she spent teaching the children who carried wide, searching eyes, and hearts that still dared to hope. She gave them what she could. As much as she was left with.

Ziad

The following morning, as Amara prepared to teach, she heard a shuffle of exhausted footsteps approaching. She recognized the slow, deliberate footsteps that echoed with a familiar heaviness. The din was of a group of new refugees who had arrived at the camp. Amara stepped out of the tent, wiping her hands on her scarf.

The group was a collection of weary faces, each carrying a story written in lines of pain and affliction. Their eyes held the same exhaustion she had grown used to. This was an exhaustion born not just from physical fatigue but from the heaviness of survival. Beneath the weariness, there was something fragile, something quivering but not extinguished. Hope. It was the kind of hope that wasn’t bold or loud but guarded, as if it didn’t fully trust the world anymore. Amara had seen it countless times before, and it never failed to break her heart.

A man, from among the lot, passed by Amara’s tent. He seemed old, maybe in his fifties, and weary. His salt-and-pepper beard framed a face marked by time and hardship. He walked with a slow and deliberate limp. His clothes were loose, hanging off his thin, worn frame. His eager eyes moved anxiously, scanning the camp. It was as if he were searching for something or perhaps someone. And then his gaze locked with Amara.

Amara’s heart tightened into an unexplainable ache. New arrivals, like him, often looked like ghosts of who they once were. It wasn’t unusual to see hollow faces and haunted eyes. But there was something about this man that was different.

He carried himself with a quiet dignity despite the weight he seemed to bear. His posture wasn’t broken, but it wasn’t whole either. And then there were his eyes.

She recognised the pain in his eyes as the kind of pain that came from losing too much, too quickly. The kind that stays with you, quietly gnawing at your soul. She had seen it so many times, in the mirror, in the faces of the children she taught, and in the parents who clung to them like lifelines.

This man’s pain felt deeper, more personal, as though it came from carrying the memory of someone he couldn’t leave behind. It unsettled her, because it felt so terribly close to her own.

Later that day, as she gathered the children for their lessons, the man approached her.

“Do you need help?” he asked. His voice was merely a whisper. His Arabic carried the lilting cadence of someone from Aleppo.

Amara hesitated. It wasn’t common for men in the camp to volunteer but they were often too broken by their own grief and struggles to think of others. But this man didn’t seem to want to sit idle.

“I can always use an extra pair of hands,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Ziad,” he replied.

“Aleppo?” Amara asked him, hoping that he hailed from her town. 

She saw the way his shoulders were slumped. His lips were heavy with unspoken sorrow that didn’t match the quiet light in her eyes. But she believed, perhaps foolishly, that just being here, in this moment, in this place, would help him heal from whatever storm he was weathering.

As if he had read the question lingering in her mind, Zaid spoke. “No family to live for anymore,” he said. He exhaled, as if releasing a part of that grief into the air. “I thought maybe this place… maybe here, I could find a reason to keep going.”

Amara smiled at that. It was strange how people could find a flicker of light in the darkest corners, as if survival itself was woven into the human spirit for eternity.

Amara and Zaid

Over the weeks that followed, Ziad became a quiet presence in the camp. He helped Amara repair the children’s broken desks and carved small toys for them from scrap wood he scavenged. The children adored him, crowding around him to watch as he carved intricate birds, cars, and even a miniature camel for them.

Amara observed him from a distance, trying to piece together his story. He didn’t talk about his past ever, and she never asked. She acknowledged how people in the camp carried their secrets like invisible scars, and she knew better than to pry. How was one to let their wounds lay bare when they knew everyone around was going through their own personal hell?

It was late one evening as the sun set and the children ran off to their respective tents that Ziad approached Amara with a small wooden bird in his hand. Its wings were spread, as if in flight.

“This is for you,” he said, holding it out.

“For me?” Her light brown eyes shone. She hesitated before taking it. “Why a bird?” she asked softly.

A faint smile tugged at his lips, “because… birds don’t care about borders,” Ziad said. “They fly over the rubble, the fences, the checkpoints. They remind us that there’s still freedom somewhere in the world.”

Amara observed the carved wings of the bird and traced her fingers over them. 

“When I look at you, Amara, I see a bird just like this, who is providing flight to these tiny lives here, amidst doom and hopelessness. You are such a god sent for them.”

She felt a lump rise in her throat. “Thank you,” she whispered. When Zaid turned and walked away, she wiped a tiny tear from her eye that had sprung up.

Rebuilding Hope

Zaid stayed by her side, working quietly in the little school and stirring pots of steaming food for the small community they had nurtured. He moved with quiet purpose, checking in on the elderly, sitting with the sick, fixing what he could; broken fences, restless souls. In the rhythm of daily tasks he found something that felt almost like belonging. With Amara.

Together, they planted jasmine bushes around the camp. The jasmine became their symbol of hope. The flowers bloomed with their sweet fragrance cutting through the stench of war. Amara and Zaid began to feel a glimmer of peace that they hadn’t felt in years.

Amidst all this, there was something that seemed to linger on the edge of Zaid’s thoughts. He was caught between a certain hesitation and necessity. He had tried to come across to Amara before, through half-formed sentences and swallowed words, but each time, the weight of it held him back. It wasn’t just difficult to say, it was difficult to begin. But now, he felt that there was no room left for silence. Amara needed to know. She deserved to. And this time, he couldn’t turn away. 

Amara sat in her tent writing names in her journal. The sun was touching down on the dusty horizon further past the refugee camp. Ziad appeared at the entrance of her tent. She looked up from the journal and put it aside. “What’s that in your hand?” she asked. He held a folded piece of paper hesitant to present it.

“Umm…” he swallowed the spittle that was holding his words. “I think this belongs to you,” he said, extending his hand.

Amara furrowed her eyebrows, setting her pen down and taking the paper from him. She unfolded the paper carefully. Her hands trembled as she recognized the handwriting. Her name was written on it, the letters scrawled in a familiar, hurried script.

“Samie,” she breathed, her voice breaking.

Ziad nodded. “I met him in Aleppo. He was helping a group of children escape a bombed-out school. He... he saved my life. He saved many lives.”

Amara’s heart pounded in her chest. Water sprung into her eyes. “Is he...?”

“He didn’t make it,” Ziad’s voice was filled with quiet regret. “He stayed behind to make sure everyone else got out. He gave me this and told me to find you if I could.”

In that one moment, Amara’s world came crashing down. The grief she had buried for so long erupted like a storm, shaking her to her core. Ziad knelt beside her, his hand hovering over her shoulder before resting there gently.

“He loved you,” Ziad said softly. “Even at the end, you were on his mind. Who knows for how long he had your name written on this piece of paper in his pocket.”

Amara clutched the paper to her chest, tears streaming down her face. Her silent sobs vanished in the cold winter breeze like the millions of sighs around her.

The Keeper of Names

The days after Zaid’s revelation blurred into a haze of emotions for Amara. A quiet storm kept brewing within her. She moved through the motions even though her mind was heavy with thoughts she couldn’t yet unravel. Only when she was with the children, teaching, laughing, offering them a world brighter than her own, did she manage to push aside the weight of it all. She had to. They needed hope, even if she wasn’t sure she had any left for herself.

Zaid watched her from a distance, knowing that no matter how much time had passed, this moment had always been inevitable. Samie’s message had been his burden to carry, but it was never his to keep. Amara had the right to know. And now that she did, all he could do was give her the space to make peace with it, however long it took.

One evening, as they sat by the fire, Ziad looked at her and said, “You gave me a reason to keep going, Amara. If Samie had not given me that message I wouldn’t have had a reason to live or find my way here. Thank you.”

She smiled. “And you reminded me that love doesn’t end when someone is gone. It carries on, in the people they touched, in the lives they saved.”

The ache in her eyes weighed on Zaid more than he had imagined. He wished he could take away even a fraction of her pain, but some burdens weren’t meant to be carried by others. Still, he knew one thing for sure. Amara had a way of pulling warmth from the coldest moments, of turning even the heaviest silences into something softer, something survivable. He had witnessed it every day that he had been with her. 

Amara’s journal now held hundreds of names. Each name was a quiet monument to resilience and survival. Though the war raged on, she held on to her task. Her mission now was to etch their stories into permanence, to ensure that their voices did not fade into the silence of history. Some lives were lost, but their stories would not be.

She turned the page as her fingers lingered on the crisp, empty sheet. For a moment she just stared, as if waiting for the right words to come. Then, she picked up her pen and, with steady, deliberate strokes, wrote his name at the centre.

Samie.

Gone. Never forgotten.

***

* White Helmets- The White Helmets, also known as the Syrian Civil Defense, is a volunteer organization that provides emergency services in Syria. They are known for their white protective hard hats. (Google AI)