Woman, from Syria.
I had a good life before the war broke out. I was making a living by sewing pearls on textiles and clothing and I liked it a lot, but when I got married there was no longer a need for me to do it, and later my time was consumed by taking care of my children. We had bought an apartment on the second store in the city where we lived, but when the war broke out we moved outside the city to the countryside where we rented a house. The house was surrounded by a beautiful landscape with grass, flowers, fruit trees, sheep and a river, and it just felt very peaceful.
I was pregnant with our youngest child at the time, and as we could hear the shootings and bombs, we decided to flee to Turkey. But the journey turned out to be very frightening as we together with a large group of people were taken to the border in a huge vehicle and near the border were stopped at gunpoint by some soldiers. They threatened to kill us and take our money and other horrible things, and it was a very scary experience, but they let us go, and the person who was driving told us to keep our heads down, so nobody could see us.
Once in Turkey, the driver left us and we did not really know what to do, so we slept out in the open and then we began to walk and during the 3 first days we had nothing to eat. For many months we lived on the street or in different houses, but it did not feel safe at all. And at one point we even went back to Syria, but we left again. We decided to send our youngest boy together with my brother and his family to Denmark as we legally had the right to a family reunification.
However, it took 3 years before we saw our son again in Denmark, where I arrived last year with my husband and our two sons and two daughters. One of my daughters got married in Turkey just before we left and she now has had a child, and we would really like to go and see our grandchild and hold him in our arms. But it is a complicated situation, because we probably will not be able to leave Denmark now that we have gotten our permanent residence permit.
We have just gotten our own apartment, and even though it is a good apartment located in a nice neighbourhood, I am tired of moving around: It seems as though the moving never ends and that I am always packing or unpacking our belongings, and I am just tired and at times it can feel lonely to be in a new country. But I am also grateful that I have had the opportunity to be here, although I realize that I until now have lived in a protected environment in a temporary housing and that I do not really know how life is here and what it is supposed to feel like.
Dublin Core: Language: en Subject: a million stories, denmark, syria, refugee,