The curse of the expat

Over the past few days I've come across some of the most beautiful and joyful scenes one can see in a life time. An ancient city dressed up for christmas with lights and street fair, the laughter of children on the rides and the scent of spiced coffee and Christmas sweets. Walking through the Christmas market in Edinburgh I kept thinking that Bab tomah or Kasa'a' in Damascus should be as festive at this time.

The following day I was going through the glens of the Highlands with its snow topped peaks and small streams crossing through the stone all the way to the different lochs and two thoughts came across my mind, this could be Kassab with its majestic mountains and lemon trees; and can all the springs in Scotland wash the blood of the face of my beloved Syria?

Over the past ten months I, like so many Syrians living outside Syria, have, been living in turmoil and peace at the same time. You wake up, go to work, meet friends and live life as normal but at the same time you're wasting away with every drop of blood wasted, you sanity is slowly disappearing with every news round and you're losing friends and family quicker than you can keep up with.

We're cursed if we support and cursed if we oppose, we're damned if we're in the middle or if we try to keep room for logic or reasoning.

We're double cursed because we have to live on when our family and friend back home struggle to hold on. How can I keep warm when my flesh and blood slowly waste away? How can i see beauty when so much ugliness surrounds me?

I've been living outside Syria for so many years, I've never felt I'm exiled as much as I do today. The past ten months have created two types of Syrians, those living in Syria and those living abroad, deny it as much as you want but you cannot say that you're as part of Syria as the people who are living these days there. This was not a price I bargained when I chose to temporarily live abroad, I think that most Syrian expats haven't bargained on this price either.

2011 has cost us all so much, blood, lives, friends and our sense of belonging, as it's coming to its end, the heart trembles when thinking what more can be lost.

A friend told me yesterday while walking the streets of the old city surrounded by joy and morning our dead, this is just the beginning, the stupidity accumulated through the past months and the push for "creative chaos" and "you need to destroy in order to build" is starting to show its results. The question on my mind, how much more will it take for some to realise the price they're asking others to pay? Will 2012 carry the salvation or distraction of all that is beautiful in Syria?

Forgive me all, I can't wish you a merry Christmas nor happily wait for the new year, I can only wish that we end 2012 still having a Syria we can call home and with healing wounds not fresh ones.

2008

Another year is coming to an end and like every year, we look forward to the year ahead and rethink that year that passed. Going with the latter , 2008 has been a phenomenal year to say the least. Events that we didn’t imagine took place during 2008, things that lifted us up and others that came crashing down on all of us. What is happening now in Gaza is just the last drop in a cup full of sadness we had to drink over the last 12 months.

For me 2008 has been a strange year, I went through unbelievable highs and very dark lows. The year held personal loss that had reaching domino effects on other things in my life and had a fundamental life changing gain that set the stage for a lifetime of change, sharing, partnership and love. Thus is life, gives you in one hand and takes from you in the other.

A year on from my last relevant post and the world had changed shape yet again, I’m not sure if I’m wiser of better on the eve on this new year, the one sure thing is that I’m older, age is the one unstoppable truth of a dying year, everything else is debatable.

A year has passed, a line has been drown and a new tally will start in a few hours…happy counting 2009

Another day, Another year...

So, another day and another year has gone by, like most (if not all) people on the planet we square our positions, do our yearly inventory, tally up all the books and pass a judgment on whether the year that passed was a good year or a bad one!

And like most, it’s always somewhere in between, the year had its highs and lows and on average we end the year roughly where we started or, if lucky enough, a bit happier, more satisfied or well off.

So what was 2007 for me? Another step towards the big 30 which seems so much closer nowadays; not sure what the judgment of the first 30 years will be, I leave that to the wiser/older crowd to suggest and to me at 31 to decide!

2007 witnessed a gigantic step in my personal life, a lucky, or unlucky depending on how you see it, man has decided that I’m a suitable partner to spend his life with believe it or not. He has popped the question 2 years ago now but the whole family/formality side of things came into existence at super speed earlier this year. Over our 2 and ½ years relationship, we’ve driven each other mad, up the wall, into success and towards better, brighter places in life. We’ve shared so much and learned so much about each other and more importantly about ourselves. Words like love, passion, friendship, care and happiness were redefined in 2007 and I can only hope that this trend will carry through in 2008 and beyond.

Career wise, I’ve now spent more than a year at my current position after finishing my rotation, I’ve crossed swords with a few, argued with a few and stepped on a lot of toes over this period but no matter how horrible the day goes, I wake up most of the times looking forward to arriving at the office. I enjoy what I do immensely and although when I started this road in 2004 I was heading in a completely different direction, God/fate/destiny had a different idea and I ended up at a much more exciting, and unexpected, place. It can be mad at the office sometimes but it can never be boring!

I can’t believe that I’ve lived in this country since 2003! It feels so long and so short at the same time! The days when I was living and working in Damascus are ancient history in a way but I can fully remember the “me” that was then! It seems a life time away but I can see it so clearly as if locked in a glass box that is the old me. Have I become a wiser, better person since I came to this country? I have no idea to tell you the truth, living in London is now such a part of me it’s hard to imagine living in any other place. I remember telling a fellow Londoner/blogger before that I love the city with all its contradictions and sides. For me Damascus carries my past, family, roots but London is the sky I’m expanding my branches into. I appreciate the freedom it offer and the challenges it carries and I think I still have a few more “London years” in me yet.

What do I have in store for 2008? I was reading Abufares’ blog today about New Year’s Eve over the year, and if not anything else, it simply shows you that a new year can carry you anywhere and while you try to plan a year ahead you never know where the wind will throw you in the year to come. Where will I be on New Year’s Eve 2008? I don’t have a clue, I just hope that I’ll be spending it with the people I love and share the tallying with them then.

I hope 2008 will add to me as much as 2007 has and for it to be a happier one for the people I know that all of you dear readers.

Happy 2008!

Peace and Good will to all man kind

(The photo used in this post is by a friend, more of the same can be found here)

It’s the holiday season and I managed to get the 3 odd days between the Christmas and New Year’s off so I was planning a long, relaxing holiday with the people I care about the most. That was until I received a call telling me that my parents have managed to get a ticket and are flying over next week! A bag of mixed reactions landed in my lap, Wow, I love how things are done in Syria, I was trying to get a ticket to fly home for the holiday but the cheapest thing I could find was £500+ (way out of budget) while my parents were able to find tickets within 24 hours from getting their visas! My house, which has been getting the shorter end of the stick with regards to my spare time is in real mess, now every where I look, I can just imagine my mum shaking her head in dismay at her “not so domestic oriented” daughter while my dad gives me his disapproving look for the garden fence that I haven’t fixed yet! Ouch, the list is just building up and my long awaited relaxing holiday has just gone up in smoke.

Yet, I can’t help but think how lucky I am, I’m warm at home with my family coming over for Eid/New Year’s while some 70K+ people were stranded in Heathrow in the freezing cold for the past few days trying to get back to their families and loved ones in time for Christmas! The newspapers were filled with stories of stranded parents and shivering children forced to spend the time sleeping on the cold floor of Heathrow Terminals with minimum facilities, what a cheerful Christmas this will be for them.

All over the world, the importance of being with your family & loved ones at this time of the year is paramount, it is not restricted to the people who believe in Christmas or celebrate it but just a universal need to spend the last few hours of the year with the ones you care about the most. Near or far, all feel the urge to cuddle up in the arms of those closest, and thinking of the year that passed with all its ups and downs and the year ahead with all the mysteries that it holds. And the world slows down for these last few hours and you get a sense of breathless anticipation for that last stroke of Big Ben announcing to everyone that a year has passed and a New Year is born.

This will be my 4^th New Year in London, but the years before when I was home seem so far away I can barely remember how they passed or what I did then, but since I arrived here, each New Year was filled with the promise of things to come, of adventures to live and mountains to clime. 2003-2004 was the first, I have been in the UK for 4 months by that time, had exams a couple of days after new year’s and suffering a every bad case of heart ache, 2004-2005 was the first new year after I started working in the City, I was still trying to figure out if I made the right decision leaving old stories behind and closing so many doors in order to follow this new life that I knew nothing about in England. 2005-2006 was a very strange one, I managed to get the time off and flew back to Syria but my return was scheduled for 3am January 1^st, so after a rather weird evening listening to Khadam on Al-Arabia with my mum and dad, I drove to Damascus airport, eerily empty at the first hours of the new year and spend the time struggling with a very antiquated PC trying to talk to my friend in Japan. Till today the “Damascus Airport Messenger” still brings smiles and tears to my eyes at the same time!

So, 2006-2007 I wonder how will that one be, off course I wont know till next week, what I know is that 2006 was the happiest and the hardest year in my life, so many things have changed, so many important dates to remember throughout the year. The foundations of life-time changes were laid during this year. A whole structure for the future has been put in place, ripped apart and then rebuild over and over again. Never has a year passed me so quickly, yet so slowly at the some time, it is exciting when one experiences Relativity first hand! So this New Year’s eve should be interesting as well as I try to celebrate it with people spread across 17 time zones (from GMT+9 to GMT-8) it will be one long party!

Merry Christmas to you All, and for all of you trying to get home, best of luck and I do pray for a special miracle so that you spend this time with the ones you love…