The New Humanitarian aims to amplify the voices of humanitarian workers, refugees, asylum seekers and people affected by conflicts and disasters. Today, I'm going to tell my story; part of a series of First Person narratives that dig into the humanity of humanitarian challenges. My name is Zaina Shahla. I am a reporting fellow with The New Humanitarian based in Damascus.
At the moment, everyone in Syria has been living on edge since the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated last month in Tehran. We're all wondering if a regional war is going to break out. This heightens our fears, but in many ways, we have been living with them for a long time.
Over more than 10 months of Israel's war in Gaza, it has often felt like everything is about to erupt, and it sometimes feels like all I have known is war after it broke out in my country 13 years ago. As a journalist, I try to make sense of it all. Actually, I didn't do anything like field reporting during the war or political reporting. I love working on the
cultural and social stuff. So for me, my work hasn't changed, let me say, but it's developing over time, because I'm discovering new stories to report on; how people are coping with the war, how people are trying to do something because, you know, in every country, I don't think it's only in Syria, people are trying to find creative ways to cope with what's happening and to build somehow, a normal life. So, this is the thing I love to report on. I
lived in Damascus my whole life. Actually, when someone asks me about years before the war, it's hard to remember sometimes, because we've been living in this conflict war since more than a decade. So, it's not easy to remember how life looked like when I was at university or was having somehow a normal life, like going to work, going to university, hang out with friends, and just planning for new things every year. And we
witnessed very brutal incidents in Damascus. We lived in constant pressure under shelling, under the bombs almost every day. Everything around us was about death. Was about how to rescue yourself and your family and to protect everyone and to make sure everyone is okay. So your mind was always busy about staying alive, you know. But after this ended around Damascus in 2018, we felt somehow hope that everything maybe was ending.
Maybe we're going to enter a new phase of somehow stability. Of course, the war in whole Syria didn't end, but we were hoping in Damascus that somehow, something will change. But we entered a new phase that was really more difficult, maybe than the war. Because since 2018 until now, everything
deteriorated, especially on the economic level. So prices are getting really high because of the destruction of the country, because of Covid and what happened after Covid, because of the revolution in Lebanon that affected us a lot, and also the Western sanctions. So, now you have a very high rate of poverty, insecurity. And you can add to this that you don't know when a new war gonna erupt in Syria and also in the region. So
you don't feel stable at all. You go on in your life, but inside your heart and inside your feelings, you know that nothing is stable. So yeah, let me talk about what happened last week. I was sitting in my room reading and listening to some songs, and suddenly the room started to shake, and I found out that an earthquake happened in central Syria. It was, I think, 5.6
and we felt really, really afraid. And my friends went out of their houses to the streets because we remembered what happened last year in the earthquake, February, earthquake that hit Turkey and a lot of places in North Syria. So we just like felt, oh my God, because we're now living and waiting for a war to erupt in the whole area, since the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, and everyone is talking about a new big war in the Middle East. And every night we waiting
for this war, and we felt, Oh, my God, a new earthquake. This is too much to handle, actually, too much to handle, to wait for a war. And sometimes I just need people to know that we, the people here in the area. I'm not only talking about Syria. I'm really, really heartbroken about what's happening in Palestine, in Gaza. So I think sometimes people think we are not equal, like maybe Western people are more human, or their life is more important. But we, in Syria, in Lebanon, Palestine,
Iraq, we have our own very rich life. We are very well educated people. We have our dreams. We have our future. So, I don't know if anyone has a solution, you know, for the Middle East, what's happening here, but what I know that we are really exhausted and we really deserve a normal life. Everyone on the
whole planet deserves a normal life. A friend of mine wrote on Facebook a few days ago that everyone expects or is waiting for normal things like a message appointment with a doctor or something - "things like a medical appointment, an email from a company for a job vacancy, or even a message from someone they like. For us in the Middle East, it's a bit
different. We got over the boredom of waiting for electricity to come or an official message to get a couple of fuel liters for our cars, and now we started getting bored of waiting for an expected bombardment. And responsible..." We are waiting for bombs and we are waiting for the wars. And I mean it, war is the worst thing that you can live in your life. It's very ugly. Whenever someone asks me, okay, what are you gonna do next
month? Or let us meet in three or four months, I say, Okay, let us stay alive, because we really don't know, something gonna happen in the area, or maybe the airport is gonna be closed. In Syria, we have kind of special case, because since more than a decade, our airports aren't functioning internationally because of the sanctions and because many of the international airlines stopped coming to Syria. So we only have few destinations that we can go to from Damascus airport or
Aleppo airport. So we've been depending on Beirut airport for most of our travels. So now, when we think about something that's going to happen in Beirut, and maybe they're going to strike Beirut or maybe the airport, we have double fear, because Lebanon actually is our only gate to the outside world. We're living in a big, big prison in Syria. Okay, we can go out and in, but it feels like it's kind of prison, and we're losing our connections to the outside world. So sometimes I
feel, okay, let's have a big war. Something gonna end, you know, or something gonna change. Sometimes I said, No, we cannot really handle a big war, neither in Syria or Lebanon or in any place. And as for my friends, so many of them were afraid, especially in the first days, because every day the news say Hezbollah or Iran gonna target the next day, and we wake up and we don't find anything. So until now, everyone is saying, Okay, tomorrow is
there is a war. So what are we gonna do? Are we gonna stay at home? Gonna go to work? Sometimes we try to turn it into something funny, but it's not easy. Today, I went to the dentist to have a regular checkup, and at night, I have a lot of teeth grinding, and I wear something for my teeth. And he asked me, how is it going? Are you comfortable with? And I say, Yeah, but I feel strange wearing
it. And he told me, do you know that half of the Syrian people are wearing this at night, and I have a lot of patients who come to me and ask me to put something like this for them, because I think almost all Syrians are having like this teeth grinding at night because of the tension of everything we're living. For me, actually, I didn't go yet to a therapist. I'm not ready maybe for this solution. But I try to talk to people and maybe hanging out with some friends, because it's a good
therapy for me, just saying whatever we are feeling. Maybe listening to music, writing, reading, yeah, maybe normal stuff, walking. I love walking, and also maybe it's something silly, but I love driving my car. I just drive my car for long ways, and I put music, and I think all the time. Just imagining that we're having like a normal life is something good for me - and also work. My work is good therapy for me, because
I really love my work. And whenever I meet very beautiful Syrian people, I just feel hope again, that we are able to have a good future. Every single day, I have this question in my mind, should I stay in Syria, or should I leave? Because somehow I have some luxury, maybe to leave, to maybe search for work abroad or live in another country. But it's not easy question for me. I really love living here, and I enjoy somehow my life here. I
love my friends. I love my social circles. We still have a very good social life in Syria. I mean, I don't feel alone in Syria. I know I have a lot of support circles around me, but the daily life in Syria is becoming really, really hard. So you consume a lot of your energy on very trivial things, providing electricity, providing fuel to your car and to run the internet or to work. One day, I wrote on Instagram that maybe I will leave the county because of the internet, because it's
really, really tiring. So, sometimes at the end of the day I say, Oh, my God, can I stay here for another year and another year, like living in this very difficult situation? I don't know. I hope that life gets better, and I hope we won't be forced to leave the country or the area, because it's unstable region. So okay, if I leave Syria, should I go to Lebanon? It's not stable also. Where should I go? Because you feel the whole planet don't want the Syrians to come. We have a
verb in Arabic that says ميّاتي ما خلصوا من هاد المك. Like, my water here didn't finish yet, so I still have something to do, I think, and I still have life here, and I still love living here, and hopefully will still have the opportunity to live here. The New Humanitarian aims to amplify the voices of refugees, asylum seekers and people affected by conflict and disasters, placing them at the center of the conversation about the policies and events that shape their lives.
Subscribe to our podcast feed to hear more stories from people affected by humanitarian issues. This episode was produced and edited by Freddie Boswell, sound engineering by Mark Nieto and Original Music by Whitney Patterson. I am Zena Shahla. Thanks for listening. Hello, listeners. We would love to hear from you. We're always looking to improve our podcasts, our coverage and our work, and that's why we're inviting you to take a quick audience survey.
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