pool of muddy water, plucking a chicken. Two kids
throw stones at a rat. Teenage boys build a shelter
from sticks and sheets of plastic. Diggers and tractors
sit alongside heaps of ripped-up earth and sacks of
building materials.
“We’re expanding the camp,” Mohammad says.
“We need more space.”
My head is too full with everything. My legs
won’t move how I want them to. My world spins. I
stumble. Try to catch myself. Crash to the ground.
Mohammad rushes to my side. He takes my arm,
lifts me to my feet.
“I’ll help you,” he says. “We’re nearly at the
clinic.”
The clinic is a white shipping container
surrounded by medical tents. The smell of diesel
smoke from the shipping container’s generator
reminds me strongly of home. Even though it’s almost
dark, people crowd around outside. Mohammad
helps me to a chair at the entrance. Three doctors
work in white coats with sleeves rolled up. Boxes of
medicines are stacked on racks, more on the floor.
It smells like Baba’s pharmacy. In a good way, it
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reminds me of home. Mohammad fetches a doctor, who sits next to me. “What is your name?” he says.
He has white skin and a foreign accent. He smells of
lemons. It’s a nice smell.
“Ghalib,” I say.
“How old are you, Ghalib?”
“Thirteen.”
As he talks, the doctor’s hands skim over my face,
my arms, my head. His eyes search my bruised and
cut face. He takes a long strip of colored paper and
wraps it around my upper arm. He writes notes on
his pad.
“When did you last eat, Ghalib?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your last drink of water?”
My head is fuzzy. When did we stop at the water
trough? “Earlier today, I think. Maybe yesterday.”
He listens to my breathing with his stethoscope.
He looks closely at me.
“Your chest is not good,” he says. “What
happened?”
“Barrel bomb.”
His fingertips touch the lump on my forehead,
my split lip. He sees Ali’s torn dressings on my feet.
“And these?”
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“Same bomb.”
I bite my lip as he unknots the bloody strips. The
stench of infection rises before he finishes. I stare at my raw and oozing feet.
“We need to treat these,” he says. “You’ll have to
stay with us for a while, Ghalib, so we can get you
into better shape. Mohammad will bring you some-
thing to eat. You can rest, build yourself up. How
does that sound?”
His face breaks into a smile. Once again, stupid
tears spill down my cheeks. I turn away, ashamed in
front of this foreign doctor. I’m too old to cry but I
can’t seem to stop.
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13
I don’t know where I am. I’m too scared to look. I
lie with my eyes squeezed shut and listen for clues.
There are footsteps close by. The clink of bottles
or jars. In the distance, I hear voices. I lie on some-
thing soft and comfortable. It wraps me in its curv-
ing sides and smells of canvas and outdoors and heat.
There are other smells too: medicine and antiseptic,
like Baba’s pharmacy. Food cooking. A soft breeze
blows across my cheeks. I breathe its coolness. I open
my eyes.
I lie on a narrow camp bed with a wooden frame.
The roof of a tent high above presses and lifts with
gusts of wind. The flaps at the open doorway billow
in and out, cooling the heat-heavy air.
I’m in the clinic in the refugee camp in Tur-
key. I’m alone. The light in the tent is twilight blue.
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Evening. I must have slept through last night and all of today after seeing the foreign doctor. Almost
twenty-four hours! Dayah always says I love my sleep.
I pull myself to a sitting position. I need to pee. I
swing my legs to the side but my aching head doesn’t
like the movement. I sit for a moment for the rolling
sickness to settle. I look at the clean bandages on my
feet, the fresh T-shirt I wear.
“It’s good to see you’re awake, Ghalib,” a woman
says. She crosses the tent and smiles as though she
knows me. I have no idea who she is. I can’t even
concentrate enough to greet her.
“I need the toilet,” I say.
“I’ll bring you a bottle.”
I stare at her, horrified. I will not pee into a bot-
tle in front of this woman. “I can use a toilet.” I try
to stand. Dizziness grips me and I sit again.
“Give yourself time,” the woman says. “You’ve
been asleep for two days.”
Two days. I’ve slept for two whole days!
The woman puts a cardboard bottle on the bed
and wheels a screen around to give me privacy.
When I’m finished, she pulls back the screens. She
examines the dressings on my feet, and other cuts
and bruises. She listens to my breathing.
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“All good,” she says. “Even your chest has cleared.”
My head aches and my body feels stiff and heavy.
It must be from being in bed too long.
“You’ve got some color today,” she says. “The
doctor will want to see you now that you’re awake,
but you’ll be here for a while yet.” She brings me
sweet tea, fried bread, and a bottle of water.
I feel stronger after eating but still drowsy. I lie
on my camp bed. I remember someone helping to
wash the dirt and dust off me, the pain when they
cleaned and dressed my burned feet, but not much
more. I think of my family and wonder where they
are. Before long, I’m asleep again.
The pain in my heart, like a dark hole, wakes
me with a shock. Dayah and Baba, Bushra, Alan
and Dapir leap into my thoughts. I lie still. I think
I’m having a heart attack—but soon realize the pain
comes from missing my family. They’re all I think
about. All I dream about.
It’s morning and a male nurse is on duty. He
helps me to a toilet tent outside.
“I’ll walk back myself,” I say.
The morning air is fresh. I splash my face with
cold water and return to my camp bed. The sharp
pain in my heart dulls to an ache, though my
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thoughts are still full of my family. When the doctor arrives, I remember his foreign voice and nice smell.
“You’re looking better,” he says. “Have you
eaten? Are you drinking lots of water? Have you
used the toilet?”
He seems satisfied with my answers. He talks to
the nurse, studies my file. “A few more days,” he
says. “Then you can go to the children’s center.”
After he leaves, the nurse changes my bandages.
“Your feet look better,” he says. “The blisters are
healing and the infection has cleared up.”
Mohammad brings eggs and bread and cheese,
> and a mug of hot sweet tea. I demolish everything
and would eat more, but there’s nothing left.
“Nothing wrong with your appetite,” Moham-
mad says. He tears open a plastic pack of clothing. “I
had to guess your size but I think these will fit.”
He hands me a tracksuit, underwear, lace-up
trainers, a warm quilted jacket, a woolly hat. I stare
at him. “For me?”
The clothes are brand-new. Never worn. They
smell of plastic wrapping. I pick up the tracksuit.
Red, with white stripes down the legs—the Syrian
team colors.
“The national soccer strip?” I say.
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Mohammad smiles. “Everything from the Red Crescent is red, so it might be a coincidence.”
I don’t think so. Alan would love it. I put on
the bottoms. They’re way too big—nearly an adult
size—but I don’t care.
“You’ll grow into them,” Mohammad says.
I tie the cord tight; the pants hang on my hips.
The trainers are white. Even the soles. Spotless.
Straight from the factory.
“I’ve never worn closed-in shoes before.”
“You can’t actually wear them until the bandages
are off your feet,” Mohammad points out.
There’s a blanket and a towel, plus a zip-up
plastic bag with soap, comb, razor, toothbrush and
washcloth. Mohammad peers at my face. “You
probably don’t need the razor yet. You can swap it
for something else. All the kids do.”
He holds up a plastic bowl.
“You’ll use this for everything,” he says. “Wash-
ing, water, food, carrying things. Keep it safe.”
---
The doctor discharges me three days later, on the
condition I return daily to have my dressings changed
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and breathing monitored. Mohammad walks me to the children’s center.
I wear my old sandals until my bandages can be
removed. I hold my head high and check that people
notice the Syrian national strip I wear. Plenty of oth-
ers are wearing it too.
“Lots of Syrian soccer supporters here,” I say.
Mohammad smiles. Maybe he’ll get Alan a
Syrian soccer tracksuit when he gets here, but a
smaller size. “Every section in camp has its own
toilets, kitchens and food center,” Mohammad says.
“There’s a school too.”
“School?” It’s been so long since I went to school.
“You’ll attend once you’re strong enough,”
Mohammad says.
We pass shipping containers, caravans, metal huts
with awnings, tents and a handful of concrete build-
ings. What looked ordered before now seems chaotic
and random. Rubbish and food wrappers lodge in every
corner. Torn plastic bags snag on poles and awnings.
We cross a bridge of old planks laid over thick sludge
oozing through the camp. It stinks of sewage and rot.
“Green River,” Mohammad says. “Never fall in.”
The toilets are in a wooden hut. They reek. Peo-
ple stand in line on the saturated ground, waiting to
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fill buckets, basins and containers from a row of taps on the outside timber wall. A woman squats in the
dirt to wash a squawking baby in a metal bucket.
“Drinking water outside,” Mohammad says.
“Washing water inside.”
Webs of cables fasten the tents to pegs hammered
into the dirt. Three men drive wooden poles into
the ground to hang sheets of plastic on. A shop made
from blue tarpaulin sells fried potatoes and falafel,
bowls of rice, and sweet tea. Men hunker down out-
side to eat and talk. At the back of a truck, people in
reflective jackets carry boxes of vegetables, sacks of
food and bags of flour into a large tent.
“Food center,” Mohammad says. “Families
collect rations here and cook in the kitchens.”
The kitchens are a row of gas burners and open
grills set on a concrete slab beneath a sheet of corru-
gated metal. They’re full of women and kids preparing
vegetables, frying potatoes and chopping cucumbers.
“You’ll eat in the canteen with the other kids in
the center,” Mohammad says.
The children’s center turns out to be a row of four
shipping containers surrounded by a broken fence.
Little kids play a noisy game with a softball, organized by two women with whistles. Mohammad leads me
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into the first container. It’s crammed with cots and small mattresses. The floor is covered with mats, rugs
and scraps of carpet, in the middle of which sits a
woman surrounded with papers and documents. Her
headscarf is neatly held in place with a fancy pin. She
has polished fingernails and gold rings.
“I’m Fatima,” she says. “I run the children’s center.”
Fatima helps me fill in a form all about me: my
age, date of birth, full name.
“Tell me about your family,” she says.
“How did you get separated?” she says.
“How many of you were traveling together?”
she says.
She measures me against a paper strip stuck to the
wall, asks me to describe the clothes I wore when I
arrived.
“When your family crosses over, they’ll come
here first to find you,” Fatima says. “They all look
here for lost children. We keep a database to make it
easier for everyone.”
Musab told me all families head to Ankara to find
separated relatives. Musab was wrong. I’m relieved I
came here. I doubt that anyone in Ankara would
take my name, my date of birth, my height, to help
my family find me.
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“My lost toddlers sleep in this container,” Fatima says. “The next one is for my handful of girls, and
the last two for my boys.”
Fatima shows me a mattress in the last container.
“This is your place now, Ghalib. Your belongings
will be safe here.”
I look around the container. At the mattress. I hug
my new belongings close. “I’ll keep them for now.”
Fatima smiles at me. “The teenagers are at school,”
she says. “You’ll meet them at lunch.”
I’m a little nervous about meeting the others. I’m
a lot nervous about going to school. My head is too
full of everything new, everything different, to con-
centrate. My heart is too sore for my family.
Fatima and Mohammad go back to their work,
and the morning drags. I sit on my own in the door-
way of the container to watch the ball game. Alan
would enjoy this, even though he would probably be
the slowest player and spend half the time tripping
over his own feet.
Dapir and Dayah would help to take care of the
little ones if they were here. Bushra would figure out
some ingenious way to improve the drainage around
the toilets.
By the time I smell lunch cooking on the gas
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burners in the kitchens, I’m hungry and fed up and already dreading the long afternoon ahead.
/> The aroma of food wafts toward us as we walk to
the canteen tent. Inside, Mohammad checks names
off his list, and I help him to load trays with bowls of vegetable stew and bring them to the table.
“Get yourself a bowl, Ghalib,” Mohammad says.
“I’ll introduce you to the others.”
I follow Mohammad to where a large group of
older children and teenagers sit wolfing down dishes
of stew. There’s little chat.
“This is Ghalib,” Mohammad says. “Be nice to
him—he’s just arrived.”
A few people lift their heads. Most ignore me.
An older boy shifts over to let me sit down. I bend
my head to eat. Scan the table as Mohammad checks
faces and names and has a quick word with a couple
of teenagers.
At the far end of the table, a girl raises her head
to stare at me. There’s no mistaking that wild frizz of
hair, tied back with a bright beaded keffiyeh. I lock
on her dark eyes.
I drop my spoon with a clatter; hers freezes mid-
way to her mouth. My heart thunders in my chest as
our eyes lock. It’s Safaa.
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14
White rage rushes through me. It scorches my blood
and sears my thoughts. Because of her, I’m here.
Because of her, I’m alone.
If she hadn’t disappeared, I would still be with
Dayah and Baba and Alan. With Bushra and Dapir.
Yet here she sits, at my table, sharing the same food.
I push my bowl away.
My breathing rushes fast and shallow. My heart
thunders behind my rib cage. I’m furious that she’s
here. But another emotion surges above my anger:
I’m relieved she’s safe. I shouldn’t feel relief for her. I should feel nothing for her. She ruined my life. I don’t know what to think.
Safaa watches me closely with the same wildness
as before. I see anger flash in her eyes, but beneath
it, a shadow of fear clouds her gaze. Her eyes flicker
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to the left. Tucked among the other students is little Amin. He hasn’t noticed me. He scoops up his
stew, slopping it on the table as he struggles to eat
from a too-big spoon. Seeing him is like seeing Alan
again. My heart aches. My anger softens. A turmoil
of emotions churns through me. I grip the tabletop
with white knuckles.
“Ghalib.” Mohammad’s voice cuts through my
thoughts.
I snap my gaze to him. He looks at my pushed-
away bowl. Stares at my face. I turn away from him.
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