By Phyllis Meras
It was only five years ago that I happily traveled across Syria, much of the time by public bus. I found hospitality everywhere. Giggling young women who were students at the University of Aleppo took me to see their dorm. My bus seat companion, a widow, told me that her dream was to get to Pittsburgh with her two children.
In a covered souk in the Old City of Damascus, a young woman in a pretty pale blue jalablyya saw that I was bewildered and asked in western American accents if she could help. She had been born in Syria, she said, but her parents had moved to Denver and she had grown up there. Now she was 18 and had been brought back "home" to be married. Her fiance, she said matter-of-factly, was an architect who was religious, but not too religious. They had met only five times, but talked on the phone. She was in the souk to buy a wedding dress.
With a Syrian I had met through an American friend, I went to the narrow shop-lined Street Called Straight. It was there, it is said, that Saint Paul ― then Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of the Christians ― having been blinded by God, regained his sight and converted to Christianity.
As I sought to cross a busy, multi-lane Damascus highway where there were no lights, a woman took my arm and guided me through the traffic. "Syrian people are kind people," she said in English.
With a van and driver, I was taken across the desert to the 11th century Krak des Chevaliers that is regarded as the finest Crusader castle in the world. My 27-year-old driver, Mumad-Ahmad, whose cellphone played "Jingle Bells," conversed as best he could with an Arabic-English dictionary, and we laughed often. When it came time for him to pray, he stopped the van and asked if I would like to photograph the Bedouins in the distance tending their sheep. Then he took his prayer rug from the dashboard, left me to find a stream to wash in, and returned to kneel on his rug and pray.
On another day on my weeklong visit, I went to the pillar on which Saint Simon Stylites, religious history has it, lived and preached in the Fifth century. The pillar rises on a hill of pines and wildflowers. There were teenage schoolchildren there, who, recognizing me as a foreigner, tried out their English. They asked where I was from and told me their names ― often Mohammed and Jasmine. One picked a bouquet of poppies to give me. Another proffered an ice cream cone. A third presented me with a key chain that said in English and Arabic "I love you."
And so as I read of the civil war engulfing Syria, I cannot help worrying about Mumad-Ahmad, my American friend's friend, the college students from Aleppo, the teenagers with the gifts and the young woman from Denver.
Does Mumad-Ahmad live in a Damascus neighborhood that has been under attack? Where are the college students from Aleppo, which has just been shelled? The 14-year-olds who gave me the poppies and ice cream and key chain are old enough now to be in the army, or to be revolutionaries.
Who among my Syrian acquaintances of just a few years ago are in favor of the Assad regime? Who are against it? Whichever side wins, what will their lives be like?
Reach Phyllis Meras at pmcocroft@aol.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.