The SYRIAN Woman

Who do you think is a syrian woman? Answer yourselves by reading this article by Shubhashree Sathe.

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Who do you think is a syrian woman? Most of you will answer she is a woman like others around the globe with maybe a little more adversities, but maybe your answer wont remain the same after reading a few more paragraphs. A syrian woman is hard to describe for me in words but Ihope I can do justice to all of them out there through explaining them.

Let me ask you all a question, what if you had to make a choice between all the wealth you have, to save your beloved one or to lose your dignity as a woman? Hard isn’t it? Well those decisions are one of the very few decisions that a syrian woman has to make everyday. What if I asked you to imagine a situation where you are asked to take away the bodies of your brothers, who were tortured and beaten to death, from the police station and threatened that the same would be done to your 18 year old son if he did not leave the country. Scary, isn’t it? Well that is what syrian woman faces every other day.

We as women feel unsafe travelling at night on empty streets surrounded by men even when we have a family to go back to and people to ask protection from, however imagine being in a community where being in a family consisting of only girls is considered fragile. Where eyes of manly monsters gaze at you from head to toe because they know that you are weak, powerless and alone. However a syrian woman has the courage to not shy away from this situation but instead stand up tall against him with stones in her hand and show them even if she is alone, she is not powerless and neither is she weak.

A Syrian woman has gathered the courage to face a soldier, gazing at her with hungry eyes, to look him into his face. She has the courage to fight for her life, to scare away death that most of us fear yet without knowing how long she is going to live. She has the will to not think of herself as a victim of the situation, instead she thinks of herself as a survivor of the it. She is the one who encourages rather forces her daughter to pursue education convincing her that is the only thing she owns for herself. A syrian woman chooses to jump of from the edge of a cliff with the belief that she will not fall rather fly, while most of us would not dare to do that. She is a syrian woman.

All this makes all of us think of our perspective towards life. We don’t have to make choices between the life of our loved one or our dignity, we don’t have to cook food for the same soldier who gazed at you with hungry eyes and neither is our walk from our home to our school and back fight with death. However we still choose to be a victim of our lives. Now let’s take a moment to think how privileged we are. Also think again, who is a syrian woman?

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Written By Shubhashree Sathe