Memories … . Damascus - Dec 25, 2013

It’s Christmas and I am looking out of the window of my ‘security cleared’ hotel in Damascus and I see black smoke rising just behind the mountains.

I just returned from Homs, a small city in Syria near the Lebanese border, where I met an educated middle-class man with his wife and their two children. No politics, no religious issues, just life, his children, his skills, and lack of a job, and lack of any education for his children. All he wants is some future for his children, and in absence of schools, that seems impossible. He feels how his children are loosing out on a daily basis, bit by bit.

He was suffering from depression - depression deep enough that affects everyone around him. I didn’t take his picture, and yet, it is like his image is printed on my mind. His face still keeps me up at night. I cannot shrug that man out of my mind. It is so unfair that millions of children have to pay the price, with their lives, dreams and future, for the greed of a few dozen individuals.

I counted at least 30 shelling from the window of my hotel in Damascus. My driver the next day told me, “It’s so safe these days, there were no shillings last night”. It’s amazing how people get used to violence when they loose control over it. One develops filters to cancel out undesirable. As I don’t hear the train that rattles my house every time it passes by, people don’t hear shelling. They just can’t.

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Posts tagged with depression

The man in Homs, Syria