For 30 years, Fiona Hill lived on an off with a Syrian family. Now their lives have been shattered by war and it’s time to repay the favour.
Fiona Hill with her adoptive Syrian family
By Fiona Hill
I LIVED in a Syrian village idyll on the banks of the bounteous Euphrates River on and off for 30 years.
I first lobbed there as a student archaeologist in 1984 and until 2012 I’d visit most years, staying with the Al Sultan household for months at a time, sharing births, deaths, marriages and every conceivable trial and joy in between. That hasn’t stopped. We’re family.
Crop farmers, market gardeners, livestock breeders, cheese makers, and fishermen, skilled in adobe, concreting, and painting, my family’s replete with natural leaders.
That meant, despite regular incarceration by over zealous security police, I was free to wander and explore life up and down the river, feast with Sheikhs, talk sheep and market prices with men, natter, dance and do domestic chores with women and girls, row boats and swim with delighted boys.
As a rare literate adult, I’d chaperone women and their anxious husbands or fathers to find clinics, navigate hospitals, hand hold in theatre, interpret medication, and traipse the length and breadth of Aleppo and Damascus seeking correct medicines. There was a lot of grief. Along with much laughter, it knitted us close together.
"If it comes down to me I’ll surround Syria with a belt of silk, cover it with a cloud of safety, and make it shower a rain of love on those hurt and peaceful hearts."
A Syrian-Australian
They’re grateful I documented a life now lost forever, and I owe them my anthropology PhD.
From 2004, when educational opportunities were revolutionised for all Syrians, my Australian family and friends helped provide English and Arabic children’s books to our village primary school, as well as small grants for local female high school students with lots of smarts but little means to pay the Baccalaureate fee.
My grand gesture was commissioning ‘The Villa’ to be built amongst olive trees, overlooking limestone cliffs and the beloved river, painted in glorious technicolour by my adoptive Syrian brother, and adorned with local handicrafts. Here a growing pool of volunteers were destined to coach high school English language teachers and teach English and French while enjoying rural village life. The conflict ended all of it.
Since 2012 the Free Syria Army (FSA), the Syrian Defence Force, DAESH (ISIS), Jubhat Al Nusra, the Syrian Democratic Front, and the US Alliance have variously abducted, extorted, flogged, tortured, starved, looted, intimidated, and aerial bombed members of my family and our village community.
Only Russia, Hizbollah, and the Syrian Christian militias have left them alone.
When the FSA first arrived in our district, my adoptive Syrian brother Thamer, as village leader, rescued three visiting Alawi families from inevitable summary murder by smuggling them out to safety. If discovered, he too would have been killed.
When hundreds of refugees from Aleppo countryside took refuge in our school, I crowd-funded to help Thamer provide food, fuel, and blankets for these strangers until the Syrian Government eventually housed them elsewhere.
In 2013, DAESH fighters from all around the world – including two Australians – took over the region, and our village, with a relentless barrage of random incarcerations, beatings, beheadings, and terrorising harassment of men, women and children.
My family’s village is all Sunni Muslim, but DAESH insisted they prove this by surrendering all boys over 12 to fight with them.
In 2015, when DAESH reopened our school to teach only the Qur’an Thamer denounced them as propagandists and refused to send our kids.
Furious, DAESH commanders came to confiscate our homes, land, livestock, and male teenagers. Managing to put them off till the next day, that same wintry November night Thamer and the teenage boys risked their lives to escape into Turkey.
We all prayed DAESH wouldn’t throw the women and children out of their homes. But when they began to confiscate everyone’s olive and grain harvests, eat all the livestock, and ban all females from leaving the district, it was time to get them out.
Getting 22 women and children out of the village undetected took several months of nail-biting planning. Once out they walked and slept rough for 5 days, then waited in the hills near the Turkish border while fierce fighting crashed around them.
Apart from the dangers of missiles and gunfire, they risked fighters abducting the older boys. We all instinctively held our breath. Even the baby stayed silent.
In the last frantic moments of their escape into Turkey with a hero Syrian smuggler whom I hope to meet one day, despite their hunger, cold and fear, my family insisted to stop to gather up a small family huddled terrified under some trees.
That little family stayed with mine for weeks. When I showed them a photo of the kids at Bass Coast Childcare Centre and gave them they money they’d raised, tears pricked everyone’s eyes.
Generosity from the other side of the world was bittersweet for people who’ve always been the generous ones.
With Turkey now home to the world’s largest refugee population and pledged $3.26 billion to stem the flow of refugees to Europe, all refugees are at risk of abduction by militant groups, or deportation by Turkey.
So despite the lack of handouts, legal work and education, we’ve opted for the relative security of tiny rented flats in Gaziantep where one daily chaperoned walk around the block is the only exercise possible.
In September last year I lodged applications for my family to resettle in Australia, with me as their Sponsor, because their rural background and range of skills make them an easy fit for Gippsland.
There are thousands of regional Victorians networking to create support networks in readiness for refugees from war zones.
Bass Coast and South East Gippsland Shires have Refugee Welcome policies and Cr Jordan Crugnale and Cr Moyha Davies wrote jointly to Canberra to support the resettlement of my Syrian family in our district.
Felicia Di Stefano on behalf of the hundreds of South Gippsland Rural Australians for Refugees (SGRAR), former Councilor and Mayor Jennie Deane, and Rev Ross Stanford and Rev Graeme Reid of Inverloch’s Uniting Church have all written also and pledged to support the family when they arrive.
Susan Denny, Workforce Support Project Manager at Murray Goulburn Co-operative in Bendigo, and Lisa Sinha at Gippsland Multicultural Services are invaluable guides.
Bass Coast Adult Education Centre’s Janice Connor’s been actively preparing for my family’s arrival for months.
The Victorian Multicultural Commission and the Task Force for Settlement of Refugees in Regional Victoria say my hole-proof grass-roots support network is an exemplary model.
Hundreds of individuals are writing to the Prime Minister, the Minister for Immigration & Border Protection, and local Federal and State MPs to support my family’s admission to Australia.
Professor Joe Camillieri and Pax Christi Australia are demanding the Australian Government meet it’s commitment to accept 12,000 Syrian refugees within this calendar year.
Yet according to a March 2016 Australian Government Fact Sheet Update, of 25,000+ humanitarian applications only 187 have been processed so far due to security concerns.
Christmas time last year, Kurdish-Arab allied forces supported by U.S air strikes ousted DAESH from our village, but it continues to attack with car bombs and missiles. Now no one’s permitted to enter or to leave.
So the three men, four women, and nineteen children of my family sit on threadbare scraps of old carpet in sparsely furnished rented rooms, eking out each day with abstemious meals, story telling, and 1000 piece jigsaws of bright yellow wattle, Uluru landscapes, Sydney Harbour, and Philip Island’s wildlife.
Watching them struggle to piece together the fragments of those beautiful foreign images is like watching them struggle to imagine how the pieces of a brighter future might look.
For these big-hearted victims of so much pain and loss, the many indignities of forced migration cut deep.
But a safe and hope-filled future withheld for reasons of security would have to be the final blow.
Fiona Hill is an anthropologist and Arab and Islamic guide and educator. She lives at Dalyston. If you wish to write a letter, pledge employment, or assist in any other way, contact her via [email protected].
I LIVED in a Syrian village idyll on the banks of the bounteous Euphrates River on and off for 30 years.
I first lobbed there as a student archaeologist in 1984 and until 2012 I’d visit most years, staying with the Al Sultan household for months at a time, sharing births, deaths, marriages and every conceivable trial and joy in between. That hasn’t stopped. We’re family.
Crop farmers, market gardeners, livestock breeders, cheese makers, and fishermen, skilled in adobe, concreting, and painting, my family’s replete with natural leaders.
That meant, despite regular incarceration by over zealous security police, I was free to wander and explore life up and down the river, feast with Sheikhs, talk sheep and market prices with men, natter, dance and do domestic chores with women and girls, row boats and swim with delighted boys.
As a rare literate adult, I’d chaperone women and their anxious husbands or fathers to find clinics, navigate hospitals, hand hold in theatre, interpret medication, and traipse the length and breadth of Aleppo and Damascus seeking correct medicines. There was a lot of grief. Along with much laughter, it knitted us close together.
"If it comes down to me I’ll surround Syria with a belt of silk, cover it with a cloud of safety, and make it shower a rain of love on those hurt and peaceful hearts."
A Syrian-Australian
They’re grateful I documented a life now lost forever, and I owe them my anthropology PhD.
From 2004, when educational opportunities were revolutionised for all Syrians, my Australian family and friends helped provide English and Arabic children’s books to our village primary school, as well as small grants for local female high school students with lots of smarts but little means to pay the Baccalaureate fee.
My grand gesture was commissioning ‘The Villa’ to be built amongst olive trees, overlooking limestone cliffs and the beloved river, painted in glorious technicolour by my adoptive Syrian brother, and adorned with local handicrafts. Here a growing pool of volunteers were destined to coach high school English language teachers and teach English and French while enjoying rural village life. The conflict ended all of it.
Since 2012 the Free Syria Army (FSA), the Syrian Defence Force, DAESH (ISIS), Jubhat Al Nusra, the Syrian Democratic Front, and the US Alliance have variously abducted, extorted, flogged, tortured, starved, looted, intimidated, and aerial bombed members of my family and our village community.
Only Russia, Hizbollah, and the Syrian Christian militias have left them alone.
When the FSA first arrived in our district, my adoptive Syrian brother Thamer, as village leader, rescued three visiting Alawi families from inevitable summary murder by smuggling them out to safety. If discovered, he too would have been killed.
When hundreds of refugees from Aleppo countryside took refuge in our school, I crowd-funded to help Thamer provide food, fuel, and blankets for these strangers until the Syrian Government eventually housed them elsewhere.
In 2013, DAESH fighters from all around the world – including two Australians – took over the region, and our village, with a relentless barrage of random incarcerations, beatings, beheadings, and terrorising harassment of men, women and children.
My family’s village is all Sunni Muslim, but DAESH insisted they prove this by surrendering all boys over 12 to fight with them.
In 2015, when DAESH reopened our school to teach only the Qur’an Thamer denounced them as propagandists and refused to send our kids.
Furious, DAESH commanders came to confiscate our homes, land, livestock, and male teenagers. Managing to put them off till the next day, that same wintry November night Thamer and the teenage boys risked their lives to escape into Turkey.
We all prayed DAESH wouldn’t throw the women and children out of their homes. But when they began to confiscate everyone’s olive and grain harvests, eat all the livestock, and ban all females from leaving the district, it was time to get them out.
Getting 22 women and children out of the village undetected took several months of nail-biting planning. Once out they walked and slept rough for 5 days, then waited in the hills near the Turkish border while fierce fighting crashed around them.
Apart from the dangers of missiles and gunfire, they risked fighters abducting the older boys. We all instinctively held our breath. Even the baby stayed silent.
In the last frantic moments of their escape into Turkey with a hero Syrian smuggler whom I hope to meet one day, despite their hunger, cold and fear, my family insisted to stop to gather up a small family huddled terrified under some trees.
That little family stayed with mine for weeks. When I showed them a photo of the kids at Bass Coast Childcare Centre and gave them they money they’d raised, tears pricked everyone’s eyes.
Generosity from the other side of the world was bittersweet for people who’ve always been the generous ones.
With Turkey now home to the world’s largest refugee population and pledged $3.26 billion to stem the flow of refugees to Europe, all refugees are at risk of abduction by militant groups, or deportation by Turkey.
So despite the lack of handouts, legal work and education, we’ve opted for the relative security of tiny rented flats in Gaziantep where one daily chaperoned walk around the block is the only exercise possible.
In September last year I lodged applications for my family to resettle in Australia, with me as their Sponsor, because their rural background and range of skills make them an easy fit for Gippsland.
There are thousands of regional Victorians networking to create support networks in readiness for refugees from war zones.
Bass Coast and South East Gippsland Shires have Refugee Welcome policies and Cr Jordan Crugnale and Cr Moyha Davies wrote jointly to Canberra to support the resettlement of my Syrian family in our district.
Felicia Di Stefano on behalf of the hundreds of South Gippsland Rural Australians for Refugees (SGRAR), former Councilor and Mayor Jennie Deane, and Rev Ross Stanford and Rev Graeme Reid of Inverloch’s Uniting Church have all written also and pledged to support the family when they arrive.
Susan Denny, Workforce Support Project Manager at Murray Goulburn Co-operative in Bendigo, and Lisa Sinha at Gippsland Multicultural Services are invaluable guides.
Bass Coast Adult Education Centre’s Janice Connor’s been actively preparing for my family’s arrival for months.
The Victorian Multicultural Commission and the Task Force for Settlement of Refugees in Regional Victoria say my hole-proof grass-roots support network is an exemplary model.
Hundreds of individuals are writing to the Prime Minister, the Minister for Immigration & Border Protection, and local Federal and State MPs to support my family’s admission to Australia.
Professor Joe Camillieri and Pax Christi Australia are demanding the Australian Government meet it’s commitment to accept 12,000 Syrian refugees within this calendar year.
Yet according to a March 2016 Australian Government Fact Sheet Update, of 25,000+ humanitarian applications only 187 have been processed so far due to security concerns.
Christmas time last year, Kurdish-Arab allied forces supported by U.S air strikes ousted DAESH from our village, but it continues to attack with car bombs and missiles. Now no one’s permitted to enter or to leave.
So the three men, four women, and nineteen children of my family sit on threadbare scraps of old carpet in sparsely furnished rented rooms, eking out each day with abstemious meals, story telling, and 1000 piece jigsaws of bright yellow wattle, Uluru landscapes, Sydney Harbour, and Philip Island’s wildlife.
Watching them struggle to piece together the fragments of those beautiful foreign images is like watching them struggle to imagine how the pieces of a brighter future might look.
For these big-hearted victims of so much pain and loss, the many indignities of forced migration cut deep.
But a safe and hope-filled future withheld for reasons of security would have to be the final blow.
Fiona Hill is an anthropologist and Arab and Islamic guide and educator. She lives at Dalyston. If you wish to write a letter, pledge employment, or assist in any other way, contact her via [email protected].
Fiona's adoptive brother Thamir and his family, 2010. Photo: Bryan Dawe