Erstellt am: 2. 2. 2016 - 11:34 Uhr

The Death Trip - Part 2

Six years ago Syria was a piece of paradise. Paradise Lost, the pain of leaving home.

Bode37 ist im Sommer aus Syrien geflohen, wo er als Lehrer gearbeitet hat. Für uns erzählt er von seiner Flucht aus Latakia. Hier der zweite Teil seiner Erinnerungen. Er heißt natürlich nicht wirklich so; aus Sicherheitsgründen bevorzugt er für seine Geschichte ein Pseudonym.

Memories haunting Bode37 - Part 2

Six years ago Syria was a piece of paradise. There was a past, a present and a future worth living for. The people were living together without fears, no one would ask about your ethnicity or religion. Syria had 23 million inhabitants before the war. They derived from different religous and ethnic backgrounds. You could travel freely to any part of the country, nobody would discriminate or harm you.
Christians were an integral part of society, celebrating their holidays, eating pork and drinking alcohol, no problem. I am a Muslim and I was living with my Christian friends, sometimes even sharing their holidays. I will always remember the Christmas evening they took me to church and we enjoyed the chorals together.
Syria´s constitution defined the functions of the state and the government. Syria was a democratic and republic country and formed part of the wider Arabian world. Syria´s culture was rich and proud to be a diverse union of traditions, customs, civilizations and religions.

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Syria is home to many archeological sites. Palmyra is the famous place where you can still smell the fragrant of Queen Zanobya, a third century queen that fought the roman empire and invented the first soap. You might recognize the smell in the street of Palmyra because Zanobya's soap these days is a popular product in organic spas all over the world.
The university of Damascus is one of the oldest universities in the Middle East besides Aleppo and Tishren.
As I mentioned, Syrian citizens had the freedom to choose their religion, so one can say that Syria was the most secularised country in the Islamic world, especially with regard to economic dealings.
On the streets you could see women with or without hijabs, mosques next to churches. Syria was home to a small extremely wealthy upper class, seventy percent middle class, where I come from, and poor people,
jobless but with a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs.
There is a special spiritual belief, our "al redah": We are taught to accept our destiny.
We had our ways of living, and we felt no hate towards the ways of the West, it is their "al redah" and we accept it and also gladly learned from it. In Berlin I know girls with Jewish backgrounds going to Buddhist meditations, nobody questions their efforts to learn and benefit from the wisdom of different cultures, so why is it so hard to believe that my Syrian sisters where dancing to Rihanna and learning from Western and popcultural ideas how you can be an independent woman and grow by studying the knowledge of different cultures. Please don´t imagine Syrians living in tents and being scared of globalization, instead picture them as going to concerts and throwing parties.

Omar Souleyman is a very famous singer in the East of the country. He represents the culture of the Eastern provinces of Syria. In the West of Syria he is not very well known and you can imagine my astonishment when I found out how popular he is in Europe.

In 1928 the first Syrian movie called "Al Muttaham al Baree", the Innocent Suspect, was released. The old and beautiful Al Kindy cinema in Damascus hosted international film festivals. Musicians toured in Syria, there were galleries, museums, unlimited online access - all a human being needs to feed its hunger for wisdom, education and entertainment.

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The small details of life were as important to my Syrian sisters and brothers as the preserved artifacts in museums. Our souls pay a lot of attention to details. The way the cities, mountains, villages, forests looked, smelled and tasted formed our concept of happiness and our sense of belonging.
The streets talked about our memories and the shadows of our happiness.
My personal story would have been told by the streets of Latakia, the large port on the coast.
Latakia is my hometown. The world´s first alphabet was created here by the Ugarit civilization. In the center is a huge Roman castle, burying love and emotions under its stones.

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The train station knows well the many stories of my passionate dates with the girl my heart chose.
In winter the trains took me to Aleppo where I was teaching.
I was travelling every Sunday, when the night hugged the morning at 4 am. At dawn I shared a cup of hot instant coffee with my father on the balcony that meant the world.
I was living inside a lovely painting, this portrait of Syria that one of her sons tried to bring back to life for you.

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Bode, the primary school teacher, is taking the train every sunday at 4 am. This is me - sorry, this was me!
I had everything I wished for: a career, a family, a fiancée and myself.
Now I´m Bode the refugee, what a transformation beginning at a point where I didn't realize that I was already at the starting point of a nightmarish journey hiding behind the pure and sweet emotions I shared with my students, girls and boys alike.
In January 2010 I was teaching my first class in Tadef, a small village outside Aleppo. My students were ten years of age. Innocent beings not yet conditioned by society, amazed by this world and the new discoveries they made every day.
I prepared myself before I started this job: You have to get rid of your negative emotions before you enter the classroom if you want to achieve the goals set, leave your poisonous ideas outside before you enter this sanctuary, become part of their world of curiosity and amazement. The door of the classroom is a gate. I was teaching them all subjects and I was teaching them how to dream and have faith in their dreams, how to be good and constructive in a diverse society. This is how my school looks today:

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