Family life goes on in Damascus for a mother from Dundee
Jannah Reid certainly puts a brave face upon it, but then again she says: “I cry. I cry almost every day about the whole situation. I love Syria. I love the wonderful people here. But we all fear for what is going to happen.”
She welcomes me into the family home, a flat in a typical concrete mid-rise block in north east Damascus. The neighbourhood isn’t being fought over, but then again it isn’t totally safe from war.
“Just this week there was a car bomb near the park where the boys sometimes play.”
And that is not all: “I never need an alarm clock. Instead of the birds, the rockets fired from the hill behind me wake us all up.” And she laughs. A nervous laugh.
That brave face again of a single mother who is effectively trapped here and must go on from breakfast of chapatti-style Syrian bread with cheese spread, through a long day’s teaching at the Sky Education Institute across town, to coming home around 9pm.
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Her children, Talal, 19, Ridwaan, 11, and Hashem, 10, are lively, confident, outgoing boys. Talal, old enough to appreciate what is going on, declares his fear candidly: “If mum is even a minute or two late coming home in the evenings then I worry, ” and more widely he worries for Syria itself: “Let’s face it, Syria is the centre of Arab unity. If things fall apart here, well….it’s just…I dunno it’s just so depressing….” he falls silent, close to tears.
Generally though Jannah says the boys are coping well enough with it all: “You’d be surprised. The kids sometimes calm me down. Sometimes when I hear a noise and I go “What was that?” they just say “Oh mum, it was just the rebels or the army farting,” in reference to the latest explosion.
Ridwaan suddenly leaps up to rattle one of the dining room windows in a perfect mimic of the noise of outgoing rockets and again everyone aughs, the visible release of tension.
Although Jannah could leave the country with Talal, her son by her first marriage, with Ridwaan and Hashem life is complicated. She says their father has upped and left for Saudi Arabia and she wants a divorce. She says she has not been able to contact him.
She says under Syrian law he holds power of attorney over the youngest two boys and that means she cannot get the paperwork altered to allow her to take the boys out of and back into the country.
But don’t assume she would automatically come to Britain, let alone her native Dundee. In fact she probably feels northern Iraq or perhaps Morocco might both be options; Jordan and Lebanon ideally but as everyone agrees – seriously expensive choices.
And living is the big issue. The war economy means spiralling inflation of the rent, gas for heating and cooking and basic foods which have tripled in price over the past two years or quadrupled in some cases: “I firmly believe the cost of things here is driving as many people out of the country as the fighting is. I looked at Tesco online the other day for London prices out of sheer nosiness and I just couldn’t believe just how expensive everything is here now.”
Work means a long slow series of walking detours around the roadblocks. She has no issues with the overt or secret security forces, but it is just the time and delay it causes.
On the way home at night, it is rather different. A friend’s unlikely orange VW Beetle will take her half way or so. Then follows the bus and then a 10-minute walk. There is no curfew as such in Damascus, because you don’t need one.
Everybody knows the only people out on the streets after dark are rebel fighters in the suburbs or the army taking them on – and those, like Jannah, with families to feed with no choice but to be out.
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