A gift

A gift is different from a present, a token, or an offering.
There is something reverent and profound in this word, something that conveys the full force of choosing to part with what is vital, personal, and intimate in order to entrust it to someone else; of accepting to lose something so that someone else may cherish and safeguard it.
Indeed, when we give a gift to someone we love, we reveal ourselves; we allow ourselves to be seen a little more deeply.
On my first day in Greece, I received a gift, a true gift.

I met Mina and Alberto, volunteers already working in the field, who kindly came to pick me up at the airport.
They told me that, before going home, we would stop at the family home in Athens.
When we arrived, after being warmly welcomed by a lively, bouncing little boy, I met a young Syrian man, and we began to talk.
I told him that I had travelled to Syria three years earlier, about the places I had visited. I showed him the notebook I always carry with me when I travel, filled with notes about the places I have been and the people I have met.
His insistent questions brought my memories back to life, and in his bright eyes I could see those places—so beautiful and yet so deeply wounded. I could see his love for his homeland.
As we talked, I realised that I did not simply feel welcomed as an expected guest; I felt gathered in. Every experience I had lived, every face I had encountered in the past, was now stitched together in the face of this young man who had left his homeland in search of life elsewhere.
He told us that he had arrived from Syria with a pair of jeans, a double holy card depicting Jesus and Mary, and a Bible given to him by his cousin, who was still in Aleppo.
Then he disappeared, only to return a little while later carrying the Bible he had been given. He held it out to me.
“For you,” he said.
He was giving me one of the three things that spoke of his story, of his homeland.
I tried to refuse. I could not bear to deprive him of it.
But he would not listen to reason, nor to any formality.
This was not a welcome present, nothing impersonal. It was a gift and, as such, it invited me to remember all those lands that so many people have been forced to leave; to recognise and cherish their stories, their beloved and familiar places, the smells, tastes, and scents that make a place one’s home.
It calls me to seek a home in them and to become one for them.
At a time in history when the loudest voice seems to be saying only, “at home in their own country,” resisting means longing for encounter and reminding ourselves that only true humanity is our common home: the magnificent human capacity to give another person everything, everything that we are.
With naturalness and simplicity, this young Syrian man showed me this.
I do not know what will happen during this time in the Greece project. But, for now, this was the beginning…

Sara