It looks like we're going to make this trip, it looks like it's all arranged, it looks like they're going to they are going to make us cross the border between Lebanon and Syria... it seems.
But I still don't believe it.
And so I focus on every present moment, with no expectations, just the here and now.
But then we really get to the border and really after a while we are in a car that travelling at high speed through Syrian territory, on the road to Damascus.
I begin to realize that we have really entered, I start to get emotional, I am at a loss for words. Words.
But the power of what is happening overwhelms me when we arrive in a suburb outskirts of the fascinating Syrian capital, and from the balcony he looks at us, greets us and then runs to meet our Syrian friend.

As volunteers of Operazione Colomba, alongside the Syrian people since 2013, we must participate in the euphoria following the surprising fall of the Assad regime in Syria. A regime that lasted 53 years and gripped the lives of three generations of Syrians.

In these crucial days that are overtaking this country, heart and bridge between the Mediterranean East and Mesopotamia, we echo the stories of pain, desperation, anger, but also resistance, resilience, patience, which we have especially met in Lebanon, but also in Syria, Turkey, Greece, Germany, France and Italy.

Our thoughts go out to these people we chose to meet and that came to life in everyone who has welcomed us and who has trusted us with their story, even as they lived it first-hand, on their own skin.

To those who confided in us “Unfortunately life has assigned us this fate, we only want a future for our children”, aware of having been caught up in the events that brought them to a life as refugees.

From the house of S. and his family, the only landscape we can see is a gray moor at this point. It’s been raining continuously for three days.
We are visiting this family to get updates on the health conditions of their parents. Their father has got an eye health problems and their mother is being treated for breast cancer.
Soon, indeed, the Italian doctor will come to Lebanon and we would like to have everything ready for him to visit them.
They have five children, but their house is always full of people. The classic extended family: more families living on the same landing and sharing much more.
Today, however, the house is strangely quiet, almost empty. As soon as we get there, they make us sit down, they serve us the mate and peanuts.§
It is the second time that I come to visit them, and they already know how much I like to smoke hookah.
It is there, ready for our arrival.
After the first pleasantries and updates, the conversation took another turn.
In fact, as if it was that circumstance to call those memoirs and without any specific questions, S. began to tell us about the time he was in Syria and he had been arrested as deserter and imprisoned.

Operazione Colomba, the years spent in Lebanon, Humanitarian Corridors and the solidarity shown in these years have taught me a lot and opened many new paths.
They taught me a unique way to live certain situations and when to give space to others.
I saw a world of tragedies caused by human violence, but also the solidarity and closeness that grows within them.
Twenty days ago, I heard of a big shipwreck, 750 people left Libya and only a hundred survived, a hundred corpses were found, while the others... were lost at sea.
Shortly after I talked with a friend who arrived years ago in Italy from Lebanon through the Humanitarian Corridors: his cousin Mohamad, 24 years old, was on the ship.
He is among those unaccounted for.
Several friends intervene to help and one of them accompanies the relative of the missing person in Greece to search for answers.
There, along with the volunteers from Operazione Colomba, information was exchanged and listened to in order to see what can be done.
In the meantime, I have arrived in Lebanon and learned that Mohamad’s parents are here, living just a couple of hours by car from where we stay.
They are our friend’s uncles, parents of a desaparecido in the deadliest border of the world, refugees in a country that barely hosts them while they can’t return to their country of origin.
Operazione Colomba is what can’t make you flee facing other people's pain, but instead it whispers “get closer, try to feel even a small fraction of what they are feeling, don’t run away, even if it’s painful and even if you don’t have an answer”.