From Quseyr

Tonight I’m looking at the stars from Quseyr, sitting on the roof of the house we’ve rented in this small syrian town in the southeast area of Homs.
It’s not a holiday, definitely not tourism, we’re not exactly aid workers, we don’t have an office – and we don’t want one – we move using public transportation and we speak Levantine dialect without ever having studied standard Arabic, the official kind.
I realize that our presence here raises several questions, for both Syrians and Italians: why, how, since when, for how long, with whom – and again, why?

F., a volunteer with me, says he chose to be here to ask himself questions, not to find answers; I can’t help but agree with him.
And I’ve already answered the first question.
We came from Lebanon, after living side by side with Syrians in what used to be – and hasn’t been for a long time – the Switzerland of the Middle East.
We’ve received many, many, many invitations from the people who are returning to Syria, and we intend to accept them all, little by little; we want to see their houses, even if they’re damaged or destroyed. Actually, maybe we are especially interested in those – we want to witness their rising again, just as we witnessed their hardship.
Syria is not like the place I heard my friends describe, it’s not like they remember it; it’s not easy to recognize the places that once mattered, in what are now piles of rubble by the side of the road.
And it’s painful to see those rubbles day after day.
For three days now we’ve "had" a house in Quseyr, and we’d like to stay for a few weeks. A house is something precious here, not to be taken for granted. Especially a house like ours, with solar panels, a water tank, a working bathroom, doors and windows.
The other times we came here – this is the fourth – we stayed as guests in the houses of friends we came to visit; having a house, instead, means trying to become part of the community of this city, trying to have an active role. This, without forgetting that we remain “ajaneb”, foreigners, in this country that we began to know from the outside and now we are slowly starting to approach from the inside.
The answer to “with whom” might come as a surprise.
Here in Quseyr I have at least five fathers and just as many mothers; I have many brothers and even more sisters.
In Quseyr, the volunteers of Operazione Colomba have many families: with different last names and religious affiliations, from varied social backgrounds – some have traveled and gone to live in Italy, some died in prison or during armed conflict, others are here now.
It’s with them that we share this moment of rebirth, which we hope will carry us far.

M.