“It’s time you change your bio, dearest”

The definition of the violation of human rights doesn’t change depending on the profile of the victims. Either you are for or against human rights. There is no in-between. Silence is complicity. Selective empathy is complicity. Sitting on the fence is complicity. They are one and the same as standing with the oppressor and against the oppressed.

I started this blog as an aspiring dentist. 

I am writing this post as a qualified optometrist.

That sentence right there, exactly five years ago, felt like a death sentence. Exactly three years ago, it felt like a possibility. Exactly one year ago, knowing I had to give my qualifying exams another go, it felt like a very far-off dream that felt so far beyond my reach. And exactly three weeks ago today, it became a reality.

It's been six years since I launched this blog; in that time, I have graduated in one degree, started and graduated in another and finally completed a two-year pre-reg to qualify as an optometrist. It's not been an easy journey. Nor a predictable one. It was a lot of blood, sweat and tears. So many tears. A lot of you are familiar with my personal conflicts that came with optometry...the struggles, setbacks and emotional pressure not just throughout university, but also over the course of the last two years. I was, once upon a time, convinced it was not a place for me. 

Today, my heart is overwhelmed with gratitude and the proud sense of achievement in being able to write this. 

It is, for the first time in a long time, the start of a new chapter. It is, finally, the end of an academic journey - and the beginning of the rest of my professional life. I didn't think I would make it. Many times, it felt like the odds were stacked against me. I have carried the unbearable weight of will it ever work out for me. There have been so many moments where I contemplated giving up, only to bite my tongue, grit my teeth, and keep going. I debated whether to pursue a different career altogether. I questioned and doubted my abilities time and time again because setbacks do that to you...self-doubt creeps in and you wonder if you are truly meant for the thing that you are chasing. 

It hangs in the air, the metallic stench of blood like crushed copper mixed with acrid smoke and the sharp chemical tang of poison. It stings as I breathe in and my lungs burn.

Blood. There is blood everywhere.

And the screams. The screams vibrate against my ear drums until I fear they will burst.

Maybe that will be a mercy. It will be a welcome end to the ear-shattering screech of the mother clinging to her only child as he takes his last breath, the wails of a father who carries the broken bodies of his daughters, sounds that cannot possibly be human for they are laced with so much anguish, a pain that reverberates through my bones and snaps the threads of sanity.

I stumble through the rubble, searching for signs of life.

All I see is war. The slaughtered bodies of innocents make me stagger against a wall and I shut my eyes, desperately hoping that I am walking through a bloodied nightmare that will cease to exist when I open them again. But no, I am still in a war zone and I cannot unsee the carnage that lies at my feet.

Torn limbs. Expressions of the dead lost in the ghost of a scream, upended in a mess of blood and bone. Chalk-white faces that have been drained of life and blood.

My feet catch on bodies. Body after body after body. Lifeless things, scattered haphazardly across a land they once called home, not knowing that they were building their lives on a landmine.

I sway, a veil of black threatening to descend as coloured spots fill my vision but I have to keep moving. Life. Please, God, let there be life somewhere in this field of the dead.

Dust and debris and death. I am walking through a river of corpses. The battered bodies that are splayed across the shattered ground are small. Too small.

I collapse.

And come to.

I cannot breathe.

I think of my kid back home. I wonder how sheer chance - or luck, or destiny, or some miracle I do not deserve - gave him a life halfway across the world untouched by the stuff of nightmares. I wonder how he could just as easily have found himself in this little hell, his childhood burnt to the ground, his family ashes amid the explosions, his eyes windows to a shattered soul.

I wonder how it is that he wakes to clouds of candy floss pink floating in a bubblegum blue sky instead of waking to a cloud of smoke, the drop of a bomb and the roaring of planes overhead in a chaos of fire and tear gas and collapsed buildings.

I wonder when the bodies that stretch on for miles stopped believing and instead welcomed death with open arms.

I wonder when they stopped putting their hope in the hands of those who do not care.

I wonder if they will forgive the world that watches through blind eyes and sends thoughts and prayers through dead hearts.

I wonder if, when God asks them why they do not want to forgive, they will say that Syria became a cemetery void of mourners.

I wonder if God Himself will refuse to forgive.

And I wonder. I wonder about the global outrage that would colour television screens if these bodies had white skin and blonde hair and blue eyes and were pooled in a river of blood on soil in another part of the world.

I wonder how the mounting pile of massacred lives does not spike an international outcry, nor does it commandeer international intervention.

I wonder how one human life does not equal another. How the hundreds of children's lives that soak the soil red does not even remotely equate to the value of the life of my son tucked away safely in his bed thousands of miles away.

I wonder how we so easily discard lives.

But, after all, this is war.

And I have to ask.

It doesn't take much to wage a war. How many lives does it take to end one?


- 27.2 // the bloodbath of Eastern Ghouta, Damascus