Syria's view

For me, Syria is the Land of the Aunties. There’s Auntie Diala, my real aunt. There are Aunties Huda and Hiam, my grandfather’s sisters – one sweeter than the other and each competing for title of shortest woman on the planet. It makes you want to pick them up and cuddle them while they tell you stories about childhood summers on a Baghdad farm in the late thirties.

And then of course there’s Auntie Hind, who isn’t really my aunt: she’s my mother’s very best childhood friend. Her Auntie-ness is, however, official, since we’re listed as family members even on Facebook. My sister and I sometimes contemplate running for cover when she approaches, but eventually realise there is no escaping her very strong displays of affection. The key is to just relax and let your body go limp, because no part of the body is spared when Auntie Hind makes her attack. We are left with our shirts the other way around and our hair in a complete mess.

Auntie Hind shuttles between Syria and Canada, and her house in Damascus is in the middle of the oldest part of town. Lunch or dinner there with all our family is always one of the highlights of our trip, and the invitations qualify as events themselves:
“Come for dinner on Sunday!”
To which my sister and I: “But Auntie Hind, on Sunday we’ve promised to…”
“Stop! Halas (that’s Arabic for “enough”)! Cancel everything! See you on Sunday!” A couple of crushing hugs and demands to my mother about adopting us, and Hind always gets her way in the end.

Driving in Syria is like a voyage on another spectacular planet. The only colours you see are different shades of brown, a little bit of green here and there, and the huge blue cloudless sky above. Once you approach a city, the first thing you’ll probably see are half-finished apartment blocks which were probably started on years ago but have now been abandonded because of lack of money. The traffic gets more chaotic, and eventually you arrive to the centre of town, which is usually marked by a clocktower. There is hardly any water, and if there ever was any, it’s anyway nearly all dried up in the midsummer.

The region around Damascus is full of majestic hills rising from the desert, and many of them have ancient Christian convents on the summit. Further inland, there is nothing but desert, with few main roads crisscrossing it. Here, the saddest thing you’ll see is all the rubbish which has accumulated over the years and lies all over the place as an ugly reminder of all the cars which have passed through over decades. Once you get your eyes off that, you’ll see whole ancient ruined cities rising out of nowhere. Roman, Byzantine and Muslim sites, Crusader castles… it’s like driving through a history lesson where everything is empty, waiting to be explored.

Even more fascinating are the people living here: some days ago, we visited a single mother with four children, living in an ancient house that looked like a beehive and was all in all not that much bigger than my room. The house was in a tiny village on a road that led to nowhere. The mattresses were all piled up, ready to be taken down at night, and there was a very old black and white television set in one corner. The children were transfixed by having foreigners over. The boys proudly demonstrated their skills like writing and making cart-wheels. The girls just couldn’t have enough of having their pictures taken, rearranging their shawls and dresses with serious expressions before giving us the green light to press the button.

Of course, life in the capital city couldn’t be more different. Iraqi refugees are still arriving and Damascus keeps growing. The latest news on the political scene is the alleged nuclear reactor Syria was building in the northeast of the country before Israel bombed it to the ground. And then there’s always the US accusing Syria of not controlling the Iraqi border against insurgents. “It’s five hundred kilometres of sand!” my grandmother screamed at the television while we were watching a CNN exclusive report called “Syria’s view”. “I’d like to see them trying to control it!”

However, most people don’t really seem that interested. There are other things to do than worry about politics! Like the new shops which keep opening up: Miss Sixty, Mango, Villeroy & Boch to name a few. Or how to bypass the tight internet censorship which doesn’t let Syrians access their Facebook accounts or read blogs like this one. Most people use invisible Chinese servers, but even these tend to clog up. As for entertainment, a Turkish soap opera called Noor is all the rage.

This new arrival might not have caused a revolution in Turkey, but its dubbed version is certainly THE programme to watch in the Arabic countries today. A friend told me that in Jordan, 70% of newborn babies are being named after the main characters. Episodes are screened several times a day, but like my grandmother says, it’s one of those series which you can miss ten episodes of and still be able to follow without problems. We’d been home from the airport only for some hours, and already my twelve-year old cousin Rama was bringing me up to date with the storyline. “The man loves the woman who is married, and the woman who is married to another man loves him, but then the first man ties up the woman who is married and tells her he won’t let her go before she agrees to divorce the man she is married to.” Without having seen one episode yet, I was instantly hooked.

Neighbouring countries go up in flames, the world’s greatest super-power keeps coming up with new synonyms to “terrorist state” and an Israeli bomb drops in the middle of the desert, but people here shrug the dust off and keep being more hospitable and friendlier than ever. The people in these lands have been the same for thousands of years, and to keep up with tradition, we’ll be knocking on Auntie Hind’s door in the Christian Quarter after some days.