Syria's Children

I recently watched a PBS program on Frontline about the children of Syria. It focused on a family with four young children living in Aleppo where ISIS has a stronghold and constant shelling and bombing happens daily in the streets. Children cannot go to school and the father who fights in the resistance is eventually captured by ISIS. After a time, the mother decides her children deserve a better life and decides to use the money she has left to emigrate to Turkey and eventually to Germany. The mother and children miss their father very much and hope to return to Syria one day to find him if he is still alive. At first, the children are happy being able to go to school and have a nice home in a small German town, but soon the German sentiment toward Muslims changes from welcome to cautionary fear. Life becomes uncertain again.

It was a heartrending story, and I wondered if the children would ever be able to live normal lives after experiencing such trauma. Would they ever feel secure and safe? Families who are uprooted from their beloved countries by war and seek refuge in other lands go through such turmoil. Americans who have never known war or losing everything they love find it hard to identify with such horrible situations, but we need to try to understand why we cannot close our doors to these suffering people. They are not terrorists. They are God's children as much as we are. We are all one family and need to care for one another.