The first time I met Fatina she was in the refugee housing unit where she now lives and she was busily and efficiently changing her young son, Yousef’s diaper. He is one & a half years old. Within moments of my arrival he had gone from bare bottom to diapered to dressed, all the while Fatina engaging with me, smiling at me, totally nonplussed by the task at hand. Then he was out the door to join his sisters. And Fatina dissolved into tears.  

On the day the EU-Turkey deal went into effect – March 20 – we had all heard that there were two dinghies which arrived that morning, before the deal went into effect at noon, which were catastrophically overcrowded. Both dinghies - boats that are overcrowded when they carry 40 people - were carrying upwards of 80 people and, on one of the dinghies two men had died on the crossing. I had heard how it had happened. That one of the men died on the beach, and that the other had drowned on the boat, that he had slid down to the bottom and, because no-one could do anything because there was no room to move and everyone was afraid that if they did move they would capsize the boat, he had died there. I had met reporters who had been on the beach when the boats came in and who had watched as rescue workers tried to resuscitate the man. I had heard about the wives who had wailed in grief at the realization that their husbands were dead.  

Fatina was one of those wives.  

Now, a month later she waits at Kara Tepe and she doesn’t know what to do. Part of her thinks she should return to Aleppo but the refugees she has met here advise against it. They say she should stay in Europe for her children. Fatina says that when she saw how crowded the boat was going to be she didn’t want to get on it, that many of them didn’t want to get on it, but that they were forced to at gunpoint. She says that they were literally sitting on top of each other. She was at the back of the boat and her husband was at the front. She was powerless to help him.  

Fatina is 40 years old. She looks younger & I point this out to her.  

"I looked much younger when my husband was alive," she says.  

He was 35.  

April 2016