I first met Mohanned on the road leading directly into Idomeni. He was walking towards me carrying two soups in his hands, gotten from a lovely volunteer group here, Aid Ministry, which sets up a food truck at the end of the road and serves soup, music playing softly.  

He walked up to me and asked me if I had any news about the meeting. I said I didn’t. He asked if the border would open and I say that it was very unlikely. He offered me some soup. We walked together back through the chaos and out into the field on the other side of the train tracks, packed with tents, crammed together in the mud and he led me to a tiny little oasis amongst the tents – four tall posts dug into the earth, small fir branches wrapped on their sides, a plastic shelter overhead, a campfire burning and a small group of guys smoking a hookah. Welcome to our living room he said and invited me to sit. This was on Friday when the decision had yet to be announced on their fate – Iraqis and Syrians most in their early 20s. One, Ali, from Homs, the interior designer of the group, is 32. “Are there any women who can adopt me?” they all laugh. 

 Mohanned and his brother, Ahmed, are from Fallujah. They are both charming with that family similarity I always love to see. “It’s the nose,” they both say and we laugh. 

 What do they think of us in Europe, Ahmed asked me on Saturday when the deal was done. “Be honest,” he said. His friends around him, Mohammed, Ali, Abdul Aziz. There is a lot of fear in Europe, I said. Some people see Muslim and they think Daesh. Paris made people afraid. (To note here that most all of the people I have met over the past months speak of Daesh, not ISIS. They see nothing Islamic about the militant group that has torn apart their lives). But I said, there are many of us who see them as brave, beautiful people, people who but for the luck of life would be pursuing their careers and their dreams and not stuck here in the mud of Idomeni.  

Ahmed said, thank you and noted that if they didn’t have a war in his country he wouldn’t have come here. “If they don’t see us with eyes of mercy, we have no future,” he said, “we are lost here.”   

March 2016