More Than Tea

The silver tray was placed in front of me, with the assumption that I'd take a tiny cup of black tea.  Not offered in the way it would be in the states, “Would you like some tea?” before the water was ever boiled.  Then there would be the ordeal of selecting a tea from a wide variety of organic choices…herbal or caffeinated, looseleaf or bagged, sweetened or not…this was different.  The simple, very sweetened black tea was expected as part of any visit, as natural as greeting a guest as they walked in the door, as much a part of a visit as the parade of cheek to cheek kisses.  Tea, steeped in Middle Eastern culture.  Sharing a cup of tea with someone, anyone, was much more than a formality.  It was even beyond hospitality.  It was a co-mingling of souls, an acknowledgement of our shared humanity.  Sharing the same pot of tea was both equalizing among people and honoring of the guest at the same time.

The young woman who served the tea was stunning, to say the least.  In America, she would have been featured in a makeup advertisement, in a shiny magazine or huge billboard, modeling flawless olive skin and the classic beauty that comes with a face so beautifully symmetrical.  I thought about how beauty is subjective to culture.  Here, her full beauty was reserved for her husband.  Did the fact that the world would never experience her beauty make it any less valuable, I wondered?  She was a hidden jewel, covered in her black hijab, leaving her hair and full womanhood a mystery to us.  I was accustomed to no mystery, instead, a flaunting of beauty, almost a competition of who was fairest in the land.  Here, her husband and children would be the only ones to see her in the fullness of her beauty.  I quickly tried to place her as a Disney princess; she’d be Princess Jasmine, but prettier.  

Her dark chocolate colored eyes were deep, but missing the sultry, provocative expression that I was programmed to see in a woman of such undeniable beauty.  She carried the depth that one can only attain when they have learned to hold both joy and sorrow, hope and despair, in perfect balance.  Although she was younger than me, her eyes looked older.

Her body was also fully covered and shapeless in her black robe.  I marveled at yet another difference in our cultures.  Her modesty left the focus more on her spirit and the feeling she brought to the room than her fashion sense and level of fitness.

There was no, “Cute shirt, where’d you get it?” or brand name pressure.  Instead, the focus was on her hospitality, her willingness to receive my friends and I into her home and share her story with us.  There was much more freedom in her modesty, the focus being on her rather than what she wore.  I took her in.  She was shy and confident at the same time, sure of herself, and yet unsure of us.  With the language barrier, I relied solely on non verbal communication….eye contact and smiles.  She didn’t initiate a smile, but returned mine.

She opened her mouth to begin.  Wasn’t that why we were here?  To hear her story, to honor her as we shared tea.  My eyes welled with tears as soon as she started speaking.  It wasn’t that I understood a word of what she shared.  I don't speak Arabic.  It was the fact that she was a refugee, a young refugee, that told me part of her story before the translator switched the story to a language I could understand.  The word refugee told me so much of her story, clued me into the fact that it would be a sad story, similarly to knowing that someone was an orphan would bring tears to my eyes before I even knew the circumstances that had given them that identity.  I’d know that they were without parents the way I knew that she was far away from home.  And so, as she opened her mouth, I knew that hers would be a story of fleeing home due to tragic events.  Most likely, feelings of displacement, despair, pain, and extreme poverty would be a part of the story.  I braced myself, preparing to hear both heartbreak and redemption, evidenced in the expression she now wore, full of hope.

“I had siblings,” the translator started, as the woman paused for a moment to let him catch up, “but they were gas poisoned.  Three little brothers.  I saw them go off to school one day, and they never returned.  That was the day we really knew things were getting bad and we might possibly have to leave.  I think we had been in a sort of denial before that, or maybe it was shock.”

“Our house was bombed a few days later.  I had gone to the market for my mother.  She was so sad about my brothers that she spent her days staring at the wall, unable to speak.  She had lost her words along with her reason for living.  My father continued to work, because he had to.  We still had to eat.  But that day, he had come home to eat lunch.  If only the explosion had happened an hour later, my father would still be alive.  The thing is, if it had happened an hour later, I would be dead.”

“I went to get meat to cook that night.  I heard the explosion as I was paying at the market and knew.  It was one of those times where I just knew it was our street, our house.  It was the direction the explosion came from, and this internal awareness that I had.  I remember the fear I felt at that moment.  I couldn’t return home.  There might be more bombing.”

“I had just found out I was pregnant.”  Her eyes filled with tears as the translator paused along with her.  Up until this point, she hadn’t cried.  I wondered at how she had spoken of such horrors without shedding a tear.  I took a moment to glance around the room since she had paused.  All of us had our gazes transfixed on her face, captivated not only by the story, but the way in which she told it.  I tried to put myself in her shoes.  Living life, happy, and then the country erupts in civil war and all is lost.

“I was keeping it from my parents until after the marriage was official.  They would have disowned me if they found out that I was pregnant before the wedding ceremony.  The reason I was afraid to go look at the ruins of my home was because of the baby.  I didn’t care if anything happened to me at that point, but I knew I had to live for the baby, and heard that the government was still patrolling the area, killing people.”

“I spent the night curled up in that market, long after it had closed.  I hid under a table and slept.  In the morning, I gathered the courage to go look at my house.  I needed to see it for myself.  It was black, burned to the ground.  I wanted to take something with me to remember my life by, but there was nothing.  Nothing but ashes.  I called my fiance, and he told me we had to run.  Rumor was they were coming back tonight to shoot down anyone else they found alive.”

She paused and went into the kitchen, returning with some marinated olives and bread.  She made sure everyone had a snack, and then continued with the story.

“I had to come to terms with the fact that my parents would never meet my baby, their grandchild.  I helped my fiance gather his belongings and we left that night.  Ran, actually.  There were gunshots everywhere, and we ran in the dark, never knowing if a bullet would hit our backs or not.  We ran in the direction everyone told us to go.  Many people around us dropped dead.”

Again, she paused, smiling gently at her guests.  We sat on cushions in her modest apartment, if it could be called that.  It was the size of a shoebox, and the floors were cement, covered in dirt.  It was clear that she hadn’t been hit by a bullet, but we were still in suspense.  Had her fiance made it?  There had been a small child running around when we first came in, was that the baby she had been pregnant with as she ran out of her beloved Syria?

“We made it across the border the next day.  But I lost the baby.  I think the terror killed it.”  She wiped away a tear, steadied herself to tell the rest of her story.  

“I lost everything that I had up until that point.  My entire family, and the new life in me.  All I had left was my fiance.  We married as soon as we all got to safety.  We knew we weren’t promised tomorrow and had to make the most of each day.”  She paused.

“Does anyone have any questions?” The translator asked.

My friend raised her hand.  “Did you have more children?”

“I have a little girl now.”  She smiled.  “She’s with my husband and his mother.”  There was the redemption.  Did the life of that little girl soften the loss of her first child?

I set down the little glass teacup I held in my hand, which had been refilled by her whenever she noticed it was empty.  Somehow, she had managed to tell her story to a small group of traveling Americans, while making sure our little cups had never gone empty.  The tears cried in that room could have easily filled my teacup.  We would never be the same.  Never take for granted our lives, or our families.  I had so many questions for her.  How did she smile so freely, for example?  Her resiliency was beyond remarkable.  She had overcome so much tragedy and turned it into gratitude for the life she had now.  I wondered if her story was even more poignant when told in her language.  I had been told that there were words in Arabic that had no equal translation in English.  

I recognized that the translator was an artist of sorts, taking her story in Arabic and crafting it into English, to the best of his ability.  It was one of those stories that had to be taken into the soul and then exhaled deeply.  The translator had done that well.  He stood, signaling to us that it was time to leave.  We had some sightseeing to do that day.

I didn’t know how to transition from that story to tourism.