July• 2019 | 127three hours. Along the way we saw
vast encampments of white tents, as
well as people sleeping on the sides
of the highway under branches and
sheets. We entered town as dusk
fell, and found our new home in a
first-f loor apartment that Mustafa
had rented for us. Bland carried me
in. I turned on the TV and started
searching for familiar shows like
Days of Our Lives.
I knew that Gaziantep wasn’t the
end of our journey. Shiar had men-
tioned Germany. I didn’t tell anyone,
but one night when everyone was
sleeping, I borrowed Shiar’s laptop
and googled “Germany cures for cer-
ebral palsy.”
My parents eventually came to bewith us in Gaziantep, and in all, we
spent a whole year there. It was OK
for me as I busied myself watching
TV, which was how I was learning
English, and using the internet to find
out all the things I missed by not going
to school. But while the Turks had let
us into their country, they didn’t like
us. Bland couldn’t get a job. Nasrine
couldn’t study.
We made a plan to join our broth-
er Shiar. Bland went first, by him-
self, travelling through Bulgaria and
gaining asylum in Germany. But his
route took over a month, with lots of
hiking that Nasrine and I couldn’t do.
Besides, as more refugees surged into
Europe, Bulgaria built a fence to keep
PHOTO: KARAM ALMASRI/NURPHOTO/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKrefugees out. So for us, the only way
By 2015, bombings like this one in Aleppo drove Syrians to flee the chaos