Lessons war of
MONTREAL— It’s midnight, and Hazar Mahayni is watching the day’s opening of her school, Al Salam.
She inspects the senior male students standing in tidy lines on the cobblestone courtyard before the front doors, and singing an anthem for their lost homeland, Syria.
“I worked hard to have children stand in lines and be organized like this,” says Mahayni. “You should have seen it before. Now they are going up to the second floor. I can go with them.”
Sure enough, with a swipe on her cellphone screen, we are transported upstairs to a hallway, where we watch the same boys quietly walk into their classrooms.
Al Salam is in Reyhanli, a Turkish town in sight of the Syrian border.
Mahayni, the school’s principal, is seven time zones away in the living room of her Montreal condo.
Hazar Mahayni of Montreal was visiting Damascus when she got a call to help out — for a few days — at the opening of a school for Syrian refugees on the Turkish border. She’s now principal, giving hundreds of students an opportunity to make something of their lives
But she oversees the school’s every function, as if she were there, flipping through 18 security cameras linked to her tablet and Android phone and bouncing between Skype calls with staff on two laptops.
“See, the youngest are starting to arrive,” she says, surveying the school’s courtyard, where a handful of young boys and girls are running in circles. They have arrived an hour early for their school day — Al Salam’s second shift of classes.
“They are playing,” says Mahayni. “They are so happy with the space.”
Every one of the 1,600 students is a Syrian refugee. Each fled home after the Arab Spring uprising disintegrated into civil war, often with nothing but a backpack of clothes. Many have witnessed horrors — family members arrested and tortured, friends killed or kidnapped, homes bombed and ransacked, schools attacked and destroyed.
Three years before most Canadians were rattled awake to the refugee crisis in Syria by the photo of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body lying on a Turkish beach, a group of Montrealers created this school to offer fleeing children a refuge. They wanted to restore their childhood and offer hope, at least temporarily — because everyone assumed the war would end soon.
“Otherwise, they would be a lost generation,” says Mahayni.
Mahayni (pronounced ma-HIGH-nee) planned to spend only five days in Reyhanli for the school opening, and then return to her home and job in Montreal. Instead, she stayed for three months, and since then has split her time between the two cities.
How the 64-year-old pharmacist and grandmother became the principal of a school 8,500 kilometres away is a story of compassion, courage and — perhaps — fate. It is also the story of the difference one person can make.
Aphone call in Damascus
Mahayni hadn’t planned on attending Al Salam’s opening in October 2012.
The school was a project led by her friends at École Al Salam, a Saturday Arabic school in Montreal, where she had enrolled her three sons shortly after arriving in Canada in 1990, to ensure they didn’t lose ties to their Syrian culture.
Mahayni volunteered as a teacher, so she was aware of the plan to open a school for Syrian refugees, but she was not involved.
She was in Damascus, where she had grown up, when she got a call asking her to help supervise the school opening.
“I said, ‘It’s impossible. It’s far. I want to come back to Montreal,’ ” recalls Mahayni. “She called me back and said, ‘Nobody else can go. If you don’t go, nobody will be there.’ ”
So Mahayni changed her return ticket to route her through Turkey, a country she had never visited. What she saw there compelled her to take charge.
“It was a mess,” Mahayni says. “They were not teaching, just gathering. I said, ‘If you want a school, it must be a real school. This is a disaster for the children.’ ”
Five days turned into three months, which turned into three years. Mahayni always expected her time at Al Salam to end quickly, with the fall of the Assad regime. But Syria’s war only intensified, driving more refugees across the border. Instead of closing, the school expanded.
Perhaps the years volunteering at the Montreal school were preparation for this.
“It’s as if God put me in that school to teach me things that later I would give to the Syrian people,” she says.
She rhymes off changes she made: songs instead of revolutionary chants; lines of students instead of a mosh pit; collaboration among teachers instead of suspicious competition.
When Mahayni saw that only boys were allowed to play soccer outside, she set down a new rule.
“Either the boys and girls will play, or we will not play at all,” Mahayni recalls in- structing the staff. “It is a cultural thing. They come from a conservative place, where girls don’t have the same freedom as boys.” Now, the school boasts 18 female soccer teams and 18 female basketball teams.
When Mahayni heard the secretary turn away over-age students, who had missed years of schooling because of the war, she created remedial classes.
“If we won’t accept them,” she recalls saying, “no school will accept them. I’m sure they will never go back to school again. We will lose them.”
All along, her motivation has been to create opportunities for children who lost everything. She calls Al Salam a “dreamland.”
Back in December 2013, the first international volunteer group arrived at Al Salam. They were mainly artists and athletes with Chicago’s Karam Foundation. Among them were dentists — the first that many students had seen in years.
As the dentists were packing up, Mahayni cornered one with a proposal. She would find a way to build a permanent clinic, if the Syrian American Medical Society covered one dentist’s salary. The clinic opened that spring.
A tragic twist would link Al Salam, through that clinic, to the most notorious suspected hate crime against U.S. Muslims this year. For it was there that Deah Barakat, a University of North Carolina dentistry student, was planning to come on a 10day relief mission.
Barakat was raising money for the trip when he was shot dead in his family’s apartment in Chapel Hill in February, along with his young wife, Yusor Mohammad AbuSalha, and her sister Razan.
Last summer, Barakat’s father and his brother, Farris, came in his place.
The most powerful moment of that trip, Farris Barakat says, occurred as some den- tists were leaving. Students spontaneously began to dance and serenade them in the school courtyard. “Most of us cried,” says Barakat, 25. “How inexplicably happy they were. It made so sense. We have so much more safety and security and aren’t nearly as happy as they were. I lost a brother. But these people have lost so much more.”
He calls the school “an oasis of childhood.”
For three years, Mahayni has shuttled between Montreal and Reyhanli. While overseas, she sleeps on a couch in the school’s administration office and takes sponge baths with water heated in a kettle. Clearly, Canada offers more creature comforts.
But, emotionally, she resides in Turkey.
The school consumes her. She barely sleeps, worrying about money. She speaks breathlessly, as if she is running for help. This morning, the problem is bus insurance. The school’s Turkish account is $1,400 short.
“The buses will stop unless I find the money,” Mahayni says.
For all its stress, the school has given her purpose. Her adult sons have moved away, and four years ago her husband died. She and Khaldoun had been married for 38 years.
A year after his death, when visiting Damascus, she was still gripped by loss and the unsettling question of what to do, now a single woman in her 60s. “I was trying to come back to life.” It was then that her friend called with the request that would lead to an answer.
It is now 6:30 a.m., and the black sky outside her windows is warming to blue. Most of Montreal is waking up, but Mahayni’s day is only halfway done. She rolls in her chair between computers and Skype calls. On the iPad, she watches the youngest students board the buses for home. After they’ve all gone, she will continue to look over the school from afar.
“I need these children as much as they need me.”