The girl who adopted a grandmother Morning, noon and night, death tumbled chaotically from the sky into her city. Finally one November night in 2015, it crash-landed in the 10-year-old girl’s neighborhood.
The falling bombs killed two of her close relatives.
Her mother shrieked at the loss. In the dark of night, the girl watched her parents work out a terrible calculus about the future of their five young children. They arrived at a wrenching decision. At dawn, the family would walk out of a Syrian war zone. They would leave with nothing. For the sake of the children, they would throw themselves on the mercy of the world.
They would seek asylum in another country.
The girl and her family left Aleppo and found their way to a Turkish refugee camp. Within two months they would be on the road again. Dangers stalked the girl throughout the ordeal. That included the frightening night she spent in a Turkish jail with her mother and three younger sisters. Their jailers did two things she never will forget. First, they gave the woman and girls dry bread and dog food, which they refused to eat. Second, they confiscated the supplies the family had collected along their journey.
Gone were the precious life preservers they desperately needed for the next step to safety and freedom — the often-deadly ocean crossing in an inflatable raft.
No one in the family could swim.
Passage to their unknown future would be in a flimsy, black rubber dinghy. The wind was already whipping the Aegean Sea into chopping waves when they found themselves on a rocky beach on the west coast of Turkey.
Read the rest of my story here. | 
