Since her childhood, Yusra Mardini’s dream was to become a professional swimmer and represent Syria in Olympic sports tournaments, but the intensification of the battles in Damascus in 2015 reduced her dream to just survival. Like tens of thousands of Syrians dreaming of living in peace, Yusra set off with her sister Sarah, and some of their relatives, on the terrible asylum journey to Europe, carrying with them their dreams of a safe life and resuming professional swimming, but in the middle of the trip between Turkey and Greece, the rubber boat’s engine stopped working. Work, and the boat loaded with passengers began to sink, and despite their many attempts to call for help, no one responded to them. Seventeen-year-old Yusra, her sister, and some other passengers jumped off the boat. To lose weight, they swam with it until they reached Greece, after which the sisters continued their dangerous journey overland to Germany. From swimming to save her life and the lives of her friends, to swimming with a dream of an Olympic medal, Yusra tells her extraordinary story from a refugee fleeing a war-torn country to an Olympian in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil. ***** Yousra, we could not be more proud of you for your courage, your ability to resist difficulties, and for the wonderful example you set for children everywhere. Former US President Barack Obama
An existence where no one sees you:
No one can turn to you when you are not yourself. Someone knocks on the door of your thinking to get nothing. Someone extends his hand to your heart to freeze because of its cold. Someone blows on your wounds to spread dust on them. No one stays for you anymore. You are not there. You are in reality. You have headed to that void in which no one will find you, but there is that feeling that took hold of you while you were running away, the loneliness that clung to you to fill the void inside you. This is your existence in which no one sees you, there is only you and your loneliness.!
Misfortunes befall the Levant Sharif, the birth of strange children increases, drought and poverty prevail, and the attempt of Ibrahim Pasha and the apostles of the French Revolution who joined him to overthrow the state of the Ottoman Sultan is nothing but a sign of the imminent arrival of Satan, as the religious extremists see, trying to preserve the Levant Sharif, fighting the creation Newspapers and comics that encourage obscenity.
All of this is happening outside, while Arwa sneaks into Bernardo’s house and messes with a strange drawing of a complete being, carrying both masculinity and femininity.
In an interesting plot that combines imagination with history, myth, and folktales, Khairy Al-Dhahabi tries to read the effects of the French campaign in Syria, and monitors the return of theater to the Levant, discussing many problematic issues: myth, masculinity and femininity, and the Damascene people killing those who are gay among them.
