On breezy evenings
I open my front and balcony doors so the wind can flurry through.
Singapore is hot
and humid all the time and I like to freshen up my tiny apartment with wafts
and drafts whenever I can. My English neighbours from across the hall are
like-minded and on occasion wee Liam wanders in and we sit and chat.
Liam is nearly
five years old and he loves Postman Pat and chocolate ice cream and his little
brother Daniel.
I was sitting on
my sofa this evening feeling self absorbed and pithy.
Watching the news
has been horrifying the past few days.
More horrifying
that it normally is.
The conflict in
Syria seems never ending and the plight of the enormous wave of refugees being
forced from their homes and fleeing for their lives is heart breaking.
Liam walked into
my apartment dressed in his Fireman Sam pajamas and he asked me straight out
why I was looking so sad.
We don't muck
around with small talk and idle chitchat.
I told Liam that the
news about what was going in the world was distressing me. In a moment of
tenderness and benevolence and kindness – and in a flash of innocence that only
a five year old possesses - Liam gave me an almighty hug.
It was as welcome
as it was unexpected.
My television was
on at the time and images of refugees desperately trying to board trains in
Hungary was on and then the most despairing of sights came on the screen.
The little
3-year-old dead Syrian boy floating face down in the shallows of a Turkish
beach.
It was a haunting
thing to see.
It is an indelible
image that has rapidly become symbolic of the horror of the conflict that has
been raging in Syria since 2011.
I saw Liam looking
at the TV and I immediately grabbed the remote and turned the television off.
Liam then asked me
if that was the little boy who drowned in Greece with his Mummy and his brother
and I told him that it was. He informed me that he had seen the picture before
at home and his own Mum had explained that a lot of families were trying to
escape a country called Syria where bad people were making wars.
I told him this
was true.
Liam told me that
he thought that the bad people should stop fighting and he thought that they
might if they saw pictures of little boys drowned and then everyone could go
home.
I told
him that I wished that this were true.
I told
him that I thought that some people thought that war might sometimes seem be a necessary evil but I thought that no
matter how necessary people think it may be - it is always an evil.
I told
Liam that I did not think that anyone would learn how to live together in peace
by killing each other's children.
At Liam's
suggestion we made a cubby by putting a couple of blankets over two chairs and
we sat in it on the ground and I put on one of Liam’s videos that he keeps over
here for his visits.
We watched Postman
Pat together on my big screen television.
We drank chocolate
milk and Liam explained to me again who all the characters were.
He taught me the
Postman Pat song.
His dad Warwick
poked his head in early on in the piece and Liam told his Dad that I was
feeling very sad because of seeing the people having to leave their homes
because of the war. He then asked him if it would be all right if I came over
for a sleepover.
It was one of
those moments that I could contain neither the tears nor the laughter and I
tried in vain to blink away the wetness that clouded my eyes.
Life is full of
ups and downs and peaks and troughs and moments of tenderness that take my
breath away. There are climactic times when clarity and peace and joy strike
like a thunderbolt and one sits above the clouds. This was such a moment and it
was an apogee of sorts.
The empathy and
virtuosity of little children astounds me at times.
It really does.
I told Warwick
that much as I would like to come over for a sleepover I had to get up early
the next morning so I would have to take a rain check this time.
Liam’s dad nodded
his understanding and he told me to send Liam home when he became a nuisance.
Liam is never a
nuisance.
When Postman Pat
finished Liam wanted to talk more about the refugees and I pondered how much I
should explain such horror to a five-year-old boy.
He asked me what
the war was about and it was a very good question. I told him it was just bad
people doing mad things but I think few people do actually know what this
conflict is all about.
It started as a
civil war nearly five years ago with a large group of civilians holding
protests demanding President Assad’s resignation. The armed forces came down
hard on the protesters and shot many.
Which triggered
more protests.
The violence has
escalated ever since and more than 220,000 Syrians have been killed. More than
4 million Syrians have fled their homeland and the UN estimates that nearly 8
million are displaced internally.
The population of
the country is – or was – only 22 million people.
Neighboring
countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey have been inundated with refugees for
the past 4 years and it is only in recent weeks that a tipping point has been
reached as more and more terrified Syrians have fled their homes.
The war has become
more than a civil war too.
It has become a
sectarian battle that pitches the country’s Sunni Kurd majority against Assad’s
Shia Alawite sect.
Muslims are
killing Muslims.
The Russians and Iranians
have been providing aid to the Assad government with weaponry and Arab states like
Qatar and Turkey and Saudi Arabia are helping the Sunnis. As too are France and
the US and the United Kingdom.
The United Nations
have as usual proved completely impotent.
To add to the
terror and to complicate things further the terrible extremist group the self-named
Jihadists – the Islamic State - are raging a war within a war and have taken
over large swathes of the country and reign in terror.
It is hard to see
how this nightmare will all end.
I didn’t explain
any of this to Liam of course. I just told him that the people he had seen on
television were very frightened because of the war that was going on in their
country but they were very brave to leave their homes. I told him that leaving
was not an option – it was a necessity - and it was dangerous as well.
I told him that it
was why little children had died trying to escape on boats.
Even though he
didn’t ask, I reassured Liam that we were quite safe here in Singapore but the
whole world needed to help these people and wars just had to stop.
He told me that he
agreed.
We put another
Postman Pat video on but after awhile Liam fell asleep. I picked him up and
carried him home and I put him into his own bed. He was clutching his little
plastic dinosaur effigy tightly in his little fist – the green one.
He told me once
that it was his favourite thing.
He roused as I lay
him down and as I bent over to tuck him in and I planted a goodnight kiss on
his forehead - he handed me his dinosaur and he told me that I could keep it.
He told me not to
be sad anymore and that he was my friend.
The little
figurine is standing up on the table next to me now as I write this. A wave of
sorrow is flooding through me again as I think of all the little Syrian
children who must be so frightened right now.
Wars are so
dreadful.
I wonder how can we
keep having wars on terrorism when war is an act of terrorism itself. I know
that the situation in Syria is complex and emotive and fanatics are difficult
to stop but the world needs to assist the hundreds of thousands of people
displaced.
Immediately.
They are human
beings.
There are little kids.
They need to be
provided with assistance with dignity and respect.
There simply can’t
be any more little children drowning at sea.
No more little
children dying in war.
No more dying at all.
All I can do is
hope that perhaps my children’s children can live in a better world and I might
one day be asked, “Hey grandpa, what was
a war?”
I will return the
dinosaur to Liam tomorrow.
I can't get the
bloody Postman Pat song out of my head.
He has a black and
white cat you know.
It is driving me
mad.
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