Destiny tells the story of a teenage Syrian boy, his family, and the people that they meet along the way. As a nearly decade-long war spreads through Syria, Tareq’s once peaceful life is uprooted when he experiences a loss like no other. He, his father, and his 4-year-old sister, Susan, must embark on their long resisted journey to Europe. With a Daesh threatening pit stop in Raqqa, the family must quickly make their way to Turkey with the newly joined company of Tareq’s teenage cousin Musa. Once they arrive in Turkey, Tareq and Musa are sent to Istanbul, to find work, while Susan and his father remain in Gaziantep. After experiencing the challenges that Turkish life holds for Syrians, a resistant Tareq leaves Musa behind to smuggle his family to Greece. With the little money made, the family is able to send Tareq and Susan across the unpredictable Aegean Sea into Lesvos, Greece, an Island off the coast of Turkey. After a dangerous and uncertain smugglers' ride to the Island, Tareq is met with the generosity of many volunteers, including American college student Alexia, who makes a life-lasting impression on Tareq and the people that mean the most to him. This book opened my mind up to a refugee's journey in a completely new way. I was always aware that making the decision to leave one's home can never be easy, but I was under the impression that there were many people whose job was to make it easier on the refugees. Instead, throughout this book, I found that more people are making it extra challenging to cross borders, which is happening on top of the already life-threatening situations refugees face. What surprised me the most was that many of the smugglers were Syrian refugees themselves. It was hard to believe that someone who had escaped from that kind of danger wasn’t fighting harder to get their fellow Syrians out safely. Reading this book really made me think about the life that I have and how it is sometimes taken for granted. Here we are losing ourselves over a lost sports event, or a failed assignment, while kids all over the world have bombs exploding left and right. One thing that is highlighted in this book is the idea that what is ultimately the most dangerous for humanity is the divide between the love in our hearts and the hatred that our mind convinces our hearts to feel. This is something that affected my opinion on a lot of conflicts around the world. I think that in the future, it will be a little bit easier for me to understand the pain and the loss that the people fleeing these countries experience. Tareq’s life was so different from mine that it was easy to see that this book was fiction. However, after reading, I keep thinking about how real this journey is for so many people, and that was difficult for me to grasp. By Kera W.
1 Comment
jdhoe
10/6/2023 11:44:20 am
bad
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorSTenth grade students at Decorah High School share how they're reading outside of their own experiences and how it has changed them. Categories
All
Archives
November 2022
|