From the UK to post-Assad Syria: How a Syrian-British mother turned a family visit into a humanitarian mission

"I can't believe how the people are living. I know there are poor people in Syria, but I can't believe it is to this extent," begins Hanan Alshami, who recently returned to the UK from a 26-day-long trip to Qatana, her hometown in Syria.

"You can't believe people in this world are living like that."

Alongside a team of volunteers, Hanan spent a month refurbishing a local school, packing food parcels, distributing clothes, paying locals' debts off at local stores, and footing a hospital's cleaning bill.

She managed to raise over £5,000 to pay for these actions, after having decided to visit her family there as soon as the Assad regime fell.

Taking her eldest son, who had not been to Syria for the past 12 years, as well as her youngest son, who had never been, Hanan quickly decided this trip wouldn't just be a holiday — instead she wanted to take the opportunity to "try to do something to help the people there."

For anyone who knows Hanan, this will come as no surprise. Since arriving in Cheltenham in southwest England as a refugee with her family in 2015, she has organised multiple fundraisers to help Syrian refugees and those struggling back home.

In 2016, just months after arriving, she organised a film screening, exhibition, and talk about Syrian refugees in Lebanon, where she was for four years before coming to the UK. She sent the money raised to an organisation assisting refugees there.

Almost every Ramadan, she has fundraised for Syria, where her mum still lives and has been able to assist with packing and delivering the food parcels they buy for families with the funds, and distributing the new clothes they collect for the children.

Hanan radiates compassion for those suffering, and brims with energy and ideas when it comes to organising to help others.

She had been back to Syria once since leaving in late 2011, to see her family after being granted British citizenship two years ago. However, whilst there she had suffered a chilling experience — she was threatened she would never see her family again — which made her vow not to return while the regime still existed.

"When Assad fell, we didn't sleep for three nights," Hanan tells The New Arab.

"We were really happy, all of Syria was happy… we had a 6 am group video call with all my family – one in Dubai, one in Germany, one in Jordan, one in Lebanon, and one in Syria."

She quickly started making plans to return to Syria, booking her tickets, and then "everything went really, really quickly," she says, explaining that there wasn't much time to do the fundraising.

She contacted a volunteer organisation in Qatana, who told her about a dilapidated primary school in her local area in desperate need of repairs, including plumbing in the bathrooms and general refurbishment. She decided this would be one recipient of the funds raised.

She also spoke to her mum, who told her how people locally needed basics — food and clothing; with many indebted to local stores which had lent them credit for these things.

On Facebook, she was connected to a local hospital, continuously making call-outs for assistance, so she decided some of the money would go to them.

She then contacted everyone she knew who might help. She says she's always had a generous response locally in the past, and felt she had built a level of trust through her past fundraisers. She is also part of the local group 'Cheltenham Welcomes Refugees,' which she was sure would help, alongside the Syrian and Muslim communities in Cheltenham and Gloucester.

One of her friends set up a JustGiving page for her, with a message outlining her plans. After posting and sharing the page with everyone they could think of, the donations started to trickle in. Amazingly, in less than a month, she had exceeded her target and raised £5,400.

On 9 February, she set off for Syria, via Jordan, arriving a day later. Her eldest son, Mohammed, 18, who is at university, helped her with everything, she explains, adding, "I'm really proud of him."

She adds that though it wasn't "like a holiday", – they spent almost every day working. She did take him to the Damascus Museum as the sole sightseeing activity of the trip.

After visiting the school, she arranged for a plumber and painter to come to fix up the bathrooms, and quickly began purchasing staples for the food parcels.

"We made around 150 boxes of food," she explains, each of which contained rice, sugar, lentils, bulghur, eggs, meat, oil and other essential items. These were delivered to families in batches.

After visiting the hospital, Hanan learned that what they needed most was funding for cleaners, as they had been unable to afford to keep employing the previous cleaning company. So she donated enough money to pay for one month's cleaning there.

Qatana itself is a big city, she says, with a population of around 100,000. Similarly to everywhere in Syria, people are struggling to survive the deep poverty most of the population has been plunged into due to years of war and sanctions.

Despite knowing the situation was bad, Hanan says she was shocked by the extent of poverty, and has emailed the UK government, asking them to lift the sanctions and reopen their embassy in Damascus.

"They should lift the sanctions, because that affects the people in Syria, not the government," she insists.

Recently, after returning to the UK, she called her mum to find her crying. When she asked why, her mum said her neighbour had died.

"I met this neighbour," she says. "She died because she's poor; she had malnutrition because they don't have enough food. She was a retired 55-year-old teacher."

Hanan shares how much the news upset her, and that she had tried to help this neighbour when there, but so many people are in so much need that it’s impossible.

"To be honest," she says sadly, "I feel that the country has gone back a hundred years." Nonetheless, she has hope in the new government, adding that people feel they have rights now and can make their voices heard.

That said, she is extremely worried about the future of the country and the people, remarking that the Assad regime didn't leave anything in Syria — they "stole everything."

However, the generous response she found there was overwhelming.

The workers they hired insisted on taking less money for the jobs, she explains, and many people volunteered to clean the school grounds and help with the painting.

Her brother's friends took time out from their university studies to volunteer with them, she adds, and her mum, "who always helps," brought her car to transport supplies and food boxes.

With regards to her efforts, she sums these up as "bahsa btsanad al-jarra" — an Arabic proverb meaning "a pebble can prop up a jar" — believing that such initiatives do make a difference, even if they seem a drop in the ocean of suffering.

Hanan is continuing to fundraise, having forged new connections with various Qatana-based organisations there, and being determined to keep assisting the hospital, as well as a local GP who is providing medical treatment to people from the whole region, she says.

The needs are vast — from insurance for ambulances, to medicines and supplies — but she's not giving up as she continues to press for more support for Syria, and to have faith in the truth of that time-honoured proverb: Bahsa btsanad al-jarra.

To donate to Hanan Alshami's crowdfunded, click here 

Rose Chacko is an Arabic-English translator with a focus on politics, particularly in the Middle East. She holds a Master's in Advanced Arabic from Edinburgh University and is currently based in Stroud