Rome – Just before breaking the fast from Ramadan on Sunday night, Hasan Zaheda played basketball with his son in the small courtyard of the apartment at the basement level on the outskirts of Rome where the refugee family is reconstructing their lives.
They have no photos of their native Syria: Damascus fled in the height of the civil war with just a change of clothes, diapers and milk for their small child. But there is a photo framed by Little Riad knowing Pope Francis, who brought them to them and two other Muslim families with him to Italy from Refugee camps on the Greek island of Lesbos Almost a decade ago.
“It’s a gift from Paradise,” Zaheda said Sunday, laughing. “Pope Francis, a gift from our God, that God sent us to save us.”
As the Zahedos began to observe The Sacred Month of RamadanFrancis, 88, entered his third week of fighting pneumonia in a hospital Not far away. The least they can do, said the family is to be close to him in the prayer at night and day.
“We are looking for her health newsletter every day,” said the mother, Nour Essa, 39, after remembering having met the pontiff suddenly in lesbians. “What surprised me most is that the father of the Church was a modest man, who had no prejudices, open towards other ethnicities and religions.”
The family traveled on the Pope’s plane, one of the most visible moments of Defense of migrants who marked Francis’s papacy. The Zahedas remember how kind Francis stroked Riad’s head as he passed through the hall to talk to journalists.
But “miraculous” as they thought, it was only the beginning of a new life in Italy to which they are still adjusted.
ESSA, Biologist, and Zaheda, an architect who worked as an official in Damascus, decided to leave Syria in 2015 after being recruited in the army. They sold their home to pay a smuggler, walking all night trying not to make a sound in the desert and at a time driving for ten hours in different trucks.
After fighting to cross the territory controlled by ISIS, they arrived in Türkiye and then had three failed attempts to reach the Greek islands by boat before reaching Lesbos in early 2016.
“I always thank God that my son was so small and that he does not remember all these things,” Essa said while Riad saw a Syrian soap opera in the living room with her grandfather, who fled approximately one year after them. On the walls, the disturbing paintings of Hasan’s white faces against the black and red turn have the vivid memories of the parents.
After more than a month in a lesbos camp, the family was approached for an interview for a stranger: Daniela Pompei, the head of migration and integration for the Catholic beneficial organization Sant’Egidio.
He had been commissioned to find families with the appropriate paperwork that Francis could bring Rome back with him, and asked them to make a decision about the act. They accepted, and the beneficial organization, with funds from the Vatican, finally brought more than 300 refugees from Greece and 150 from another Papal trip to Cyprus in 2021.
Sant’Egidio’s goal was to prevent the longest migrants from the sea through different routes of the Mediterranean, which they have He killed tens of thousands of asylum seekers Provided to “die for hope” over the years, said Pompei.
But the real evidence has been integration, since the processing of its asylum cases to learning Italian to school and labor placement. Initiatives such as Pap make a difference because they point to refugees that their new communities are willing to welcome them, despite the differences in faith.
“The Pope has attracted the open parishes for a long time, to welcome at least one family in each parish, to push the Catholics also to counteract what he called, with a very strong term in Lampedusa, “The globalization of indifference”, “ Pompei said.
In the characteristic Roman accent they have acquired, Zaheda’s parents told their challenges: having to re -insinuate in the university so that their titles can recognize themselves, helping their families to come to Europe, taking care of their son.
Working or studying 12 hours a day, they rarely have time to socialize with other Syrian families and migrants who understand most of their neighbors in the modest apartment buildings with a brick face, as well as most Riad classmates.
His best friend is from Ecuador, and Riad plans to study Spanish at high school. He has joined a local basketball team and the images of the court align in his room, where a large Syrian flag hangs from his bunk. He likes to read the little prince in English, but his Arab is tentative, although he spends most of the afternoons with his grandfather, who loves sketching local churches.
For Sunday IFTAR, the food breaking the fasting of the day, the family covered a small table with yogurt salad and Chickpea Tisiyeh and pizza to bring in typical Roman flavors such as zucchini flowers and anchovies.
While Riad packed his backpack for school week, his parents said that his future depends on the child, for whom they will probably stay in Italy, instead of joining relatives in France or returning to a Syria who could probably not recognize.
“I would always like it to build its future, that you can build a position as the son of an undocumented migrant who arrived in Italy and wanted to leave his mark in a new country,” said Zaheda.
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