{"id":258119,"date":"2019-09-26T07:00:20","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T10:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/?p=258119"},"modified":"2019-09-25T18:41:35","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T21:41:35","slug":"brazilian-women-describe-life-in-syria-during-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/brazilian-women-describe-life-in-syria-during-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Brazilian women describe life in Syria during crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

S\u00e3o Paulo \u2013 Two Brazilian women living in Syria told ANBA how the war impacted their lives. Both live with their husbands and children, Marcela Jacques in Damascus and Renata Isa in Homs, and were in the country when conflicts started in 2011. They are both friends.<\/p>\n

In the series on Syria that was recently published, the agency included parts of their testimonies in the reports on Damascus<\/a> and Homs<\/a>, and now shows other details.<\/p>\n

\"Brasileiras
Marcela (L), her younger son, and Renata<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After meeting a Syrian young man on the internet and having online conversations with him throughout a year, Marcela, who was born in Recife, decided to go to the Arab country in late 2008 to meet him. \u201cIt worked out and I stuck around,\u201d she said. \u201cWe married in 15 days and I was pregnant two months later, isn\u2019t it so, \u2018habibi\u2019?\u201d she teased her husband, who was at her side while she talked to ANBA on the phone. \u201cHabibi\u201d means \u201csweetheart\u201d in Arabic.<\/p>\n

The couple has two kids, a 10-year-old girl and a 18-months-old boy. Her husband works in an embassy in Damascus and Marcela is a Portuguese teacher. Pictured above, a selfie of her and her students.<\/p>\n

Born in Curitiba, Renata has also married and had two kids, but while she was living in Brazil still. Now, her boys are 8 and 14. The family moved to Homs in early 2011. The riots of the so-called Arab Spring were taking place in several countries in the region, but things hadn\u2019t still escalated to a full-blown conflict in Syria.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Marcela and her husband<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMy husband is from Homs, Syria and wanted to go back home, and we both wanted to raise our kids in a safer place, without so much crime,\u201d she said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know what was going to happen, what it would become,\u201d she said. Renata is a dentist and her husband is a civil engineering.<\/p>\n

What to do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Things were getting worse and both woman and their families faced the same question: should we stay, or should we go?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen things really got ugly and bombings started in the city in 2012, I got scared,\u201d Marcela said. Although Damascus itself was not the scene of fighting, the capital city\u2019s outskirt saw heavy conflicts, including projectiles shot at the city\u2019s downtown.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very troubling. There were tanks on the streets, army’s choppers and planes overhead. Rebels had surrounded Damascus reached the suburbs,\u201d Marcela said. She said that for two occasions she was near places hit by bombs.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Renata and her family<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Homs, on the other hand, combats took place in the city\u2019s central area. Although the neighborhood where she lives was not the front, Renata stressed scary episodes, such as a mortar falling on the parking lot of a building nearby, an explosion in a house on the neighborhood, snipers shooting up a building in the region, and deaths.<\/p>\n

The family decided to move out from Homs to her parents-in-law\u2019s near Tartus, a city on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, where there was no fighting. \u201cMany families moved to this region. Those who could afford came,\u201d said Renata.<\/p>\n

Marcela, in turn, decided to come back to Brazil with her daughter \u2013 the boy hadn\u2019t been born yet \u2013 while her husband stayed in Damascus. She stayed in the country during 2013. The Syrian army only announced it had retaken full control of the capital city’s outskirts in May 2018.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Renata in her dental office in Homs<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Renata stayed in the region of Tartus for a year and a half. \u201cUntil things had settled down,\u201d she said. Homs\u2019 most central areas were cleared only in mid-2014.<\/p>\n

Besides the violence, Renata told goods were more expensive, and there were blackouts and shortage of fuel, even for the heating. Fuel rationing is still in force in Syria.<\/p>\n

And now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI was very disappointed since [before the war] I\u2019d came here on vacation every two years and found everything wonderful, and that\u2019s why I decided to move,\u201d she said. \u201cI left everything [in Brazil] and when the war started, I didn\u2019t know what to do,” added Renata, who is a daughter of Syrian parents.<\/p>\n

Now she is back to her dental office in Homs, tough.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Marcela and her children<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Marcela also described constant blackouts and scarcity of fuels and other products. \u201cThere was not one day without a blackout,\u201d she said. She told that armed groups took over a water reservoir in the city once. \u201cAnd the Syrian pound was seriously depreciated,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Now, the Damascus resident teaches embassies’ workers, Syrian-born Brazilian people who don\u2019t speak Portuguese, entrepreneurs doing business with Brazil, and people interested in learning languages in general. She also takes part in charitable initiatives leaded by Brazil\u2019s ambassador to Damascus, Mercedes Pitaluga, which bring together members of the local Brazilian community in regular meetings.<\/p>\n

But Marcela doesn\u2019t want to stay in Syria anymore.<\/p>\n

Translated by Guilherme Miranda<\/strong><\/p>\n

Personal Archive<\/div>\n
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Marcela Jacques from Recife and Renata Isa from Curitiba live in the Arab country with their husbands and children and were taken aback by the war started in 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1454,"featured_media":258053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3066],"tags":[11492,3941,11254,41063,2267,9611,10992],"class_list":{"0":"post-258119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-society","8":"tag-brazilian-women","9":"tag-damascus","10":"tag-homs-en","11":"tag-homs-en-2","12":"tag-immigration","13":"tag-syria-en","14":"tag-war"},"wps_subtitle":"Marcela Jacques from Recife and Renata Isa from Curitiba live in the Arab country with their husbands and children and were taken aback by the war started in 2011.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1454"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anba.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}