What it means to be a Syrian Refugee.
What makes someone abandon their home and travel across land and sea in often dangerous and unknown conditions for a hopefully better future? Sleman Shwaish, Refugee Coordinator for the British Red Cross gave us an insight by sharing his story as our guest speaker at the May meeting. Sleman, Kurdish in origin is from Quamish in NE Syria. He studied in Aleppo as an agricultural engineer but fled to the UK in 2012 after being forcibly conscripted to join the Army as the war took hold and started to ravage what had been a beautiful country. Sleman could not countenance fighting or killing his own people and had to make the difficult decision to leave his parents, his father a Pharmacist and his mother an English teacher. Sleman travelled illegally through Turkey and Iraq eventually ending up in London, where he claimed and was granted asylum.
