The Foreign Service Journal, September 2016

100 SEPTEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL REFLECTIONS Road Trip to Syria, 2011 BY LAURA MERZ I G FABRYCKY W e had no idea then just how slender a needle’s eye we were threading when we set off as a fam- ily to explore Syria over a long (Ameri- can) Presidents Day weekend in 2011. Traveling with our 4- and 2-year-old daughters, we planned an ambitious itinerary, secured visas and headed north from our apartment on the western edge of Amman, to the border crossing at Daraa. The Arab Spring was still in its heady early days. Egypt’s youth had electrified the region a month earlier by toppling a dictator. We wondered if Syria, too, would soon taste freedom, but couldn’t have anticipated just how hard and with what hell-fury the window that had been cracked open would be slammed down upon a people and a place. Our happy memories of this trip now seem strange and incongruous alongside accounts of the civil uprisings and the regime’s brutal retaliation in places like Daraa, Damascus and Bosra—not to men- tion the growth of ISIS and ensuing brutal- Five years on, ourmemories are in a kind of interpretive ruin, andwe have no place tofix them. Laura Merzig Fabrycky, whose husband is a State Department FSO, is a freelance writer and editor, poet and essayist. Her writing has been published in Books & Culture, the Review of Faith & International Affairs and elsewhere. Her first collection of poetry, Give Me the Word , was published in 2015. She and her family are currently posted to Berlin. ity throughout major parts of the country. As we drove up to the border, we read Little House in the Big Woods aloud in the car, eating Goldfish crackers. On the Syrian side of the border, we piled out of the car for passport control. The guards laboriously scrutinized our passports for signs of travel missteps into enemy terri- tory, a familiar, delicate dance of Levan- tine travel. Eventually, after much waiting, the kids and I returned to the car. Yet the scrutiny dragged on. My husband, David, attempted to speed up the process with polite chitchat while I continued to read Little House aloud in the parked car. The Goldfish bag was now empty. Frustrated but not quite defeated, David returned to the car. “I need Hannah” (our youngest). Ten minutes later, he emerged from the building beaming, with pass- ports in hand and Hannah in his arms. Apparently, seeing her energetic blonde pigtails and enormous brown eyes once more helped the guards regain their perspective, and they gave up looking for signs of enmity. We drove off. Listening to a Dora the Explorer “World Friendship” CD, we made our way through Daraa—where, in a few weeks’ time, children who had scribbled anti- regime graffiti on a wall would be dragged away to torture chambers. Children’s songs from France, Russia, Australia and China blared from the car. Just outside of Daraa, Hannah said she had to go to the bathroom, so we pulled over. I hopped out of the car, but just as I lifted the hatchback to retrieve the plastic potty, Dora’s unmistakable voice belted out: “Shalom! From Israel!” Hardly the tones of a delicate dance. We jumped back in the car and zoomed off. We ventured on to the still-inhabited Roman ruins at Bosra—taking in its basalt amphitheatre, climbing up to a perch to gaze down on the stage, where in March 2015 rebel forces would battle with regime troops. Winding through its ancient, cobbled streets, we stopped to let our girls play amidst the grassy, time-softened remains of a basalt Byzantine cathedral. They played “house” and “farm” around the toppled structures. David and I sat on upturned column segments watching them, happy that we had ventured here and not to a cloistered tourist resort for the holiday. Residents waved and smiled at us. We waved and smiled back. Later we headed into the mountains north of Damascus, to Ma’loula—one of the few towns where Aramaic (the language of Jesus) is still spoken. We ran