The Foreign Service Journal, September 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2016 101 Walking through the basalt ruins in Bosra. DAVIDFABRYCKY Laura Fabrycky and her daughters look down at the stage from high up in the amphitheater at Bosra. DAVIDFABRYCKY inside a smoky, modest café to escape a torrential afternoon rain and had a satisfy- ing meal just below the cliffs where the Orthodox monastery of St. Thecla perches. After visiting the shrine, we hiked through a famous crack in the rock, bun- dled against the rainy cold. The apocryphal story tells of a rock that opened to allow an elderly St. Thecla, a contemporary of the Apostle Paul, to flee her persecutors after having faced torture and death sentences many times over in her life. Two years later, the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front would wage battle with the Syrian army here, taking lives and kidnap- ping a dozen nuns. Back in Damascus, the sights, smells, tastes and faces of the ancient streets left lasting impressions. We purchased a set of glass-paneled copper lanterns from a shopkeeper who, in his doting, fatherly way, gave our daughters little fabric-framed mirrors for their purses. Mash’allah! Mash’allah! He had the lanterns wound tightly in bubble-wrap for our trip back to Amman, assuring us that if any of the panels broke, he would be honored to repair them. Just come back, no problem. The lanterns have by now even survived a transoceanic voyage. But five years on, our memo- ries are in a kind of inter- pretive ruin, and we have no place to fix them. It was a good trip. We still say, as we did then, how lovely a place Syria was, even in the shadow of its ruthless dictator and his apparatus of fear. Yet Bosra’s basalt structures have been pocked by bullets, its mosaics punctured, many of its residences demolished. The destruction of sites like these, there and elsewhere, makes us weep, but that pales before the abject suffering and displace- ment endured by the Syrian people. Howmany times have I thought of Thecla’s rock and said a prayer for miraculous safe passages for the countless refugees who have suffered unrelentingly in the years since? The diplomatic life comes with enormous privilege—which, at its best, is twined with a responsibility to venture far beyond the safety of Disney-like surreal- ity; to take real and complicated places into one’s own life, as best one can; to meet people, encounter cultures and make memories in places that many will never see. While some among the American public harbor fear about the unknown and the “other,” we think back to the faces we saw—including little ones with bright pigtails and brown, doe-like eyes, just like our Hannah; eyes that should have been compelling enough for a taste of liberty, for an end to the violence, for a livable, human peace—smiling, waving, as our daughters played farm in the gentle ruins of Bosra. n