Torture Survivor Speaks at Fundraiser

Sunday was the formal fundraiser for Syria. We all needed to feel that sense of community and unite for at least a few hours on a positive note of feeling we were making a difference in hopefully several hundred displaced and hurting Syrians. My friend came over and introduced me to this newly arrived gentleman from Damascus. The man was holding onto a cane and was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up and his jacket over. He looked very kind, but also scared and exhausted. He had survived recent torture and imprisonment and had now arrived here, more than eager to recover and try to get his soul put back together. I exchanged a few words with some helpful brothers and decided to include him in the fundraising program. What often happens at fundraisers is that people walk up to you and want to be included in your program. They may or may not speak well English and may or may not be public speakers. Many are quite boring presenters and there is nothing to kill an exciting and well-planned program than adding some sleep-inducing presenter(s). 

I was right away taken with this brother's excellent command of English and his eagerness to speak as long as his name was not mentioned. He really wanted to talk and share and help us raise more money for the cause of freedom in Syria and to provide humanitarian help to people now out on the streets or dying from hunger and lack of basic medical care. The program began and I found the brother haltingly walking up to me, asking to speak with me. He was feeling bad and awfully guilty about having to speak about himself and his situation and suggested he talk about the situation he had left behind instead, about the thousands of people on the streets in Damascus now. Proud, independent people who were now out on the streets in the unrelenting cold, with no clothes, belongings, money or food. He mentioned makeshift schools in bombarded buildings where people had tried to hang up plastic bags as protection against the elements, educating their children and future and doing their part to keep up the spirit and insure everyone's future. He wanted to share their misery and not the horrors of his own story. I felt very sympathetic and very little next to this survivor of some of the cruelest human experiences imaginable. I promised this gentleman that I would indeed deal with the problems of Damascus and I would do my part to help those people - and God willing then this blog is one way of helping and eventually creating funds for them - but that tonight was building up to a climax of us needing to help individual people and that his story would fit in perfectly and put a face to the horrors we hear about. He agreed to my request and went ahead an hour later and gave a very moving, to the point presentation of the violence that happened to him in the name of dictatorship and total need for control. His crime was to have been part of a rally for freedom and the damaging evidence was the flag he had hidden up his sleeve, discovered upon violent frisking by the shabeeha when they stopped the rally. There was much to fear from the group of educated, freedom-thirsty crowd of people who no longer wanted to live like sheep, but wanted the freedom and liberty to think and speak openly and with no fear.