Hi. Please help a refugee if you can.

Last year, I went to a refugee camp in Bulgaria. It’s filled with young men from Syria and Iraq. They’ve made the difficult “illegal” crossing through the Turkish border. Their parents and wives and kids and younger brothers and sisters are not strong enough to risk the journey. The mountains between Turkey and Bulgaria are a rough trek. And there have been violent pushbacks by border guards. This is thanks to the lovely policy of richer EU nations pressuring poorer member states, like Bulgaria, to keep the Arabs away from Western Europe.

Their families back home in Syria? They depend on them for money, but even when these guys don’t get their wages stolen, they get paid a measly amount for hard work in construction, because Bulgaria still uses the original currency rather than the Euro.

I made close friends with a few of them and I feel very personally connected to their stories. I can live in America—or anywhere else in the world—because my grandfather, too, was a refugee. He tried to cross various borders to escape Communist Bulgaria four times, almost getting his ass shot by guards on more than one occasion. Every time he got caught he went to prison and was declared an “enemy of the people” (for any accidental tankie readers I have have, rest assured, he wasn’t an official in the previous government or a “Nazi”, as some delightful Twitter responses have suggested; he was just a nobody young guy who wanted his freedom). He never gave up, after almost 20 years in and out of prison. He made it out by hiding on a freight train, ending up in a refugee camp in Germany. The camp was as terrible as the current one I visited in Bulgaria.

But in the end, this lunatic, damn. He died at the age of 88 in a beautiful home in Southern California, replete with oranges trees in the yard, which he had dreamed about in the cold, dank, Soviet-era prisons. “I outlived them all!” he’d gloat about his former captors.

OK! Here’s my call for help. One of the guys I made friends with is Humada. He’s very sweet, and smart, and was studying to be a doctor when shit hit the fan in Syria, and now is hoping to get his license to cut hair. It’s all to send money back to his family.

Things were hard enough. But, a few days ago, as the war in Syria re-escalated (tho it never ended, even though the world forgot about it), his family’s home was destroyed in an airstrike.

They’re temporarily staying with family, but have no idea what to do. “And the bombs still fall,” he previously said.

“Hi. I am very tired and very sad,” he texts.

“And now winter came. Because of this, I will work day and night so that I can build at least one room for them.”

In response, I shoot out a stupid, manically optimistic Americanism about how everything will be OK and that he should take care of himself first. “I cannot abandon them, they gave me everything to help them.”

I know it’s asking a lot. But if you want to contribute money to help, it would be amazing. Obviously I would provide proof that I’ll send the money to Humada instead of spend it on beer. If you (understandably) don’t believe this, please consider contributing to a charity that helps refugees.

https://donate.unhcr.org/int/en/syria-emergency

https://www.karamfoundation.org/

https://syriarelief.org.uk/

https://missionwings.bg/

TY,

T