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Not Better Than A Dog (Share And Share Alike)

“Look, I want to show you,” Ahmad says while skilfully fumbling on his screen, hectically swiping left and right and up and down until he eventually stops and hands me over his phone. He shows me a picture of a little girl standing on grass so luxuriously and richly green you only find in Ireland, a small pink bicycle lying on the ground in front of her. “She is called Lamar,” he tells me. He says that if she had been born in Syria, they probably would have called her Fatima or something similar. But as she was born in Greece, he and his wife Souhaila wanted to give her a Greek name. Tradition has it that the first born daughter takes the grandmother’s name, so Lamar should have been named after Ahmad’s mother. “But I don’t like my mother’s name. I said to her I don’t like it – she wasn’t happy,” he laughs. But now that his brother has a little girl as well, his mother’s name was passed on after all. “I usually don’t show people pictures of my daughter or anything happy. If you show people how happy you are, it will go away.” His wife does not like when he shares happy news, she believes it is bad luck.

“My wife is in the hospital. I came straight from the hospital today. She is pregnant with a boy.” I can see the happy smile on his face. “So have you not told anyone yet that you’re having a baby boy?” “No,” he replies, “only my mother, because she called me when I was in the hospital and then I had to tell her. And you.” He grins. “We will name him after my father, Mostafa.” His father Mostafa died in the war.

“I share a lot of my opinions on Facebook. I post news about Syria. And I wrote ‘If you like Assad, please leave my page!’” It is incomprehensible to him why the big countries do not simply kill Assad and get rid of him. “But Assad cannot be killed. He has too many allies,” he says. The police came to arrest his cousin in Damascus, because he had stopped working for the Assad regime. “Back in Syria,” I ask him, “did you share your political views just as openly as you do here?” “Of course!” he replies. “I say everything. I am free.”

And yesterday, 222 people died again during an attack.

“I share everything with my wife. It was always like that. I tell her everything, my problems, my emotions. We talk about the war.” Now, he explains to me, only people working for the army are officially allowed to have mobile phones, and soldiers are paid with cars instead of money, because there is no money. And people he used to know now suddenly work for Assad. “When I meet a new person now, I always think at first that he might be a bad person.”

In Syria, Ahmad’s family used to have three dogs. “I would love to have a dog,” Ahmad tells me. “But the Justice Minister here in Mosney says no.” The minister’s reasoning is that Mosney is not a good place to live for a dog, as they do not have the right food and enough space. “So, a dog is better than me,” Ahmad laughs, shaking his head.

He always used to work over the summer back home. But here in Ireland he is not allowed to work. Of the little money they receive from the Direct Provision, he is able to keep €4 per week. The rest he has to spend on creams and medicine and sometimes the money they receive is not even enough. “I have to work black,” he says. “I don’t need much. I don’t need money. I just need enough for the medicine.” The personal allowance, as it is referred to, was raised to €21.60 per week.

“What was the last thing you shared with your wife?” He laughs. “The last thing I shared with my wife was that when we have money, I will buy two cars – one for her and one for myself. But she said no, I am crazy!”

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