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Sometimes I feel like life is hard - I have had a tough week and when I let that drive my attention it was debilitating. But my life is not hard really…

In 2005 my wife and I traveled to Syria.

After spending 6 months teaching English in Istanbul, it was time for some adventure. We had two journeys to choose from - one east through Iraq and Iran and one south through Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

We were still pretty fresh in the backpacking/life adventure game so we choose the cheapest and easiest visa route - south it was.

I could never have prepared myself for the wave of culture shock when we hit Syria on that first day. Turkey was unique but Syria took that up a notch with the sights, sounds and scents all around us.

Allepo was a bustling city that instantly made us aware of the kind and generous nature of the community. Everywhere we went we were met with smiles, offers of food, invites to homes and opportunities to talk.

From the buses to the market to the restaurants everyone aimed to make sure we were OK and offered advice on places to see and things to do.

One of those places was Dead City of Serjilla just outside of Idlib.

The Dead Cities or Forgotten Cities are a group of 700 abandoned settlements in northwest Syria between Aleppo and Idlib. The communities reached their peak in the fourth through the sixth centuries, after which a war with Persia (603-630) and the blocking of the Mediterranean dried up the olive oil trade, forcing the inhabitants to pack up and leave. The olive trees died, the soil eroded and most of the region became barren.

The only way to get there was a private taxi that you needed to pre book through the hostel in Hama. A 30-minute drive later and we arrived at an incredible site.

The ruins of include two large pyramidal-roofed, a number of churches, a two-story monastery, a Crusader-era fort Qalaat Abu Safian, as well as a wine press building and an olive presa and…

…there was no one there…

Just ruins further than the eye could see and a lot of red mud that stuck heavily to your boots.

We walked, took photos and sat in this eerily calm place and read about the history from our trusty Lonely Planet guide.

Then all of a sudden we see our taxi driver take off down the road and disappear into the distance. We didnt talk about that happening and it very much took us by surprise. So there we are…no phone, no idea where we are and about a 30 minute drive from anywhere.

Kinda freaky - but at the same time all part of the adventure.

Then out of nowhere, this family appears.

They explain that they live close by and wanted to know why we were there. It was in very broken English and my Lonely Plant phrasebook powered Arabic but we worked through it.

It was such an incredibly powerful moment to sit and talk to the family who asked for some photos, invited us to eat and said that we can stay as long as we want.

They took us around the sites, gave us snacks and asked curious questions about our life and what it was like in Australia. A beautiful moment of two different cultures thrown together by circumstance with curiosity at the core of the connection.

Then all of a sudden the taxi arrives back, we say our goodbyes and that was that.

In late September 2021, the United Nations stated it had documented the deaths of at least 350,209 people in the Syrian conflict between March 2011 and March 2021.

By February 2017, Amnesty International estimated between 5,000 and 13,000 people had been executed in government prisons, and thousands more people are reported to have died due to torture by the Syrian government.

By mid-March 2022, opposition activist group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported the number of children killed in the conflict had risen to 25,286, and that 15,237 women had also been killed.

Life can feel hard - but it’s not really.

I think a lot about this family I met - are they OK, what has happened to them since and how many more amazing people that we met have suffered from this terrible tragedy.

I want this experience that I had to drive me to do stuff, even little things. To donate to great causes like https://www.whitehelmets.org/en/ and https://australiansyriancharity.org.au/. To talk about ways to support the current earthquake victims - https://donate.unhcr.org/int/en/turkiye-syria-earthquake-emergency…

And the big one is to one day go back and offer support in anyway I can and repay the people of Syria for the way their country has changed and molded my approach to empathy and action.

Today is a good day and I feel privileged and grateful for the peace and security of my country. I hope to continue to test that privilege and work out ways to support people that have been put into horrible situations just by luck of where they were born.

Hope you all have a great day!

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