You do not yet know her name but Zeina Aboushaar is a young girl who escaped from the country of Syria to America. Her story, titled 'From Damascus to Detroit, a Young Syrian Refugee Shares Her Story | Mashable Docs' on YouTube, gives a glimpse into the horrid civil war occurring in the region and shows her resilience and determination to shed light on the atrocities as a writer.
Aboushaar was only 9 when the Syrian government bombed her school in the Damascus suburb of Darayya. Since then, things have only gotten worse and the civil war has cost the lives of almost a quarter of a million people. In the three and a half minute video, a now teen-aged Aboushaar plays on a lawn with her family and says she is no longer afraid to go outside since moving to the United States.
She goes on to say,
When I get sad or when I think about Syria, I just go outside, sit down by a tree and write down what I'm thinking about, write all the reasons why I think I'm sad: "Boom! There was five seconds of dead silence in my classroom and my teacher began yelling for us to get under our desk."
At around the one minute and 20 second mark of the video, Aboushaar emphasizes that "the stories are real and it's happening in Syria." She and her mother and younger brother, Zayd, fled to America in 2012 from Damascus, Syria and resettled in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan where they now live in family home with a large front yard.
The end of the clip shows Aboushaar's mother braiding her hair with Aboushaar commenting, "Some people think, what, a normal girl like me could have a story like this? But it's good because if they do share their stories, they are going to get more help for Syria. In the future I would hope that we could do something to save our country and we could all pay my mom back for what she did, return the favor."