32 Tarek

Tarek. 17 years old. Syrian. | “Do you know about the war in Syria? It’s hard. I lost a lot of things there: my friends are scattered in Turkey, Canada, or Germany!” After two years as a refugee in Turkey, Tarek arrived in France with his parents and four siblings through UNHCR’s refugee resettlement program. Put into tenth grade while he had been in eleventh grade in Turkey, he already has a grade average of 15 out of 20 and 18 out of 20 in mathematics. “But for the other subjects, I can’t understand all the classes. . . . So when I go home I go over them again with the recording.” Tarek likes “sad poems in French, like Victor Hugo’s Pauca Meae, because the words are pretty and it comes from the heart.” His many classmates also help him to express himself in online chats, typing JSP for “je ne sais pas” (I don’t know) or BN8 for “bonne nuit” (goodnight). | Saint-Jean-de-Braye, France. 2018.