31 Yaman & Shaad

Yaman and Shaad. 15 and 18 years old. Syrians. | While she should have sat for her baccalaureate in Syria, Yaman is in tenth grade in France. This still makes her angry: “In Syria and Turkey, I was the best in my class and all the other students always came to talk to me: ‘Yaman! Yaman! Yaman!’ Here, I’m the worst and nobody talks to me anymore!” (Yaman still has a grade average of 13 out of 20.) In July 2015, Yaman, Shaad, their three brothers, and their parents fled the besieged and bombarded city of Deir ez-Zor. They took refuge in Raqqa and only went out to get the bare essentials. There was no more school and Yaman remembers the long days spent searching for lessons on the Internet. When a bombing killed seven people in the neighboring building, the family headed for Turkey. “That trip was very hard because it was unprepared: we were fleeing. We walked in the rain, there were three mountains to cross and as soon as we were arrested by the Turkish police, they would send us back,” Shaad recalls. As a refugee in Turkey, the family was sent to France through a UNHCR resettlement program. The Aurore organization is in charge of guiding and assisting them in settling. | Saint-Jean-de-Braye, France. 2018.