*Dear Child of the World* : Voices of Roj Prison Camp's Illegally Detained Children

 

Written by child detainees at the Roj Prison Camp in northeastern Syria, which holds without charge thousands of women and children. Canada refuses to repatriate 5 Canadian children and issue temporary resident permits to their mothers, all of whom have been detained over 7 years under conditions the United Nations describes as "akin to torture." Canada has a choice to make here. It needs to listen to the voices of the children. 

*Dear Child of the World* 

I simply wonder… 

 I wonder what’s beyond the fence, pal. 

 I wonder if you know how lucky you are. 

I watch you sometimes, when you pass on the other side. You carry little bags, hold your mother’s hand, and disappear into somewhere I cannot reach. 

I wonder where you go. 

I wonder if your feet know the feeling of grass stretching farther than my little eyes can see. 

If you can run without a gate deciding when you must turn back. 

If you can look toward the horizon without first meeting metal. 

I wonder what’s beyond the fence, pal… 

Mama says there are places where children go to learn, and then come home when the day is done. 

Places with open doors. 

Places where tomorrow is something you look forward to, not something you simply survive. 

I wonder if she has seen them. 

Sometimes I put my hand against the fence and imagine the other side is only a little farther away than my fingers can reach. 

It never is. 

I wonder what’s beyond the fence, pal… 

I know the sounds of this place by heart. The old tents shifting in the wind, footsteps pressing into the dust, water being carried from somewhere far away, the voices of mothers calling their children back before the light disappears. 

I know how to make a day out of almost nothing. 

I know how to wait. 

I know how to make a game from a piece of string, a stone, a broken thing someone has forgotten. 

But I do not know what it feels like to leave. 

I wonder what’s beyond the fence, pal… 

Maybe there are gardens. 

Maybe there are schools with windows that open. 

Maybe there are children who have never had to wonder why they cannot simply walk home. 

Maybe there is a place where the horizon belongs to everyone. 

And maybe, somewhere beyond that fence, there is a life waiting for me that does not yet know my name. 

Dear Child of the World, 

Is there anything beyond it at all? 

And why does everyone who knows the answer keep walking past? 

Perhaps one day I will know. 

Perhaps one day I will walk through it and

there! 

There, we will dance in the rain… 

and… and… 

I’ll have my hands sticky with candyfloss. 

I’ll play with baby chicks. 

And yes! 

I’ll go to the movies. 

Maybe I’ll run until I am tired. 

Maybe I’ll laugh without knowing why. 

Maybe I’ll wake up one morning and not have to wonder how far I am allowed to dream. 

But tonight, 

the fence is still there. 

And so am I. 

Still holding on to my simple dreams, Dear Child of the World. 

I simply wonder… 

I wonder what’s beyond that fence. 

And... 

I wonder why everyone who knows the answer keeps walking past. 

 Dear… 

Child… 

of the… 

World. 

Yours, 

A dreaming soul❤️

A Wound in the Conscience: Where the human is looted

Written by a detainee at the Roj Prison Camp in northeastern Syria, which holds without charge thousands of women and children. Canada refuses to repatriate 5 Canadian children and issue temporary resident permits to their mothers, all of whom have been detained over 7 years under conditions the United Nations describes as "akin to torture." Canada has a choice to make here. As this piece notes: "There is a particular obscenity in being conscious of suffering and still allowing it to become ordinary." 

In Roj camp, childhood has been made to wait. 

Education has been interrupted long enough for interruption itself to become a kind of upbringing. Exploration has narrowed. Creativity, which requires the small luxury of imagining elsewhere, has been confined by the borders of a place the children did not choose. Years that should have accumulated into knowledge, curiosity, friendships, and the ordinary architecture of becoming have instead accumulated into absence. 

And the body keeps its own record of absence. 

Medical care delayed by years does not merely postpone treatment. It alters the life that might have followed it. Illnesses linger. Development falters. Needs become complications. What should have been temporary becomes formative. Stunted growth is not only a measurement of the body; sometimes it is evidence of how long a child has been made to wait. 

The children grow older without being permitted the conditions by which society recognizes growing up. 

They are surrounded by injustice before they are old enough to understand its language. Perhaps this is why rage begins to take root so early. A child who repeatedly encounters power without protection begins to learn a terrible lesson: that the world is governed not by what is right, but by what is allowed. Anger, then, becomes more than an emotion. It becomes a response to a reality that keeps asking children to endure what they cannot change. 

Beyond the camp, oil fields burn, releasing toxic fumes into the air. Nosebleeds are among the symptoms repeatedly endured by many of these children, their bodies registering an environment they had no part in creating. 

The damage is not always visible. Some wounds announce themselves in blood; others accumulate quietly, cell by cell, year after year. There are mutations that occur within the body, and there are others that occur within the moral fabric of humanity. 

Only one of them can be called inevitable. 

 The other is chosen. 

And through all of this, the women and children remain denied something so fundamental that its absence has become almost invisible: legal representation. 

They are trapped between the gun nozzles of two armed groups that declare themselves enemies, while those caught between them are left to inherit the consequences. They have neither the weapon nor the political power, yet somehow they are made to carry the weight of the conflict. 

There is a particular obscenity in being conscious of suffering and still allowing it to become ordinary. 

It's what has been injured most deeply: not only the lives inside Roj, but the conscience of the world outside it. 

Silence is not neutral when suffering is prolonged. 

It begins to resemble permission. 

When women and children are deprived of education, healthcare, legal representation, freedom and the ordinary conditions through which a human being is allowed to develop, what we call a predicament begins to look like arbitrary detention. 

The camp may have walls but the silence around it has built another kind of enclosure. 

enduring with hope