GRAY // The residents of Gray in eastern France lament that the town is dying. It may still live up to its nickname “Gray la jolie” — pretty Gray — but businesses have moved away, taking jobs with them. and many stores have fading “to rent” signs in their windows.
But for one Syrian family, the picturesque streets, red-tiled rooftops and quiet river walks offer hope of a building a new lifet away from the fear of death lurking around every corner in their homeland.
“I will start to love life once more,” said Abd Alwahab Alahamad, a 43-year-old Damascus oncologist. “Because sometimes (in the) last two years, I thought it will be very difficult to stay alive.”
Like so many before them, the Alahamads risked everything to escape war and ISIL, embarking on a perilous journey through checkpoints, bombs and a nightmarish sea crossing to Greece.
But after months of uncertainty, Mr Alahamad, his wife Iman Mshanati and their three children — 5-year-old Nora, 2-year-old Ahmed and Layan, born in Greece six months ago — were among the fortunate few accepted into an ambitious European relocation programme.
Started in late 2015, the programme was designed to relieve pressure on Greece and Italy, the main entry points for more than a million people fleeing into the European Union.
But it has come under fire for moving too slowly. Of the 66,400 people who should be relocated from Greece by this September, 7,286 had been resettled by the end of December, according to figures from the International Organisation for Migration, which sets up the transfers.
France has taken in the most refugees from Greece, 2,420, followed by The Netherlands, which has taken 836.
Applicants cannot choose their destination. The Alahamads were assigned to France, a country neither the Russian-trained doctor nor his wife, a 33-year-old nutritionist and beautician, had visited.
“We are going into the unknown; We do not know the city, the people, nothing,” said Ms Mshanti in a small flat in Athens the day before the family’s flight to Paris, three small suitcases sitting on the floor. “But we hear from people who had left before us that they are happy, and we felt relieved.”
The family had never intended to leave Syria. They did not expect the 2011 street protests against Syrian president Bashar Assad to turn into a civil war.
“At first everybody thought — not only me — that it will finish tomorrow, the day after tomorrow,” Mr Alahamad said of the early days of the rebellion.
In 2014, he received warning that government forces were looking for him after he treated a man for gunshot wounds. Mr Alahamad moved his family near to the city of Deir-e-Zor, in eastern Syria where his parents are from, and quickly found a job in a private clinic. But the war followed.
The area was overrun by ISIL extremists. . Mr Alahamad was questioned for treating female patients, and along with others forced to watch a murder. A family friend was beheaded, his body left on the street for three days. Relatives and friends died in the relentless bombings. After rockets landed near their home, wounding relatives, Mr Alahamad decided I was time to leave.
With two young children and a pregnant wife, the journey was harrowing — treks through the night and a journey jammed into the back of a lorry with nearly 100 others. They paid $800 each for places in an overcrowded dinghy that nobody on board knew how to drive. They went round in circles on the Aegean Sea until the Turkish coastguard picked them up and took all the passengers to a detention centre.
On their second attempt, they made it to Greek island of Chios and, ten days later, to mainland Greece.
Mr Alahamad worked as a volunteer doctor in refugee camps housing some of the more than 62,000 asylum seekers stranded in Greece by border closures. He and his wife thought of staying, but Greece’s asylum system was overwhelmed.
So they applied for relocation. For months they waited. Their third child, Layan was born. In September, the Alahmads learned they had been assigned to Gray, a town of about 6,000 people in eastern France. . They would be part of the second group of families sent there from Greece.
The mayor of Gray, Christophe Laurencot stipulated the town would accept only families, and each would be assigned a social worker. The families are given housing while they apply for asylum, a process that normally takes about four months in the fast-track relocation procedure, Once granted refugee status, they can stay in state housing for another six months while searching for jobs and living arrangements of their own, but are free to move elsewhere in France if they prefer. Of the first five families to arrive in Gray, four have moved on.
Small, close-knit towns do not always embrace outsiders. Mr Laurencot decided full transparency was the best policy and informed townsfolk about the programme before the first arrivals in March.
“We had reactions straight away,” he said. “Good, less good or bad, I had them all. .But France is after all a country of reception, a welcoming country. And it’s not enough to say it; we had to do it.”
So far, the mayor’s tactic appears to be working.
“It’s very, very good, we see them pass by, there are no worries, everything is going well,” said Stephanie Vanhee, who runs an optical shop in Gray.
“It must be done, you know. We must receive them.”
Clothing store owner Roberte Fouillot said here was some reluctance because of recent terrorist attacks and demands on social services. But media images of the war in Syria shocked her deeply. Now she foresees no problem with integration
“They are people like everyone else. . If everyone reached out to each other, there might be less wars, less misery in the world,” she said.
On a foggy mid-December night, the Alahamads arrived in Gray and were allocated a bare but warm apartment. They are keen to learn French, find jobs and get the children into school. Mr Alahamad hopes France will recognise his Russian medical degree.
. “ We lost so much,” Mr Alahamad said. “But now, I think we have a chance.”
* Associated Press