I don’t know how a seven-year-old child is supposed to miss this many people all at once.
Roaa Shehab is seven years old and in the second grade. After years of war and interrupted schooling, she is learning her letters again, learning words, and discovering that the things we carry inside us can somehow be put down on paper.
Roaa is my uncle’s granddaughter.
In a single day, my uncle, most of his children, and most of his grandchildren were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Roaa’s father was one of them.
Two days ago, she came home from school, took out her notebook and pencils, sat alone in the corner of the room, and started writing.
Her mother asked her: “What are you doing?”
She simply said:
“I’m doing my homework.”
That night, after Roaa had gone to sleep, her mother was going through her schoolbag and found the paper.
It wasn’t homework. Her teacher had never asked her to write it.
It was the first piece Roaa had ever written completely on her own, just as she was learning how to put letters together and turn them into something she wanted to say.
This is exactly what she wrote:
My First Arabic Lesson
Dad, I miss you so much.
Dad, I miss you and my uncles.
Dad ❤️ Soso ❤️ Uncle Ahmad ❤️ Uncle Mohammed ❤️ Joudi ❤️
Aboud ❤️ Israa ❤️ Grandma ❤️ Aunt Khawla ❤️ Joudi ❤️
Osama ❤️ Lina ❤️ Me, Roaa, Mama and Razan love you ❤️
I love you all ❤️ Dad, I love you so much.
And at the end, she drew a heart and wrote inside it:
Dad and Mama.
Ever since I read it, there is one word I can’t get past:
Dad.
Roaa has only just learned how to write it.
But her father is no longer here to see her write his name for the first time.
She is seven years old. She has only just discovered writing, and the first thing she needed it for was to find a way to speak to her dead father.
Even those little hearts between the names hurt me.
It feels as though she is giving her love to them one by one, because she still has all this love for them and nowhere to put it now.
And what could this world possibly give her that could ever make up for losing her father?
Nothing.
Roaa may grow up. She may study, laugh, fall in love, and have an entire life ahead of her. But that seven-year-old girl will always be there too, sitting in the corner of that room, writing:
“Dad, I miss you so much.”
What a filthy world this is.
You took their fathers, their homes, and their childhoods, and left them with paper to write down how much they miss them.
And there are not enough words in all the languages of this world to explain to Roaa why, at seven years old, she had to learn how to write to the dead before she learned how to write about life !!
#SurvivalTestimony
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