«My dream is to become a doctor and help other people”

On the World Children’s Day, she wants to send a special message to all children: “I want to tell them that they have to study, be kind and help each other without making any discrimination”

The teaching room at the SolidarityNow’s Thessaloniki Solidarity Center is empty. The chairs are set up around the table and the whiteboard is clean. Nikos, the Greek language teacher, has come up early and makes photocopies for his students. The 17-year-old Maryam from Afghanistan has come an hour prior to her lesson so as to meet us and talk about her life in Thessaloniki.

Maryam has beautiful green almond-shaped eyes. She reminds us the Iranian princesses, those from the traditional Persian tales. Timid and shy she sits across from us holding her books and notebooks. “In Afghanistan, I was very noisy in the classroom”, she says, smiling. We ask her to share with us some memories of her life back in Afghanistan. She remembers the time she spent in her classroom with her classmates and the Christmas dinner with her family. Her father passed away seven years ago. Together with her mother and her four brothers traveled to Greece. Her mother took the decision. “We were not safe. I hadn’t attended school for one year”, she notes. Their journey from Iran to Turkey was very difficult. They had to follow a very difficult path through the mountains and the cold was unbearable. “My younger brother’s feet were frozen”, she confesses.

Their lives changed for the better when they arrived at Greece in May 2017. Maryam and her family are hosted in the context of Caritas’s accommodation program. At the same time, she and her siblings attend classes in Greek school and in the afternoon, she takes Greek, English and mathematics classes at the Thessaloniki Solidarity Center. Her favorite teacher is Nikos, “because he is very good”, she notes. Maryam goes to the B grade of Lyceum and her favorite lessons are physics, chemistry and biology. She wants to study medicine. “As a doctor I will be able to help other people”, she tells us. At school, due to the language barrier, she had many difficulties, she still has. “I do not understand Greek well yet. But is important to learn the Greek language, because if you do not learn, you cannot do the things you want”, she stresses. In her class she is the only refugee girl. However, her classmates have supported her; Martha, her Greek friend from school and Suzanne from Iraq, her classmate from her afternoon lessons at Thessaloniki’s Solidarity Center, are standing next to her.

Maryam in her leisure time helps her mother with the housework, she studies, plays football and volleyball with her brothers and sisters, and tries to persuade them to do some housework too. She listens to Greek and Afghan music, she sees films and spends time with her mother, who is her best friend. We tell her that this must be the life of a child, a teenager. On the occasion of the World Children’s Day, she says that she wants to send a special message to all children: “I want to tell them that they have to study, be kind and help each other without making any discrimination”.

*Thessaloniki Solidarity Center was established and is supported by the Open Society Foundations.

* SolidarityNow’s Educational Program is supported by UNICEF, with funding from the European Commission’s humanitarian aid department (ECHO).