EXIT WEST
SEVEN-YEAR-OLD SYRIAN REFUGEE WAEL ALSALEH ONLY JUST started second grade in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, and he still doesn’t understand much of what his peers say. But the minute his teacher announces, in Greek, that it’s time to color, he reaches for the paper and markers, and launches into his favorite image of a tall, colorful house surrounded by green grass, trees and a smiling sun. He’s probably drawn 50 of those houses since he started school in October, says his teacher, Maria Liberi. “It’s not complicated,” she says when asked to interpret his drawings. “I think he’s really longing for a home.”
Wael’s family has been on the move for the past five years, ever since his mother scooped him out of bed one night to escape a bombing raid on his village outside of Deir ez-Zor in 2012. They hopscotched through refugee camps and temporary shelters scattered across Syria, Turkey and Greece. Since August, the family of seven has been living in a three-bedroom apartment located across the street from the school and paid for by the United Nations’ refugee body, UNHCR. For the first time, Wael, a pensive introvert whose quiet calm visibly separates him from his more rambunctious siblings, can go to school. He has a lot of catching up to do, says his teacher, “but he’s bright and determined. Give him stability and he will do just fine.”
Stability is not in Wael’s future. After nearly two years of struggling to find a foothold in Europe, his parents have just found out that they will be granted asylum in Greece. But what should be cause for celebration is rapidly turning into trepidation. A lawyer has told them that once they get their papers, they will be treated like any other Greek resident. They will have to move out of their UNHCR-funded apartment, and they will no longer be eligible for the monthly €550 ($646) in asylum-seeker benefits that have sustained the family for the past several months. Wael’s father Minhel Alsaleh, 39, an illiterate farmer who can barely speak Greek, will have to find a job in a nation with a 21% unemployment rate. “We have no choice,” he says. “We will have to leave.” Leave for where? “Germany. Where there are jobs. We will become refugees again.”
The fact that a family of Syrian refugees who waited nearly two years to get asylum in Europe is now contemplating uprooting itself once again raises the urgent question of just how much progress the E.U. has made in managing the influx of migrants that have arrived on its shores since 2015. That year, Europe witnessed chaotic scenes
