Mohammad holds the notebook steady with his left hand and the blue pen with his right, as if it were something obvious, natural.
The classroom is bare: a white wall cut by a faded blue stripe, plastic chairs, a table that wobbles, set up in a makeshift way. And he, with his light denim shirt buttoned to the collar and his black hair carefully slicked back, seems to be sitting in the most beautiful place in the world.
He smiles while writing, showing slightly crooked teeth of a child who grows up fast. On the desk, there is a spiral notebook, an open book, and a few scattered sheets: the right amount of disorder for someone who is starting to live again. Mohammad comes from a village in northern Aleppo. When he talks about his home, he doesn’t use generous adjectives: he says “our courtyard,” “my father’s sheep,” “the road to school.” Then he adds, without changing his tone, that one day the bombs started falling too close. They left the village because staying meant—probably—dying under the next strike.
A bomb injured his head; two months in a hospital in Aleppo probably taught him the hardest thing for a child: having time and not knowing how to fill it. War, for him, is not only destruction. It is the year—or years—when school disappears from life. When the family manages to stabilize in the city, the right to education collides with overcrowded classrooms, skipped curricula, absent teachers. “It’s hard to ask questions at school,” he says. And in that sentence is the whole difference between a place where you survive and a place where you grow.
This is why Mohammad and his sister Ghina went to an educational center supported by Pro Terra Sancta in Aleppo, one of those projects that stitch together the fragile post-war fabric starting with children. Here, they were welcomed even before formal school enrollment, being told that catching up is not a race but a path. In the first months, Mohammad spoke little. He bent over the sheets and drew animals with stubborn precision: a dog’s paw, a sheep’s muzzle, the outline of a cat. He did it silently, as if silence were a way to protest against the injustices he had begun to suffer as a child.
Today he always arrives early. The pencil is short, worn, but he keeps it in his pocket like a lucky charm. He studies science enthusiastically, asks questions nonstop, and when he understands something, his large dark eyes light up just as you see in photos. He wants to become a veterinarian. Not because it sounds good, but because he has seen his father care for the flock with patient hands and poor remedies, and because for him, taking care of animals ultimately means returning to take care of his own village, even if that village today is a place he cannot return to.
Ghina tells it in simple words: at the center, they have learned to overcome difficulties and not be chased by the worst memories. It is not a miracle; it is education. It means putting things back in order where the war has thrown everything into chaos: numbers, letters, but also trust, the ability to imagine tomorrow. Inside those rooms, before studying, children feel safe again. In a Syria where the future is often an abstract concept, a desk and a teacher who listens become a concrete form of rebirth.
Mohammad closes the notebook and shows you a drawing: his family under a clear sky. It is not nostalgia. It is a project. It is proof that, when a child goes back to school, they do not only recover lost lessons: they recover the freedom to choose who to become.
