sitting in one of the Middle Eastern bistros that have jumped up in Birmingham in the course of the most recent decade, Maan unobtrusively recounts his story. He was a 14-year-old school understudy, the child of a rancher in Daraa, a farming town in southern Syria, when the uprising began. “A gathering of young people were captured for putting hostile government trademarks on a divider. At the point when the children were not restored, the guardians dissented and the military shot them.” The uprising quickly swelled into an out and out military attack on the residents of the town and its encompassing towns. Maan lost an uncle and four different family members. With his mom and more youthful sibling, he in the end fled to Jordan. Following two years working illicitly in bistros and eateries, he understood he had no future there. “I longed for setting off to the UK to contemplate business with the executives. They regard mankind in the UK. The language, you can utilize it anyplace on the planet. Furthermore, the degrees are better.”
He went to the UK consulate in Amman. “They treated me in a harsh manner. They let me know there was no haven here. They don’t acknowledge applications.” It was the equivalent at the French and German government offices. So with family reserve funds he traveled to Algeria; paid $1,500 and was dealt through Tunisia to Libya; went through 11 days in a house without any sleeping cushions and little food; at that point at four in the first part of the day he was taken with 900 others in a broken-down boat over the Mediterranean. He dreaded for his life on the excursion with water coming in. “Luckily, the Italian military got us or we would all have suffocated.” It took 20 hours for the Red Cross to check them all in – a combination of west and east Africans, Afghanis, Syrians. And afterward he cleared his path through Europe – Catania, Milan, Nice and Paris to Calais. “I went through 27 days in Calais, climbing the wall, sticking underneath lorries, getting captured and getting back to attempt once more. I broke my leg climbing; was taken to the clinic; at that point returned to attempting to get onto a lorry.”
