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Maysaara had pulled away from his family. He wanted his children to get used to living without him, in case one day they had to if he were killed. He also stayed away from them because, he said, "Children can make a man weak. They make a man a coward. I try to keep them at a distance from my heart, from my eyes. It is negatively affecting the children, I know it is, but we have a duty. We’re talking about the fate of a country."
He was still helping finance a Free Syrian Army group mainly comprised of relatives, as well as smuggling medical supplies and satellite communication devices from Turkey. The devices were illegal in Syria, and medical supplies were needed because hospitals were often targeted in regime airstrikes. Maysaara transported the goods in black duffel bags he and his nephews carried on their backs across the mountainous Turkish border into Syria. He’d pour the jumble of medical packaging in a heap on the basement floor for Ruha and Alaa, their mother, and Aunts Mariam and Noora to sort through. The women placed like with like, creating heaped piles on the floor: packs of gauze, blood bags, intubation tubes, sachets of hemostatic agents, and other items whose use they didn’t know.
Manal feared what the war was doing to her children. "They are used to the sound of rockets, it doesn’t scare them," she said. "I don’t know if it’s because they don’t understand the consequences of the sound, that if a rocket lands near us we would, God forbid, die or be chopped to pieces," she said. "They don’t understand this."
Except they did. Alaa had even devised a game around it, one she played in the basement. She explained the rules one day. "I hear what they’re saying about who died. I memorize it as if I’m recording it on paper. I record it in my mind. I count who died, who has lived, who has left." When asked why, she just shrugged and repeated a word that was her default answer to what was happening around her: "It’s normal."
