Maisa Alhafez offers snippets of joy in Istanbul
[ISTANBUL] — About a dozen Syrian refugees stand in a circle in a dingy, fluorescent-lit basement in central Istanbul. Many have been psychologically devastated from seeing violence and losing loved ones, and have come to Turkey with nothing but the clothes on their backs. But here, they’re smiling, laughing and chatting. In fact, they’re here to sing. They come every Thursday evening as part of a free choir called Mosaic.
At the front of the room a woman with long dark hair and a big smile stands playing an old keyboard while instructing the choristers in both Arabic and English. Her name is Maisa Alhafez, and she’s the 32-year-old music teacher from Damascus who started Mosaic.
Alhafez begins to slowly pace around the room, listening to each singer, her eyes closed in concentration. The choristers are looking at their phones, reading the lyrics their teacher sent them on WhatsApp. They’re not professional singers — Alhafez taught them how to sing and read music.
Several years ago she opened a music center in Damascus, but when the fighting made life too dangerous she fled to Lebanon after losing almost everything, and began giving music classes and offering musical activities for Syrian refugee children. But finding a decent job in Lebanon was difficult, so she decided to come to Turkey.
In Istanbul she joined a multi-national choir, and enjoyed it a lot.
“Singing in a group gave me a family sensation. I was here alone and had no one from my family,” she tells The Media Line. “That’s why I wanted the same thing for the Syrian people.”
When she held the first class in March, 35 people showed up.
“It was a sign for me,” she says. “There is death, and there is war, but the Syrian people still love to sing, still they have hope that something good will happen.”
Turkey is home to as many as 2.5 million Syrian refugees. Istanbul alone hosts about 330,000. They live hard lives here in a totally foreign environment, many of them working twelve to sixteen hour days without work permits and getting paid very little.
Rami Alusi is a twenty-year-old member of Mosaic from Damascus who sings and plays the guitar. He tells The Media Line about his life in Istanbul.
“In general it’s hard. Stress, taking care of the family. You have all your thoughts on your relatives in Syria. Anyone can die at any moment there. So you just stay stressed and your thoughts are totally in a mess.”
For Alusi, Mosaic is a kind of musical therapy.
“It makes me calm and it makes me confident,” he says. “If you just work, if you’re just [doing] the same routine every day, your thoughts will just be completely messed up, completely in darkness. [In Mosaic] you’re releasing something, you’re talking to people, you’re playing music, you’re having fun. You add some colors to your mind.”
Bashar Belli, a 24-year-old from Latakia, sings with Mosaic, and also plays the guitar, piano and violin. For Belli, the choir is a kind of community.
“I feel when you’re in a group, you’re stronger than when you’re alone,” he says. “When you sing in a group with one voice, you feel you’re a part of a community.”
This was always what Alhafez had in mind for the choir.
“War separated us and music connected us,” she says. “This project is more than a choir, just singing and music. It’s a social project, it’s therapy for most of them.”
Alhafez also wants to show Turkish people a different side of Syrians.
“Everyone thinks that Syrians are only poor people and beggars, and they feel pity. But [when] we sing, we feel strong, we feel proud […] presenting ourselves in a good way.”
Alhafez’s social projects don’t end with the choir. She also organizes musically-themed activities for Syrian children in Istanbul.
“We can’t just watch the kids begging on the streets and shout at them,” she says. So she decided to start organizing events such as face-painting and cooking for them, always including some music. “I started with four kids. I said, ‘Ok, habibi (an Arabic term of endearment), let’s play together.’ After half an hour, there were twenty.”
Many of the children that come to her activities are from middle-class families, but most are quite poor, and all of them are lacking in social activities.
“Most of them don’t go to school. They don’t have any play-groups or activities,” Alhafez says.
She says it can be hard to get the children who are forced to beg on the street to join the activities.
“Their parents refuse to let them join. They say we have work, we don’t have free time to play with you.”
Zeina Alazem, a 30-year-old from Damascus living in Turkey for two years, has brought her five-year-old daughter to some of Alhafez’s events.
“I think they give the children a smile [and] hope that things might get better and there’s someone caring about them and wants to give them joy, even if it’s just for one hour,” she tells The Media Line.
Alazem thinks that what Alhafez does is very important.
“[Alhafez] is really good at what she’s doing. She’s using music to really give joy to children,” she says. “It’s like an international language that crosses all barriers.”
Alhafez focuses her charity activities mostly on kids for a reason.
“I feel like the children are very important because they are the future of my country. [If] this generation is destroyed, this is a big problem.”
More than half of Syrian refugees are under the age of 18. According to Professor Murat Erdoğan, director of the Migration and Politics Research Center at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey hosts at least 700,000 school-aged children, and another half-million under the age of five. Only 10 – 15 per cent of the 700,000 actually go to school, mostly in Arabic-language schools following the Syrian curriculum and run by Syrians.
“There are few good schools, and really good schools are expensive,” Alazem says. Her daughter goes to an Arabic-language school that costs about $2,000 per year.
But Professor Erdoğan says Arabic language schools don’t help with social integration.
“We can’t give a different and separate educational system for Syrians,” he says. “We have to give them very intensive Turkish courses, and then we have to integrate them to the Turkish education system.”
He says the government is in denial about its Syrian population, failing to accept the fact that most of them will stay in Turkey forever. But conceding that fact would mean that the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey’s largest, would have to admit that its Syrian policy – overthrowing President Bashar Al-Assad – has been a massive failure.
“They cannot say that,” the professor tells The Media Line. “It’s one of the biggest political problems in the Syrian refugee issue.”
Syrians in Turkey do not enjoy protected refugee status, and are labeled as ‘guests’ under a temporary protection regime. The government has spent billions on over twenty well-equipped refugee camps, but the vast majority of Syrians don’t stay in them because they can’t work there. Outside the camps many have jobs, but almost none of them have work permits and exploitation is common.
Professor Erdoğan says the government should give the Syrians work permits, and it should establish a special ministry to streamline their social integration.
In the meantime people like Maisa Alhafez help gives her compatriots a sense of community and belonging.