For migrants, harrowing journeys
BERLIN — WhatsApp signals a message on my mobile phone.
“Take care of my son,” my aunt writes from Syria. “He is now heading to Turkey and soon will be with you.”
Like me, my 17-year-old cousin is used to being uprooted. He’s a Palestinian refugee, and a resident of Syria. Because he doesn’t hold a Syrian passport, he can’t simply visit Lebanon and take a plane from Beirut to Istanbul. So he and thousands of others like him regularly embark on buses that make the wearying, daylong journey fromDamascus across war-torn northern Syrian to the porous Turkish border.
Source: www.usatoday.com