When we think of children in a war-torn country, we think of photographs containing images of devastation, hunger, poverty, and lost innocence.
Bana Alabed, a 7-year-old Syrian refugee currently residing in Turkey, has put words to these images.
Bana’s words have proved just how much narrative and personal perspective matter, when it comes to revealing and highlighting the intensity of certain humanitarian crises.
Bana’s tweets truly capture the side of the story you never hear, the side of a child watching people around her die, and cities burn to the ground.
Bana’s tweets reveal how more than just bodies are murdered by civil wars: dreams die, as human life becomes a statistic, a death toll count, and life itself comes to be reduced to a genuine and basic question of survival on a daily basis.
A CNN interview, conducted with Bana and her family, revealed that Bana’s mother Fatemah — an English teacher — has been helping Bana write her tweets. Fatemah stated that “By telling Bana’s story, I hope people will understand kids are the ones most affected by wars.”
Indeed, Bana’s tweets and story caught the attention of one of the publishing industry’s giants, Simon & Schuster, to the extent that they will publish all her tweets in a book called “Dear World”.
The book is scheduled for publication, but no official release date has been set.