On a dark night in September 2014, her whole life was blunted in the red suitcase.
At the door of the taxi, the mother prayed for her safety. The father stood at a distance, convinced that he would never see his daughter again.
Five years later, Syrian journalist Riham Alkousaa could barely hold back tears when she hugged her father at the Berlin airport.
He had become part of the 700 Syrian refugees who ended up in Germany, which offered them shelter.
"As the years go by, you convince yourself that you don't miss your parents anymore. Learn to live without their presence. You live with this thought until the moment you see them for the first time and the feeling hits you for all those years you haven't seen your parents. I was thinking about all this at the moment when I hugged my father after all those years", says Alkousaa.
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Since September 2014, the Syrian journalist has written many texts about the attempts of refugees to make Germany their home, trying to reunite with their families.
As a journalist covering one of the biggest refugee crises of the 21st century, she has reported on the waiting, the loneliness and the long paperwork procedures that daily delayed family reunification.
After fleeing Syria at the age of 23, she tried to reunite with her parents in Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan, Iran and Malaysia. All of these countries still offered visas to Syrians. But her family was of Palestinian descent, so hopes of a meeting were dashed.
The WhatsApp calling app helped them create an illusion of contact and closeness with their parents. At first he saw missed calls from his mother, who later learned about voicemails. So these messages became routine in the mornings when the parents drank coffee.
He says that he had never experienced a better moment in his life than when he found out that there was a program for the reunification of Syrian and Iraqi families.
"When I signed the documents I said to the official: 'Do you know that you are changing a life?' She told me: 'I'm glad I'm doing this.' And, in fact, it changed lives because it gave people hope. It gives you some hope to think about the future", she says.
After more than six months of waiting for the paperwork to be arranged, Alkousaa would finally meet his family.
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"I feel at home here, but I know I'm a foreigner. If I were to go back to Syria I would not feel at home, as most of my friends have fled and the house has been razed to the ground. I have no reason to go back. "Berlin has become my home, but when you lose your home once, you cannot make another home", says Alkousaa.
On a winter evening in 2019, Alkousa was at Tegel Airport in Berlin. He recognized his relatives, while the security guards were smiling. They knew because they were already used to the reunion scenes.
