Cape Town - They knew very little about Cape Town, having read only a few news reports here and there or some articles on the internet. But they never imagined moving here.
However, after losing everything they had in the violence in the Syrian capital of Damascus, Omar Banian and his wife Reem ended up at Cape Town International Airport with their three daughters in March.
There they approached a taxi driver and in broken English asked him to help them find a new home.
The family knew it could be dangerous approaching strangers here, but Banian said by then they realised little “could be worse than what we’d already been through”.
The family had little money, having spent most of what they had on the flight to South Africa. But the taxi driver took them to a place in Swellendam, where accommodation was cheap.
It was a small flat with a single bedroom.
Reem cried every day because it was nothing like the modern Cape Town she’d read about online and began blaming her husband for their plight.
She and the children, Shahd, 10, Rand, 8, and Joudi, 6, were so uncomfortable they decided they would rather return to war-wracked in Syria than remain in rural Swellendam.
Banian tried to persuade her to stay, taking his wife for walks every day to try to make her feel better.
But it was no good and he eventually agreed to let her and their children return while he found work and prepared more comfortable circumstances for them.
However, they ran into an Egyptian man on one of their walks, who struck up a conversation with them in Arabic and advised them to move to Cape Town. He later arranged them a place to stay.
Here the family met Abdullah January, who serves on the committee of the Moegammadiyah Mosque in Tennyson Street, Salt River. He became their friend and it was his hospitality that changed the family’s mind about returning to Syria.
After moving a few times, the family have ended up in Bo-Kaap, living in a vacant house which the owner has agreed to allow them to use rent-free for a year while she sorts out her building plans.
Capetonians have also opened their hearts to the family, supplying them with everything from cutlery, food, appliances and electricity, to a satellite dish connected to Arabic television networks.
The children have been enrolled in a school, although Reem hopes to find extra tuition to help them learn to speak English well.
The family said they were humbled by the generosity of the community, but admitted it was hard for them to live off others after living an independent life in Syria.
“It’s embarrassing. We are not used to it,” Reem said.
Reem is an engineer who worked as a pharmacist for a while, while her husband is a spraypainter.
He managed to secure a job at a spraypainting workshop in Cape Town, but broke his leg after three days and is now back at home.
His inability to provide for his family gets him down sometimes, he admitted.
The war in Syria also appears to have taken quite a psychological toll on them all, and January is concerned the children have had no counselling. Rand lost her friend in a bombing.
However, Arabic-speaking psychologists are hard to find in Cape Town, Reem said.
Of their lives in Syria, Banian recalled having to pass through six security checkpoints on his way to work daily, and again when he returned home.
At any moment he could be shot dead or arrested and detained indefinitely, simply because he happened to encounter a military official who was in a bad mood.
He had seen it happen to others and was once shot at, but escaped uninjured.
Electricity was out for several hours every day and there was no water
The couple also spoke about the unnerving sounds of bombs and rockets and how they were always afraid the next one would hit them.
In 2013, the apartment block where the Banians lived was bombed and the entire structure crumbled to the ground.
They found alternative accommodation, but the war intensified and they soon realised they had no choice but to flee.
They sold everything they had to raise 200 000 Syrian pounds to pay for the trip to South Africa and for the inflated passport prices which the regime had set.
Salaries in Syria range between 10 000 and 15 000 Syrian pounds a month, Banian explained.
The family fled in March, via Lebanon and Turkey, using visitors’ permits – but not before being interrogated by authorities.
By the time they boarded their flight to Cape Town the children were miserable and tired.
“We were going into the unknown and they wanted to go back. With all the agony there, they preferred to go back,” Banian recalled.
But Reem said their faith was strong: “Allah was with us.”
While they were happy here, they admitted adjusting had been difficult, and that they were constantly embarrassed about having to live off the generosity of others.
“Our lives have flipped around 180 degrees,” Banian said, adding that while they were free to do whatever they wanted in South Africa, they still felt imprisoned.
His biggest concern was their lack of refugee status.
Their status also meant Banian was unable to return to Syria for his mother’s funeral because he feared he wouldn’t be allowed back.
If they were deported, he said, they would return to a country where they had no possessions, and from which almost all their family members had already fled.
Weekend Argus