Where do you
find the aspiration to go on, when all is lost? You find it in Yusra Mardini.
When the boat in which she and her sister Sarah were being smuggled from Turkey
to Greece capsized due to over occupancy, Yusra, her sister and two other
people who knew swimming, swam across the Aegean Sea for three and half hours,
pushing the boat, till it reached Lesbos. This super woman like act saved the
life of all the eighteen people in the boat and taught us that at times, the
reason to live on, can be life itself.
Yusra Mardini,
born 5th March 1988, grew up in Damascus. In 2012 she represented Syria
FINA World Swimming Championships. After her house was destroyed in the Syrian
Civil war, which is plaguing the country for ages now, she along with her sister
fled Syria in August 2015. From there they travelled to Lebanon, Turkey, Greece
and then Germany through Europe. By September 2015, they settled in Berlin. She
didn’t succumb to the horrors of war or the agony of losing her home. She continued
swimming in association with Wasserfreunde Spandau 04 in Berlin and the super
woman inside her kept her eyes set upon the Olympics.
Her labour bore
fruit and in June 2016 she was selected in the Refugee Olympic Team. She was
one of the ten members of the team. Though she could not win a medal this time,
but her story has caught the attention of the entire world. In a war ridden country, she took up her
passion for swimming and never gave in to the despair and hopelessness that
surrounded her. In her interviews, she mentioned that, at times, she and her
sister practiced in swimming pools whose roof had been blown away by bomb
blasts. In a place where mere survival was considered as a blessing from God,
she did not settle for just surviving and kept feeding the super woman inside
her with hard work and hope.
She has taken a
brave stand like a super woman and one of the prominent messages she wants to
spread via media is the mistreatment received by refugees from the world. She emphasizes
on the importance of treating refugees like any other human so that they can
soon come out of the cursed times they had to face in their country and
expedite the commencement of a normal life. It is only at great peril and pain
that a person would abandon his homeland and seek the protection of a foreign
country. It is the compassion of the world around them that can assist these
people to bring about a positive change in their lives.
Like her, every
woman should strive to hear the roar of the super woman inside her and even in
face of great menace, should keep kicking, like Yusra Mardini did for three and
half hours in the Aegean sea to keep herself, her fellow passengers and her
dreams alive. We cheer her survival and her determination to move on.
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