I can’t stop thinking about Yusra Mardini’s story, told in her gut-wrenching, enlightening, inspiring book Butterfly – From Refugee to Olympian. The Syrian swimmer uses her waterborne skills in a survival situation as she and her family flee their increasingly dangerous battle-scarred homeland.
Like many people before them, crossing from Turkey to the safety of Greece involved paying far too much to traffickers. Then dangerously packed into an inflatable dinghy with no guarantee of surviving the trip. When the engine fails, Butterfly tells us, Yusra and older sister Sara leap into the water. Their aim is to try and keep the boat on course towards the shore. Not, as many headlines would have you believe, dragging the boat along between them – an impossibility in the currents and waves.
The constant newsreel of immigrants arriving in Greece, packed into boats nullifies individual stories. Yusra’s story puts you slap bang on the boat with her and it’s not a pleasant place to be.
Teenage kicks
Yusra was a regular teenager in Syria, going to school and following her passion, swimming. As regular a teenager as you can be with a father who is hell bent on his daughters becoming swimming champions. Think Andre Agassi’s start in life being forced to play tennis by his dad and substitute Yusra’s dad and swimming.
Take a teenager trying to find her place in the world, comparing her family’s culture and her friend’s more modern lives. Parents who choose to ignore being frowned upon for the girls wearing swimming costumes. Encouraged by her daughters, mum even learns, taught by her husband.
Think of watching the news when Libya fell and then going back to whatever you were doing; then think of unnerved teenager Yusra and her family realising their country could be next.
Battle scarred butterfly
Think then of the slow encroachment of bomb’s getting closer and closer to where you live. Your mum has to change jobs because shots fired are suddenly near her place of work. Constantly moving house for safety as the unrest gets closer.
How friends and family suddenly start disappearing to foreign shores or killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your dad moving away to Lebanon for work opportunities. Mum struggling with work, running the family home and terrified when her daughters grow used to the danger in which they live.
Waiting for your dad’s decision to leave your country, your home, after an unexploded bomb drops into your swimming pool. The desperate decision to leave, ending up in one of those lethal boats heading to Greece and safety.
Imagine the boat engine failing on the way to safety, adrift, and deciding that 17-year-old you and your not-much-older sister are the only ones who can save this craft packed full of human beings.
Consider all of this and then imagine still having the energy and fight to dream of swimming at the Olympics. Imagine Yusra Maldini.
Like I said, Butterfly is one inspiring book.
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