99. Wiser

[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:44 - 1:41)

The fall of the Assad regime in Syria has been mind-blowing.

It happened so quickly that it's been hard to follow what happened. And it's impossible at this stage to know what the future looks like for Syria. So it was very timely and lucky that we had scheduled an interview with the outstanding Syrian humanitarian, Dr. Ola Hallam, a while back. Her and I have a very personal and wonderful conversation about humanitarianism and about Syria. The conversation really speaks for itself, so I will not introduce it any further, but just remind you that, as always, we appreciate it when you share the show around to give us some feedback on social media. So please continue doing that.

And most importantly, enjoy the conversation. Dr. Rola Hallam, welcome to Trumanitarian.

[Dr. Rola Hallam] (1:42 - 1:44)

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (1:45 - 2:08)

You are a doctor, you are a doctor and a humanitarian, and you have a Syrian background. And of course, Syria has been on everybody's mind this week with the fall of the Assad regime suddenly. And we will talk about that at the end of the conversation.

But first, I would love to just hear your story. How did you get involved in humanitarian action to begin with?

[Dr. Rola Hallam] (2:09 - 5:39)

I don't know if an hour is going to be long enough for this. So I was born in England, but I am born to Syrian parents. And so I've always been someone who has straddled both cultures, both nations and both identities.

And at the time when the revolution calling for freedom and dignity began, and then that, as we know, turned into one of the bloodiest wars, I was a specialist in an anesthesia and intensive care doctor. I was working in the UK and London. And my focus really at that time was in sub-Saharan Africa and global child health.

And really, that's where I thought my life was taking me. But of course, there's our plans, and then there's what the universe has planned for us. So when the violence began, and it began very early on from where I am from, from from Baba Amr, very early on, we were losing our homes, we were losing our family.

We've lost over 30 members of my extended family during this brutal war. And so we really started our efforts very early on at a family level. It's super grassroots, as it has been always, and as it is right now.

And we didn't think it was going to last. We thought it was going to be just a few days, maybe a few weeks. And then as a few weeks rolled on, we were still waiting for the moment that finally came on the 8th of December, just this week.

We were waiting for that moment when they said, Assad's gone, the regime has fallen. And we just thought we had to sprint for these few weeks, few months. And then the years started to roll on.

So as a doctor, I kind of knew what I had to do, which was to get involved in the humanitarian and the medical response. And so I started initially by fundraising and collecting medical supplies and sending them over. But very soon, I started to do medical missions.

Under the protection of Türkiye, in a sense, although nothing was protected under Syrian territories, even hospitals that I've built, you know, Bab al-Hawa hospital that we built, right at the border was bombed. But yes, into the opposition areas right at the north. And those medical missions were all with Syrian-led organizations.

I was very clear from the beginning that I knew it was Syrians who were in the eye of the storm. It was Syrians who were on the front lines. And it was the Syrian-led efforts that I was always part of and always in support of.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (5:39 - 5:48)

When you began this work, you already had experience from sub-Saharan Africa. How was it different suddenly having to work in Syria, your own country?

[Dr. Rola Hallam] (5:48 - 7:21)

Well, it was vastly different because the involvement that I had, whether it was in Kenya or Ethiopia, or especially in Uganda, where I was doing a major pediatric project, the major difference there was that you had peace versus war, right? You were very much doing development work versus humanitarian work. In Syria, then, as it is right now, things are changing by the minute, let alone by the day.

You are walking and working in quicksand. And not only are you working and walking in quicksand, but at the time, we had bombs raining on us as well, right? Like nowhere was sacred, nothing was safe, including hospitals, including schools, right?

Like zero sacredness, zero safety. So that was a very big difference. And then, of course, the major difference, and we will come back to this point again and again and again, which is that when you are involved in the response to your own country, you are simultaneously a victim, survivor, as well as the health or humanitarian worker.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:22 - 7:57)

When I listen to some of the speeches you have given online, the thing that really stands out to me is, on one side, your ability to truly convey the immense suffering and the way in which individuals have been affected by this terrible conflict, and how society has been affected. But you take it a step further, you tear down that traditional hero figure we have of humanitarians, and you replace that image with something far more sophisticated, vulnerable, and nuanced. And I find that truly impressive.

[Dr. Rola Hallam] (7:57 - 9:54)

You're reminding me of so many toe-curling moments when, you know, and I appreciate and understand, feel very grateful when people say my work is very inspiring, and then when they verge into that, you know, going into that, and you're a hero. And look, we're not heroes. We are doing what we feel called to.

The brutality they witness, the suffering we witness, the moral injury, the enormous moral injury that I and have my colleagues have faced of making impossible decisions, these haunt my friends and my colleagues till this day. Like, I literally never need to finish a question of when I start to say someone during a session, can you remember a person who till this day stays with you? Like, I literally don't even need to finish the sentence, and they've started to tell me about that girl that they should have saved her leg, but they had to do a double amputation on her because they didn't have the resources they needed.

Like, that person comes to mind like they're there, right in front of them, you know? And so it's enormous, and so that's what we're dealing with. We're dealing with the best of humanity.

Those really are the beacons of hope and the likeness of war, and now in post-war, hopefully, but simultaneously with humans, with fragility and vulnerability.

You know, last night I was having a conversation with an old colleague, and we spoke about some of the people we worked with who are maybe 10, 15 years older than us and sort of retired, and actually, when you look across the board, there are very, very few happy stories of people being home, walking their dog, and watering their plants. There are a lot of them who actually crashed and did not have a very happy sort of end of career. And so I guess the question I'm asking myself is, how do we avoid that?

What must we do differently to protect the people who spent their lives serving in this way?

And how devastating is that, right? People spend their whole lives in service, right, wanting to make an impact, trying to make a difference, and how devastating that those very people, instead of leaving, feeling so fulfilled and so content, right, with a life well spent, that they should feel like that. I mean, that just tells us so much and honestly it breaks my heart.

Let me share with you maybe a couple of things, a couple of conversations I've had literally just in the last two days that for me personify part of the problem and also part of the solution. I was talking with one Syrian NGO leader, Fadi, a dear friend, someone who has been resolute and resilient supporting the Syrian people since the very beginning and to this very day. And I said, we were just exchanging congratulations and oh my gods and all of that.

And he said, right, we need to get to Syria. And he was sort of gone, went into full action mode. And I just went, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait.

Like, can you and the team just take a couple of days off? Like, our collective mind and hearts are blown here. I mean, I said, I don't know about you, but I could barely think.

I don't know how you are just being there. And he said, well, we don't have that luxury. Our INGO partners still demand the same level of reporting and the same timelines as at other times.

And I just thought, well, that is one of our problems, right? Where is that duty of care to the local partners that the international NGOs have? Where is that leeway of saying you are affected people?

You're not just service delivery. These are not people who are just making your work happen for you so that you can then go back to DFID or to wherever it is and say, hey, look, we've done what we said we would do and here's the report. These are human beings dealing with very real, raw emotions and situations on the ground.

So for me, part of the problem and part of where I see that solution is where the duty of care to local affected partners and people there and what does supporting them, not just by providing money for a project that they want to do, but truly supporting them from a health, mind and body point of view.

I couldn't agree more. I feel like we finally are beginning as an industry to make progress. I think a lot of the INGOs are taking duty of care more seriously.

I think it is less stigmatized to go and see a therapist if you need one. And so I think we are making progress and that absolutely needs to include the amazing partners we work with in the countries affected by crisis. There's just no doubt about that.

It would also be really interesting to hear how you personally find this balance. How do you actually manage to stop the hamster wheel when it's spinning a bit too quickly?

You know, how has it been 10 years of us talking about hospitals are being bombed, children are being bombed, doctors and nurses are being bombed? Like, it just blew my mind in that moment. And I really, my whole world collapsed after that because I just felt like a gigantic failure.

I feel like the burden of disappointment in humanity just sort of collapsed on top of me. The exhaustion that we had ignored and pushed through suddenly just appeared. And I think all of the grief, just the enormous mountain of grief that we had put a lid on in order to continue, in order to survive, in order to continue doing our work just suddenly exploded for me.

And it's partly why I'm now doing the work that I did. You know, I had to go through my own healing journey. I had to finally feel in order to heal.

You know, I had to actually stop my humanitarian work. I had to, I was in no position to continue because I had a breakdown. And in so many ways, I'm one of the lucky ones who was able to at least make that decision.

Like, I knew it was what was needed for me, for my work, but also as a message to all of us, as a message to all of us. And it's relating to what you were saying about your retired colleagues. Right?

This, we should not be self-sacrificing to the extent that we then end up completely dysfunctional, completely broken, you know, or at least feeling that we're broken. Of course, there's an essence that's deeply unbreakable within, but you know what I mean? And, and, and I knew I had to go on that journey.

And I knew all along that it was for me, and not for me. For it was, it was for my colleagues. And now I know that it's for Syrians in general.

And that is what I really like about the way you speak publicly about your work. You speak with the credibility of somebody who walked the walk and, and who's not afraid to talk about how that affected you. And that just lends a tremendous credibility to what you say.

And again, the way you use it to then tear down this bloody hero figure that we always drag around. It, it's very, very powerful.

You know, most of us don't really like necessarily the idea of like trauma healing, because we kind of only think about like, Oh God, like the mountain of pain I have to deal with, right? Like, and so most of us don't want pain. Like there's something very innate in a human that kind of wants to go away from, from that.

Right. But let me tell you that I've never felt so strong as I do now, because when we are traumatized and are defending ourselves, our defense is fragile. I had a wall, I used to call it Fortress Rilla, like you would only ever see me as strong and powerful, but that fortress was fragile.

It wasn't true strength. It did help me to be resilient. It did help me to, to, to make all of the impact that I did make.

And yet it was fragile. Whereas now I feel truly strong because I don't feel like I am now just shielding, defending and deflecting. I now have the ability to process and integrate, and very importantly, ask for help and do things according to my capacity.

So that has given me a far more profound and sustainable strength than the facade that I used to have.

Something I do a lot is compartmentalization. I put things in boxes. You know, I remember coming home from Afghanistan.

And, and that was, of course, a very impactful experience to work there. And then to come home to Denmark and experience how that was interesting to people for about 90 seconds. And then we talked about football.

And I think that type of experience sort of made me give up on, on making the world fit together. I have a great difficulty connecting those two worlds. And so I, I'm probably quite comfortable putting things in boxes and, and leaving them there and not going into all the boxes all the time and accepting that the boxes don't really fit together.

And that's probably how I sort of cope with that.

I think that is one of the hardest and most fracturing experiences when that, that inability to bring together two worlds. I know exactly what you mean. I, I felt, I've been feeling it these last couple of days.

And I hadn't felt that for quite some time, but I definitely felt it for the majority of my Syria work, especially acutely after I come back from a medical mission, you know, where my brain and heart would still be in a war zone. But I, my eyes were telling me I am in London in a peaceful street with people going about their mundane jobs. And it's like that shift was so enormous.

It's like, you just felt like you were schizophrenic living like multiple personalities and lives, right?

Yes, but you have to be there for your family and your friends. You can't pretend like that's not a real life. And so somehow you have to bridge.

Yeah.

And that I find really, really difficult. That calibration.

Well, this is, I think where, you know, now that I have been through what I call my valley of darkness. And now that I've been through that, I feel like so well armed and tooled and, and frankly, excited to be bringing that to my friends and to my colleagues, you know, Syrian or not Syrian, because I now feel like even though initially there's this, what world am I living in? Is it this or is it that?

And it's so weird. I feel like now I do have the tools to integrate that, or at least I now know the people I can reach out to that will help to bridge that and can help me to come to peace with it. As opposed to what you said, compartmentalize, which is essentially, let me dissociate from this.

Let me just put this away because I can't fathom it. Now I'm much more inclined to reach out to the people who helped me to assimilate it so that it feels, let me, yeah, less disintegrated.

You know, the producers of Trumanitarian was so excited when you were coming. They came to me and they said, you know, "she's into psychedelics. She is a shroomie.

Get her to talk about that". So, so please explain how mushrooms fit into your toolbox.

Right, right. So, you know, obviously I'm a, I'm a, I'm a Western trained doctor. And when I experienced my burnout, I kind of went to my medical toolbox and I found it poor.

Not only had my medical training not prepared me to even recognize burnout or trauma, it certainly hadn't prepared me to manage it. So that was a real shock. That was a real shock because I thought trauma was basically PTSD.

Like unless you're really in full flurried nightmares, relivings, you know, the kind of classic PTSD criteria, I thought therefore you didn't have trauma. Turns out I was super trauma uninformed and, and trauma had really taken up home in every cell of my body, but I needed to learn it and understand it and see what it looked and sounded and felt like before I was able to identify with it. And then suddenly I was able to see it and all my friends and colleagues.

So, so it was simultaneously like this awakening and kind of clarity of vision that I didn't have before, but also kind of a devastating realisation. And so I really went back and studied so much, not just about trauma, but I studied about movement and semantics, especially through and through nervous system regulation. I went back and studied herbs and, and, and plant medicines.

And, you know, in the Quran, it says like the Allah that hasn't sent an illness without sending its treatment. Like we know that the natural world is so rich with, with its yeah, with its, with its, with its healing powers. And yet, you know, Western medicine and pharmacology and, and the pharma industries have taken us in such a different direction.

But especially in, you know, the spiritual component also very, very important. I come from a lineage of spiritual healers, and it was at my dad's point that we turned towards medicine. And, and so that too has been becoming coming back into, into my toolbox as it were, and into my approach.

But especially psychedelics, I experienced it, first of all, as, as a, as a patient or as a client, you know, experiencing it's, it's healing, it's healing powers. And I'm now actually completing my training in it so that I can be a psychedelics provider of, as an anesthetist, I've given a lot, especially of ketamine, because that's our, you know, our legal psychedelic medication. And so now I get to give it in a different way.

And yeah, I love how one of my friends put it recently, he said, you used to send people asleep, and now you're waking them up. And it's really interesting before I really used to numb people's pain. And now I'm supporting people to feel their pain so they can heal it.

And this is the beauty of psychedelics is it allows us a window that we can use as therapists, as journey as as guides, to support people to go to places that they may be unwilling and unable to go to otherwise.

Do you get any pushback?

Oh, of course, I get pushback on everything I say. I think some of us are, we're sent to say the things that no one else wants to hear or say. Of course I do on on all of it, you know, and on all of it, whether, you know, whether when I emphasize trauma, and, and banner are not mental health illnesses, they are like a whole body illness, right?

Like it's rooted in your nervous system in your physiology, in your body, and it does not help us to just think of it as a mental health issue and say, Okay, go off the therapy. That is why it talk therapy by itself doesn't help so many people, because trauma lives in our bodies. And so we need to treat it as that.

But also there is the spiritual energy, the moral injury, you know, there is the, this deep sense of abandonment that people often feel, whether abandonment by God or abandonment by other people, there is a really deep wound there that we also need to address. And of course, the psychedelics, I think, you know, there's a lot of ignorance. And it's okay to be ignorant.

I think if ignorance is grounded in humility and a genuine wish to understand to connect to say here, we are all gathered here because we want humanity to be elevated, we want to elevate human consciousness, that we believe there is a better way in which we can all be and exist, and therefore our world can be. And that's going to require us to all do a tremendous amount of healing individually, but especially collectively, especially for those of us who are healers. At the moment, we've got the wounded healers, you know, going into battle bruised and battered, trying to heal others when they are deeply wounded.

You know, we have peace builders who are trying to fight their way to peace instead of truly embodying peace, and then we're pulling it out across our world.

We have previously spoken about mental health of humanitarian workers and other helpers on this show. And we had a colleague called Imogen Wall come for one of the episodes, and she had a very clear and wonderful phrase, which was be well, serve well. And I think that is so precise.

Yeah, I think one of the things that I really kind of understood, after coming out of my, my healing journey, and for ages, I was trying to find words for it. And then I found the words of the Sufi mystic Rumi. And he said, yesterday, I was clever.

So I tried to change the world. Today, I am wise. So I'm changing myself.

And that shift from clever to wise, frankly, feels like the shift that humanity needs to make, but especially those of us who are dedicated to serving others. It's like, are we creating the change we need within so that we can truly embody it and lead from that embodied place? Or are we just busy trying to problem solve outside of us and not doing the deep look within and the deep change within that we need for us to truly create a change?

I think that is so precise. But then here comes the curveball, right? Because my rational Western mind, of course, immediately goes, but if you look at the scale of the suffering here, if you look at the chaos in Syria, where do you begin?

And then once you have gotten off the couch, and you've become wiser, and you're done with all of that, then how do you link to the structure? How do you scale this? Is it enough just to be smarter and wiser yourself?

Or how do you scale this?

Amazing question. May I exemplify it in a little story? Because for me, it feels like that in action.

Okay, I see that. I see that urge. I see that need.

I see that want to kind of to save, but we do things differently now. I do things differently now. So I kind of said, okay, this is an emergency, let's rush to the meditation cushion.

And so I ran to my prayer mat, right? And I prayed, and I meditated. And I was wanting and asking for guidance about how do I serve now in this situation.

And I got such a beautiful and inspired idea of contacting various global trauma leaders. And we had deep conversations, I had a conversation with 10 of them, I turned that into a course that I'm about to release very shortly for kind of a trauma-informed self-care and recovery program for health and humanitarian workers. And that all came from that inspired action that was taken by entering into a state of receptivity, of openness, of receiving guidance.

So for me, that's the whole thing. It's like the change within will then ripple out. So there will absolutely be inspired action that we must take, that we do need to take.

But where is it coming from? Right? That's the question that I guess is different for me.

Before it used to be reactive, coming from a fight and flight response, right? That was maybe a mixture of here's what I know, and here's what I usually do, and here's my emotions, and here's my trauma response, and so I'm gonna act from that reactive place. Versus I feel that now I'm feeling much more responsive, I'm much more able to kind of say, okay, what do I need to ground myself?

What do I need to get myself out of freeze? I was in freeze for a good, I don't know, 30 hours, just these last few days, just shock, just couldn't compute. It wasn't a physical freeze, although it was at one point, but it was my brain can't think.

And the more that I tried to ask myself what to think, the more I just jammed my circuits, right? So for me, it isn't just go and sit on the meditation cushion and then stay there, right? That's a mystic's life.

But for us humanitarians, for us health workers, for us emergency responders, for us who are made to be in and of the world, I think it is the first part that then gives us the inspiration of what to do in a wise way.

I'm really happy that you bring up spirituality or religion also, right? That's also something that has been very important for me in terms of understanding how to serve and how to fit in and what the job is, so to speak. And secondly, there's this piece around the profound loss of control that you experience in these situations.

And I think for me, it's been important to truly own that loss of control, to accept that this is how it is, this is the chaos we're in, and then to begin to find ways to maneuver and operate in that chaos. And there's an element of humility in it as well. It's about I'm not almighty, I'm not powerful, I'm not the hero, I'm actually quite helpless here, but I can do something.

Yes, I think one of the hardest boxes, we were talking about boxes earlier, I think one of the hardest boxes that I had to open and did open eventually was that powerlessness box, right? That I feel is the hallmark of trauma or something that really traumatizes you is that you felt such a level of powerlessness, and it was so discombobulating and uncomfortable for you that it fractured something within you, right? That's the sort of trauma effect that it has.

And I think we had to, you know, as humanitarians, you know, my organization was called Can Do, right? It was all about doing. And so, you know, there was no accepting and allowing for powerlessness.

It was all about, you know, action is essentially about our power, what can I do, right? It's assuming there is an action one can take, but it was very profound when I faced that, and I felt like it was such an important part of my healing. And also part of, like you said, coming, going forward now, it's like, kind of reminds me of the serenity prayer, I guess, right?

It's like, can we have the wisdom to know the difference between that which we can change and that which we cannot change? And we really do need that wisdom. I guess it's just that some of us believe that nothing is impossible.

And I guess I was made a little bit in that category.

Yeah, and I think that's a great place to start. And when that's where you start, then you will get beaten up quite a bit, because you will run into obstacles you can't overcome. And then I think as you take these beatings, over time, you begin to then understand that lack of control, or that powerlessness that you speak about.

And once you embrace that, I think then a new toolbox opens up to you. You don't have to bloody do everything yourself. You can work through the agency of others.

And that's a new and really fascinating way of thinking about what scaling actually means.

Oh, I think, honestly, I believe it's the only way to think about scaling. It's the only way to think about scaling. Because, you know, let's take Syria as an example, and what's happening now, right?

Every Syrian, and I will dare to speak on everybody's behalf here, will have hope dancing in their heart, right next to grief. There is so much confusion, and there's so much joy, and there's so much possibility and potential, and yet there is so many questions, right? And I feel like we need to be able to hold all of that.

And I really believe that Syria's thriving future depends on our ability to hold both that hope and that mourning in our hearts. And one critical thing that is going to make a very big difference to us is really to have this like healing centered approach. And that is to recognize that trauma is not just individual, but collective.

And that empowering others, right? Having the agency, people, Syrian people, the ordinary people, not just health and humanitarian workers, not just civil society, not just the politicians or the armed whoever's, but each one of us having that agency, that sense of agency to be able to be part of civic action, to be able to dream, to have a space held for us, yes, for our mourning, yes, for our collective healing, but for our collective dreaming, right? What does our identity look like from now on? What does our future look like from now on?

And so that Syria that I know is possible to build is only going to be built if we have that sense of agency, and if that agency is amongst the majority, not a minority. And we can impact that, Lars. I mean, this is the thing, we can impact that.

And obviously now we're speaking to our humanitarian colleagues, and we can impact that now. I was talking with another colleague, he's in rural Damascus, and he really brought tears to my eyes because he said to me, you know, like, Dr. Rola, we did a really beautiful mushroom growing program and project together, he said, when Damascus was besieged, and now Damascus is free, so I can't wait to see what project we do together. And when I said to him, well, what support is there at the moment?

You know, which of the international NGOs? He said, we can't find anyone. He said, the UN are also shocked.

The Red Crescent has ceased to work because it used to get its essentially its orders from the regime directly or indirectly. And so there's a vacuum right now. There is a vacuum.

And I was on the one hand, I understand so many of us are shocked, Syrians or not Syrian. What we do now and how we respond now is going to determine what fills that vacuum. So this is a call to all of us to not stand and wait.

Everyone's like, let's stand and wait and see what happens. If you stand and wait and see what happens, someone who's willing to fill that vacuum is going to come in. And then you can't say, well, we didn't think it might turn out well.

And look, we are right. It's like no, you stood by and you watched and you allowed others to come in with their resources and with their agenda. So this is a plea to all of my colleagues.

We need to support Syria healing. We need to support the very many now experienced Syrian humanitarians and healthcare workers who are crying out for resources, who are crying out for support. There is a role in which we can all step into right now.

We don't need to wait. The reality that we want, we can co-create together. It requires us to believe in it and requires us to take that inspired action to it.

So I really make a plea that we don't wait for that vacuum to be filled by others and that we come in and support that healing and that rebuilding of a peaceful and prosperous Syria. In the end, believing in a possibility is half the battle. And right now, Syria is standing on an edge of potential and possibility that it has never in its history stood on before.

We need friends. We need that inspired and wise action right now. Healing is possible.

Peacebuilding is possible. And we can't do it alone.

So how do we do that? How can we be the right type of friend for Syria?

Yeah, I mean, I think the great thing is this isn't our first rodeo, right? Neither is the Syrian humanitarians, nor is the international humanitarians. We are standing on a breadth and depth of experience and expertise here.

So I would like to start by seeing a serious meeting between the donors, funders, or our international colleagues and the major Syrian organizations and a question, what do you need? I think it's our Syrian colleagues. They are there on the ground.

They're able to act and give as much information as is possible. But we need those who are then going to be able to support us with that response. And we especially need rapid response in some certain cases, right?

For example, the state of detainees. I mean, you've been probably seeing the videos. There's been very little support coming in to support detainees.

And the Syrian organizations themselves have very little. So I've got friends who are like, we're trying to give them some water, trying to give them just small snacks. But many of them are wandering in the streets because they don't know who they are.

And they don't know how to get home. They don't even have money to get home. There's some really basic things that we can do immediately in order to support some segments of society.

So there's some emergency response that is needed in terms of that food, water, and shelter, a basic kind of humanitarian response in some certain places. But I would love for my part to see those who are seriously wanting and willing to engage in the long-term healing game. Yes, we need an emergency response, but we also need to be very mindful that no war is not peace, right?

The surest way to the freedom and dignity Syrians want is for us to do the healing work. And we will need support, especially from those of us around the world, who like in Rwanda or South Africa or Colombia, who have got such a profound depth of that understanding. What does collaborating and working together to borrow from that expertise and knowledge look like?

So that we can then contextualize it, localize it, and of course, use it in a way that is Syria-oriented, but borrowing on that expertise and knowledge.

As you were talking, I was thinking about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and how that fantastic and painful and powerful work that they did, I think still today, means that the country has a shared narrative that has helped them overcome some terrible and very deep, deep divisions in that country.

Yeah, there's some phenomenal expertise, you know, in those countries that I just mentioned. And so I feel like, I don't believe the how is what's difficult. I feel like oftentimes it's saying, I've got the will, I've got the belief, I'm willing.

So what does that willingness translate into? For me, it's that willingness. Are we willing?

It makes me think of a Desmond Tutu quote. He said, we are prisoners of hope. That's why we continue doing what we do.

And so I think maybe that's where we should leave this conversation. We should agree that we are prisoners of hope, and that we have hope for Syria. Thank you so much for coming and for sharing your work and your experience, Rola.

I think you're awesome. I think the work you do is awesome. And I want to say a big thank you for everything you do.

And I look forward to following your work in the coming years.

Thank you. Here's to hope in Syria. I feel it too. Thank you so much.