The History of a Dream

 

What is more important that your biggest dream? 

I'm going to tell you the story of a swimmer girl, she faced the biggest difficulties to achieve her dream. Dangers, humiliations, loneliness and the pain of being despised for her origin.  She is better known as “the refugee who swam twenty people to safety”

Maybe, you know already who I’m talking about, her name is Yusra Mardini, one of the members of the Refugees’ Olympic Team.

Going to the Olympics is not a small dream. It’s a really a big dream, but for her, it was more difficult yet.

She dreamed with all the strength of her heart to go to the Olympics. She was a really good swimmer selected to represent her country in international competitions. Her coach told her that if she worked hard enough, she could make it into the Olympics one day.

She was like you and me. She had many friends, went to school, and she trained in a pool in the afternoons.

However, she lived in Damascus, Syria. One day, a few minutes after to finish to train a bomb exploded and destroyed the glass roof of the pool, this event change everything.

Her family decided she and her sister Sarah should leave Syria to survive. The travel wasn’t easy. She spent a really dangerous travel. 

She and her sister boarded a boat to go from Turkey to Greece, but only a minutes after to leave the coast the boat manned by twenty people was broken. According to her autobiographic book, entitled “Butterfly” They asked the authorities from Turkey and Greece for help, but anybody answer. She and Sarah were the only ones on board who could swim. So, the sisters Mardini decided to jump to the water to lessen the weight and steer the boat. 

After three and a half hours in the cold water they finally arrived to Greece, but the travel was just starting. Like Yusra explained in the podcast in Spotify “How to be a Super Human”, they spent almost four days without drinking water, because in Greece a single bottle of water costed five hundred dollars for them, for the only reason that they were immigrants.

25 days after, when they finally arrived to Berlin, they didn’t have a place to sleep, so they ended up in a refugee camp. Difficult days were coming. But for the first time in its history, the International Olympic Committee announced the nations competing at the summer games, that a team of refugees would be considered to compete at Río two thousand sixteen.

First Yusra didn’t want to go to the Olympics. Yes, that was her biggest dream, but she wanted to arrive to the Olympics for her talent, not for the only reason to be a refugee. 

Yusra finally accepted the challenge because she understood that indeed she was a swimmer first, but she needed to tell her history and to communicate to the world the serious situation that her country was living and to give hope to the people that continue living there.

In Rio she dedicated most of her time to tell the world about the difficulties that the refugees suffer to be in safe. Something that she had lived only fifteen months before. She knew that if she was concentrated in give interviews she cannot earn any medals.  But she could understand that there was something more important that her biggest dream.

Well, Yusra had a dream, a really difficult dream that seemed impossible. The travel to achieve her dream wasn’t easy. And finally, she was able to understand that tell her history was more important to have medals.

Yusra can teach us that many times there are things biggest that our own dreams and that doesn’t matter whatever you have to face or how much time you need to wait, you are able to do whatever you want to do.