Pope Francis greets Syrian refugees he brought to Rome from the Greek island of Lesbos. The three Syrian refugee couples brought to Rome from Greece by Pope Francis have described their experience as being like a dream come true and said they look forward to returning home.
The couples and their children were selected with the help of the Sant’Egidio community, and were brought to Rome on the papal plane on Saturday, April 15.
Wishing like the other refugees only to be identified by his first name, Hasan said being in Rome rather than a refugee camp on the island of Lesbos “is a big dream”. Making clear his wish to see his homeland again, he said, “You can find a new job maybe, you can find a new house, but you can’t find a new family”.
Commenting on the apparent incongruity of being helped by a Christian leader, he said, “we are Muslim and, unfortunately, our people did not deal with us like the Pope did”, while his wife Nour, an engineer who studied in France and hopes at some point to return there, said, “no other religious leader in the world helped us like the Pope did”.
Wafa said being chosen from among thousands of refugees to come to Italy felt like “a dream”, while her husband Osama told reporters that “We want peace in Syria so we can go home”.
The third couple to be selected learned the day before Pope Francis’ arrival in Lesbos that they and their children had been chosen. “Peace has no religion. If you think about it, we are all human. The Pope made a humanitarian gesture and it was so moving,” said Osama, whose teacher wife Ramy said being chosen to come to Italy “was God’s blessing”.