Visit the Walk With Amal Website - https://www.walkwithamal.org/
In 2023, I was asked to walk with Little Amal in Trondheim, Norway. I felt an immediate affiliation with her story - a 10 year old girl, a Syrian refugee, who has lost her mother. After meeting one of her guardians, the director of her search, I knew it would be ok for me to tell my story too.
Our Story - Inspired by Little Amal
I see you Amal
Your undying hope
A blanket of love and belonging
Waits for you
It is the right size for your shoulders
With all your favourite colours
It smells like your mother’s sweet bread breath
Some scents we never forget
Because they remind us of home
My mother would tell me
How she would smell sugar dumplings frying
And grandfather singing hymns
On a drizzly grey Sundays in a simple house they made home
In deep north London in 1961
Amal, can I tell you this story?
Of a Caribbean migrant settler family of two
“It’s just me and you,” he would tell her
Your eyes remind me of
A photo of his daughter
when she was just about your age
Bright and wise, looking for something lost
And knowing a little too much, maybe
You see I am the daughter of that daughter
Brought to a strange land by her father
Leaving her mother behind
Sometimes my mother missed her mother
like you miss yours
One day she awoke a mystery to herself
No longer a child
And you, like me, will surprisingly be
just a little closer to being a young woman,
Whose voice can change the shape of the world
Believe you have a voice of your own
Even though your mother is gone
But don’t give up searching
Trust your song will find her in the nosiest rooms
~ written by Zena Edwards© ~