WESTBROOK, Maine — Yassin Saker didn’t meet his youngest daughter until her first birthday. They were outside a terminal at Boston’s Logan Airport on Nov. 1 and the little girl took in her father with a long, uncertain gaze, Saker recalled.
“I knew she didn’t know me,” he said.
The child was born in Syria while her father was slicing deli meat at a Maine supermarket to raise money to get his family away from the brutal civil war that had overrun their home in Damascus.
Their first meeting marked the end of a years-long struggle to escape the war that destroyed their home and put an ocean between Saker and his family — a plight he first shared with the Bangor Daily News in December 2015.
Saker, 60, emigrated to the United States from Syria in 1978. A gifted student, he came to study medicine in New Hampshire, but when the cost of medical school overwhelmed his family, he changed tracks and transferred to University of Maine at Presque Isle, where he’d won a scholarship.
By the time he graduated with a math degree in 1986, Saker had fallen in love with Maine, he said. Nine years later, he became an American citizen. He eventually got a job teaching math at Portland Arts and Technology High School. During summer breaks, Saker would return to Syria to visit his family. That’s when he fell in love again, this time with a woman: Fadia al Shibbli.
They were married in 2003 and planned to return to Maine together. But things went awry two years later when Saker’s father fell ill. Saker moved back to the Damascus suburbs to care for his parents. He and his wife had their first daughter, Raneem, in 2006, and son Mustafa three years later. Still planning to eventually return to Portland, Saker made sure that each of his children obtained the documents securing their American citizenship. But things went wrong again in 2012, while al Shibbli, now 38, was pregnant with their third child.
“Then the bad times came,” Saker recalled.
As fighting between the forces of Syrian President Bashar al Assad and anti-government rebels mounted, bombs began falling in the Damascus suburbs. Like millions of other Syrians, the Saker family fled.
They sought safety in the government-held core of Damascus, but within a couple years, they were struggling to pay rent in the two-bedroom apartment that was shared with a dozen other people. The crush of refugees into the city had spiked rents by more than 500 percent and there was little work to be found, Saker said.
“We had no hope, no hope at all,” he recalled. “When we moved we lost everything.”
The family began looking for ways to return to the United States. As citizens, that would have been possible for Saker and his children alone. But al Shibbli needed a guarantee from an American sponsor who could provide financial support, and Saker did not have enough money.
By March 2015, they had already sold al Shibbli’s jewelry for rent money, but Saker didn’t want to leave his wife and children in a war zone. It was al Shibbli who eventually convinced him to return to the United States in the hope of finding work and bringing his family along after, the couple recalled.
Through begging and borrowing Saker rounded up the money to buy a plane ticket, he said. But just before he left, al Shibbli brought him news they weren’t expecting: She was pregnant.
“We were not planning for it,” said Saker. “Life was so difficult, and we had no money and, you know — war time.”
Jena was born on Nov. 1, 2015, after her father left. Al Shibbli recalled the world that her youngest daughter arrived into as terrifying. Outside Damascus, fighting between the government, the rebels, Islamic State and various militias was ferocious. Inside the city there were kidnappings, and government forces would raid people’s homes looking for rebels or those suspected of supporting them, she said, speaking through her husband’s translation.
“It was fear all the time,” she said. “There was no safe place.”
Saker arrived in the U.S. in late March 2015 with $300 and began frantically looking for a job, he said. He found a part-time position at the deli counter of the North Yarmouth Hannaford and took to work with the motivation of the desperate.
“I had three kids and a fourth one on the way,” he said. “I was working so hard, and when you work hard anywhere in the world, but especially in the United States, they reward you.”
At Hannaford, Saker moved quickly to a full-time position and then received a promotion to deli supervisor in Portland. But he was struggling to save while also sending money back to feed and house his family. And they were once again stymied by the intricacies of the immigration system. Now that Saker was in the United States, if he sponsored his wife, he’d need to sponsor each of their children, too, he recalled.
The reward for the Saker family came in the form of help. Over the last year, the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project and Rep. Chellie Pingree’s office helped them navigate the immigration process and arranged for Saker’s American cousin to sponsor al Shibbli.
Finally this fall, after four risky trips from Damascus to Lebanon, al Shibbli heard from the American consulate in Beirut that she would be able to come to Maine.
For her first birthday Jena got a plane ticket, and 14 hours later, she was looking hesitantly into the dark eyes and soft face of a man she’d never met.
“I knew she didn’t know me,” said Saker. “But I knew she would know me.”