Hope is hard.
Hope is your elderly mother walking a half mile or more every few days to a café that sells Wi-Fi access cards to ask a store clerk to connect her phone to the internet.
She gets an hour of internet access for about 50 cents.
She calls me in Belgium, insisting on talking, no matter how poor the connection is. She’s desperate for news about her youngest son and my younger brother, Ahmed. She keeps asking about him, no matter what’s happening around us. She wants to know.
Sometimes the hour ends with the internet too weak for her to get any information.
Her only question is always: “Where is Ahmed?”
“He’s missing,” I tell her. ….more