Baptize Your Way to Better Hair Care Products

You met Farid and Maysa Chahar in 2014. A recently married couple, they were sharing a storefront with two other families in an abandoned mall not too far from Tripoli, north of Beirut. Maysa was four months pregnant with her first son. They explained during the interview that they needed to find different living arrangements. There was only one bathroom shared by five stores that had over fifteen families living in them. They had to resort to using a converted bedpan, which was not pleasant when there were two other families in the same room. You tried to help, but they were able to figure out better housing on their own. They found the priest.

This priest in the mountains of Lebanon decided that Jesus would have helped refugees. He took it upon himself to care for some of the Syrians overrunning his country. At first, he began to help his coreligionists. He allowed Catholic Syrian refugees into his church; he cajoled various households in the village to take in families, offered food to everyone. Just as important, if not more so, with the help of Western NGOs, he initiated a program that helped settle these Christian families in Europe and Australia. Why Australia? Lebanese had been immigrating to that island since the late 1880s, and it was said that over one million Australians had Lebanese ancestry. Also, in this case, the Australian government had refused to accept any Syrian refugees who were not Christian. The priest was more than willing to comply with a condition like that.

He was happy, doing his God’s work. But why stop with Syrian Catholics and Maronites, he thought. Why not try his hand with some Sunnis, Shiites? No Druze, though, and definitely no Greek Orthodox or Syrian Orthodox for that matter. Melkites were all right, but no apostate Anglicans, no Protestants of any kind. And that was where the Chahars came in.

He asked a Lebanese family to take the young Muslim couple in. Farid was able to find the odd job here and there, but as he had explained to you, his family was going to be in trouble unless he found permanent work, which was difficult in Lebanon with so many other refugees. He would need to take his family abroad. He told you that the priest would help if they converted, that most countries in the West would move their application to the front of the line if they were Christian. Unlike Australia, most European countries were more discreet about their discrimination. Thankfully, his name wasn’t Mohammad or Ali. The priest wanted them to make a decision sooner rather than later, before their child arrived. All they needed to do was to take a few catechism classes and be baptized in a bathtub of some kind. Not as easy as converting to Islam but not that much of a problem since they did have the time. Oh, and they had to give up on the religion of their fathers and mothers, the one that had provided them comfort for all those years. For a better future, for their child, they were willing, Farid said. May God forgive them their betrayal. They were dunked.

You saw them again not too long ago in Gothenburg, where they had settled. Maysa’s son was now running around, and she was pregnant again, thirteen weeks. She enjoyed working part-time as a cook at a small café and day care center.

How was she adjusting, you asked. Quite well, it seemed. She and her husband had jobs they liked, they were learning Swedish, he had suddenly become quite fluent, whereas she still had a bit to go, and their son was their pride and joy. Was she having any kind of difficulty?

“My hair,” she said, “my hair. I didn’t have as much trouble as I thought I would when I removed the hijab, but no one told me how bad this cold weather is. Do you know what flyaway hair is? I certainly didn’t. And that’s different from the frizzy hair I get when it’s cold and humid. Now I spend most of my time worrying about how my hair looks. Do you know how many different kinds of hair care products there are? I can’t believe I’m spending money buying sprays and gels. We worried about our hair back in Syria, but this weather messes everything up. Don’t tell anyone that I went to the local mosque for the first time this week.”