We all want the best for our children
Dana's Story is a one shot webcomic illustrated by Rob Davis created by Positive Negativesnote in collaboration with the humanitarian agency and charity CARE International.
It tells the true story albeit with names changed of a family of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Syria focusing on the attempts of a widowed mother "Dana" trying to reach Vienna in Austria to reunite herself and her sons with her young daughter.
It is based on a real interview that CARE International conducted with one of the women they supported in Serbia. You can read the entire strip on the CARE International website at this link
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Dana's Story contains examples of:
- Bittersweet Ending: The comic ends with Dana and her sons safe in Serbia in a CARE International centre, but she still - as of the 2017 publishing of the comic - has not been reunited with her daughter or sister.
- Females Are More Innocent: The police in Macedonia arrest the group of refugees Dana and her son's are travelling with 7 times, she and her children are terrified but are mostly left alone with the other women and children but the adult men travelling with them are brutally beaten.
- Harmful to Minors: Dana's young sons for the most part seem fairly numb to the horrors going on around them, possibly because they are too young to understand. However when they reach a refugee camp in Greece one of her sons does notice the food they have access too is covered in flies.
- Human Resources: Dana has heard stories of traffickers killing children if their parents can pay the extortionate fees, then selling the children's organs. So she's understandably terrified when the Algerian Human Traffickers she's paid to smuggle her increase their fees and threaten her children.
- Human Traffickers: The Algerian smugglers Dana pays to smuggle her are ruthless and try to extort her for even more money once they reach Kosovo.
- The Illegal: Dana is so desperate to flee persecution in Syria - especially after her husband is murdered - that she sells all her jewellery and then flees the country under the cloak of night, she can't risk selling her flat as it would draw to much attention. Her daughter Basma is sent to Vienna to live with Dana's sister ahead of Dana fleeing so instead may be a legal immigrant.
- Islamic Dress: Dana always wears the a hijab veil but used to dress fairly casually in modern trousers and long sleeve shirts before the extremists came to her town and enforced stricter dress. When she briefly lifts her veil in a public market she is beaten.
- Police Brutality: Whilst the Macedonian Police leave Dana and her sons alone for the most part they beat the adult men in the group she's travelling with, scream that they are "filthy" and tell them to "go back where they came from".
- Roman à Clef: Dana's is not the real name of the interviewee this comic was based on, it was changed to protect her identity.
- Stay in the Kitchen: When the extremists take over the area of Syria that Dana lived in she loses her job as a primary school teacher when women are banned from working and girls are banned from school.
- War Refugees: The conflict Dana and her family are fleeing is the result of the ongoing Syrian civil war.
