“Come with me. My son is a butcher, he know people from police! We will take you to police-” the small elderly woman urged, tugging on my arm with her frail wrinkly knuckles. A bustling, sweat-drenched, crowd pushed and shoved through the streets of the enormous outdoor bazaar in Antakya, Turkey. I stood in front of her, bewildered but slowly recovering from my staggering breath, still shivering, despite the dense Mediterranean heat surrounding me. Her fingers loosened grip from my arm; she could feel my bones anxiously quiver through my warm skin. Carefully, she began leading me to another part of the town.
    

Just an hour before, I had been forlorn, searching for my sister, aunt, and mother in a completely foreign country, believing that I would never get back on the plane to the United States. Lost, I frantically walked through the entirety of the bazaar with no way of communicating with the strangers around me. Nearby, a woman veiled in midnight black from head to toe except for her eyes held in one hand, the hand of her son, dressed in ragged beige pajamas, and in the other, a bucket of change, pleading strangers for help. I could not translate anything she said into a language I understood, but abruptly, I felt the drought and desperation in her words, the dread in her eyes of another day with little to eat, but most of all, the yearning to return that night to a safe haven she could call home. Angry men yelled at her to get out of the way and then they yelled at me. She turned around and walked the opposite way. I wanted to give her everything I had, but I had nothing but an empty purse and the pink pajamas I was wearing.
    

I looked into the eyes of so many strangers in the light of the golden noon sun that afternoon, pleading for help- anything. A taxi cab. A map. Whatever it took. For an instant they looked like they wanted to help, but after a moment the language barrier rendered me helpless. I yelled into the streets calling for my family but they did not hear me.
   

  Soon I wandered into an emptier, dustier neighborhood with fewer vendors. I was halfway to the end, absorbed in my fearful thoughts when a low rumble drew up into a deafening crescendo- an accelerating vehicle- and I felt a rough tire touch the back of my leg. A reckless motorcyclist.
    

Panic turned into anger, then yelling at the man turned into running away. My hands and arms were dripping with the saline seas that were my eyes, but then I reached a more vibrant neighborhood. At the corner was the small elderly woman. I had remembered that my aunts and uncles had mentioned that this region had previously belonged to Syria and a few members of the older generations could speak Arabic. The woman looked up from her notebook, smiling with the creases of her eyes and lips.