"President Assad is president forever. We believe in one Middle East.”

This phrase was repeated every morning by elementary to high school-age students across Syria to mark the start of a typical school day. Haya Ajjan, assistant professor of management information systems at Elon University, began school reciting this phrase and marching for Assad alongside her peers when she was 6 years old.

“I had to memorize [Assad’s] sayings and the religious book we had to study,” Ajjan said. “So I had to memorize religious phrases and his phrases and sometimes I would mix them up — which one is Assad and which one is God.”

During this time, Ajjan marched for Hafez al-Assad, the first of two Assads to rule Syria.

She couldn’t miss a letter when being quizzed on the pledge to Assad in school. She couldn’t talk about lions because “Assad” also means lion in Arabic. Any single instance of misspeaking  was taken as a slight on the regime, even from a young child. These restrictions were enforced everywhere, even by her parents at home.

When Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, Ajjan said she was surprised.

“When he died, I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, that’s impossible. How could he die?’” she said. “I had a struggle with myself because it’s been implanted in me since I was a child.”

Since then, the second Assad — Bashar al-Assad — has been dictator. Ajjan left to live in the United States at age 19, one year before the second regime, but she would never forget her childhood in Syria.

Remembering her home sentimentally 

Continuous demonstrations by opposition armies and protestors, chemical bombings and a public lineup of dead bodies define the conflict in Syria throughout the past few years. The death toll has surpassed 120,000 people. The number of displaced Syrians surpasses 2 million. Bashar al-Assad and his regime control the majority of the country and exercise their power by waging internal war. It is almost 2014, and mass murder is occurring on the other side of the world — the United Nations is at a loss as to how to put an end to a violent modern dictatorship.

Despite political turmoil, Ajjan knew a beautiful Syria, one so picturesque that she proudly shows photos to her son, Alexander, and says, “Look, it’s Syria.”

“Something I always dream about, and I remember all the time, is my grandmother’s house,” Ajjan said. “The house was in Damascus. When you walked in, there was a courtyard and a fountain and there were rooms around the courtyard. It was Spanish style … well actually, it was Damascene because the Spanish adopted [Damascene architectural styles].”

Ajjan said she remembers this image with vivid detail even today, through the eyes of a younger self.

“I’d see all of my uncles and aunts sitting around with my grandmother and everybody’s chatting,” she said. “You’d have 35 people there on an average day when it’s not a holiday or anything. Then you have kids of all ages — I always had my cousins to play with.”

Ajjan’s cousins have since spread out across the country. Some have come to the United States, but each family member experiences trauma alongside their Syrian countrymen fighting against an oppressive regime back in their once-beautiful birthplace.

The tranquil scene Ajjan described, however, is safe for her in the recesses of her mind’s eye. She’s in her own Syria — the one she shows to her son, the one where she spent summer days at her grandmother’s house.

“They had jasmine in the yard,” Ajjan said. “Damascene jasmine you don’t find here — it has a very strong fragrance. And then there was the fountain. They used to take watermelon and put it in the fountain to keep it cold over the summer. Everyone’s happy, everyone’s playing.”

The beloved house where her entire family gathered is no more. It was eventually knocked down and turned into an apartment complex.

Daring to be different

The house is not the only thing Ajjan would lose after coming to the United States. When she made the decision to leave Syria to pursue an education, her parents took her and her brother to an airport in London. Leaving Syria was one of the hardest decisions she would make, she said.

Ajjan didn’t catch any flak from her parents, but her female relatives didn’t let her leave without chiming in, she said.

“We needed a better education than what Syria could offer, but my relatives said, ‘You can get married and have a good husband,’” Ajjan said as she recalled traditional Damascene values. “I have cousins that got married at 18. You hit 20 and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, she’s never going to get married.’ Now when I say I have a doctorate, they’re like, ‘What do you mean?’”

Ajjan’s father, who advocated for opportunity over tradition, supported her decision to leave.

“When he let us go, I remember in the airport I looked back at him,” she said. “My mom was holding onto him, and he was crying. That was the last time I saw him.”

Ajjan’s father died during final exams in her first year of college.

Elon student Maria Brown*, Ajjan’s mentee and fellow Damascene, said she understands the struggle of leaving home for education.

“Syrian education does not raise leaders purposefully,” Brown said. “If you meet a lot of Syrian women especially, the education doesn’t raise leaders. We don’t learn how to speak in public, give presentations or present ourselves. I think Haya has been able to be a leader against all odds and not let her [past Syrian] education define her.”

Ajjan received her undergraduate degree, an MBA and her doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she lives with her husband, Mahdi Ajjan, and their 4-year-old son.

Mahdi is also from Syria, but the couple met in the United States. He came here more than a decade after Ajjan and it became a running joke, according to her, to decide which one of them was ‘more American.’

“You’re so Syrian,” she’d say to him.

She worked in information technology (IT) with Trans-America Insurance before coming into her current position at Elon. She said she is enthusiastic about teaching in a field she describes as dynamic.

“She commutes from Charlotte,” said Elon senior Kelly Smith, one of Ajjan’s advisees. “That’s a one-and-a-half-hour drive, three or four times a week. She’s definitely much different than professors my friends have at big schools. She really gave me the opportunity to think deeper about things.”

Combatting apathy, ignorance about crisis 

Although she said she enjoys the position she holds at Elon, Ajjan said there’s a place in her mind always processing the conflict in Syria. It is, after all, where most of her extended family lives.

“I have a cousin who actually fled the country because he was called for military service,” Ajjan said. “Mandatory military service means you have to hold a weapon, and if you’re asked to kill demonstrators, you have to. So he fled the country and now lives in Turkey.”

Ajjan said she sees the Facebook posts of her family and friends in Syria between the classes she teaches every day. She sees posts about children who have died and their families, then goes to teach another class.

“It’s strange — you immerse yourself in those stories and you feel like you’re with them,” Ajjan said. “It makes me cry, it makes me scream, I feel helpless and I turn around and I’m like, ‘I have to go teach my class now.’ It’s like living dual lives. What’s harder is you look at people here and you see that they don’t know anything about what’s happening.”

For this reason, Ajjan has spoken at multiple panels on the crisis in Syria and started the Speak Out for Syria (SOS) organization at Elon along with Brown. SOS is a small group of about 15 students, but Ajjan said she wants to build it into a campus-wide force.

To Ajjan, even these efforts are not enough. For Brown, though, it may be too much.

“She is against the president and the regime 100 percent,” Brown said. “My only issue with that is that I still have family in Syria and I go back to Syria. Haya doesn’t go to Syria anymore because if she does she’ll be captured for all of the things she’s been saying and doing. I need to be extra careful. That’s something that she and I had to work out with this group.”

Ajjan is constantly torn in half — her mind thinking freely in the United States, her heart with the people of Syria. She said she is dedicated to making both vital organs function in sync but must figure out how to help her home country in a limited window of action.

“My husband comes home, we talk about what happened in Syria that day, our frustrations and how the world just doesn’t care,” she said. “We eat dinner, put our son to sleep then we just sit and talk more about politics.”

Ajjan has done more than converse about the crisis in Syria. She embodies the empowering message of a philosophy many women in Syria can’t even imagine — the people who give up their power most easily are people who don’t think they have any.

“I wish I could go and do as much as she does for the Syrian people,” said Brown, who looks up to Ajjan as a role model. “She believes in that and she has a great drive for it. She wants to make a difference and I think she will.”

*Name has been changed for confidentiality purposes.