Butterfly is the remarkable story of Olympic swimmer Yusra Mardini, who fled her home when war broke out in her native Syria. Halfway across the Aegean Sea, their crowded dinghy began to sink. Yusra and her sister took to the freezing water and guided the dinghy for several hours until they reached safety, saving the lives of the passengers aboard. Yusra was named the youngest ever UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and went on to compete in the 2016 and 2020 Olympics. Yusra’s awe-inspiring tale shows us that even when the odds are stacked against you, hope always wins.
Yusra Mardini’s life story is nothing short of extraordinary. At such a young age, she has already been through unimaginable hardships yet through all this she has managed to accomplish so much.
Her early life in the outskirts of Damascus was fairly normal, save for her being an exceptional swimmer. Then civil war begins – news reports gloss over what is happening so Yusra hears about the increasingly alarming events via rumours. Then the war reaches her home and her family is forced to move into central Damascus. She never returns home. As the war becomes more violent, Yusra and her older sister Sara decide to travel to Germany to pursue their swimming dreams. Their journey is covert and treacherous – first to Istanbul, then to the Turkish coast, across the sea in the infamous boat, then overland through mainland Europe, finally reaching Berlin. There, Yusra is able to train and to reach her dream of going to the Olympics.
Throughout Yusra’s book, there is almost an innocence to her own perception of herself. Each time she achieves something great, there is a brief reflection on it and then she is striving for her next goal. It’s almost as though she does not realise how extraordinary she is. But the pressure mounts – the more you achieve and the higher the standard of what you are achieving, the higher the expectation that you will keep on achieving at that rate. In her afterword, Yusra says that she felt that pressure between the 2016 and 2020 Olympic Games and it caused her to sink into depression. It cannot have helped that every time she speaks to a journalist they ask her about the boat, forcing her to relive that trauma again and again.
Yusra struggles to accept that she is a refugee. She initially sees the word as insulting and patronising and is hesitant to accept a place on the Refugee Olympic Team. After much reflection, she sees that she has a responsibility – and now a platform – to be a voice for refugees across the world.
Yusra’s message is that refugees are people just like everyone else. They all have lives, families, joys, difficulties, achievements. The ones who are able to flee from their homeland are the ones who are luckier and better off as the journey is dangerous and very expensive. But each and every one of them deserves to be respected and treated as a person with their own value.
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