BY MATT HAMILTON
ara Oudat doesn’t need to look far on most game days. There, in the front row, she’ll find her mother, Lama, and her sister, Lana. She’ll hear them, too, screaming louder than anyone else at the University of the District of Columbia women’s lacrosse games. Lama Oudat is still learning English, but she’s an
expert in the phrase, “Go Yara!” and once mastered, “Go Lana!”
“She finds me before I find her,” said Yara Oudat, a
21-year-old defender for the Firebirds. “She also takes pictures of me every single game. It’s embarrassing.” Lana Oudat, 24, remembers a time when her name was the subject of her mother’s chants. She was a midfielder for UDC before graduating last year. Unlike her sister, she found a way to enjoy the adulation. “You know how some people, they don’t want their mom to scream so loud?” she said. “I don’t care. I love it. I feel support because she’s always there for you.” Lama Oudat has been there every step of the way, but now
it’s a new world. She’s no longer driving her daughters to basketball practice like she did when they were younger. Now, lacrosse is what strings this family together. The Oudat family has been a mainstay in the UDC program for three seasons now. Win or lose — the Firebirds are 1-33 since debuting in 2014 — the Oudat family continues to take in the moment.
“Looking back at it, four years ago I would have never thought I’d be around these people doing this,” Yara Oudat said. “It makes me happy.”
It is hard to believe that just a few years — and some
5,800 miles — separate the Oudat family from a home under siege in Damascus, Syria. Now they call Washington, D.C., home. They live in a city far removed from their war-torn homeland, yet close in a geopolitical sense. Yara, Lana and Lama now find solace in a sport virtually unknown to their friends and family. It’s a new start for the Oudat family, just as it is for UDC coach Melynda Brown. “Two women can come from really tragic backgrounds,” Brown said. “And you would never know it unless you really got to know them.”
SAYING GOODBYE
From what Lana Oudat knew about America, it all seemed straight out of the movies. The technological advances, the beautiful landscape — it was so distant from what she knew in Syria.
The Syrian civil war started with unrest as part of the Arab Spring protests in 2011 and morphed into an armed rebellion in 2012. That’s when the sectarian violence hit home for the Oudat family.
34 LACROSSE MAGAZINE » June 2016
Lana Oudat (left) and her sister, Yara, were in the U.S. when a rocket blasted their home in Damascus, Syria, in November 2012. To maintain their visas, they enrolled at the University of the District of Columbia, where they discovered lacrosse.
The protests began on campus at the University of Damascus, where Lana Oudat was a student. Her friend, Kenan, was beaten and arrested. He shared on Facebook pictures of the bloody scars on his back. Yara and Lana Oudat weren’t allowed out of the house on Fridays. That’s when protestors gathered after services at local mosques in the town of Mazze, where their father, Bassel Oudat, lived. Sounds of bombs and gunshots filled the once-peaceful streets.
“Imagine being in your house and your building is literally just shaking,” Yara Oudat said. “You knew somebody was going to die on Friday.”
Fridays turned into weekends and weekends into entire weeks. There was no end to the violence between forces in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and those against his regime.
Bassel Oudat, a journalist at the Italian agency Adnkronos, had been critical of the al-Assad regime and the family feared retaliation. With violence increasing in both Mazze and Massou Doumar, where Lama Oudat lived, the family decided the girls and their mother would leave Syria for the U.S., where they could continue their education. “I wasn’t super sad,” Lana Oudat said. “I thought, ‘Maybe it is going to work out and we’ll go back.’ It wasn’t final.” One morning in July of 2012, they packed up and left. Lana Oudat said goodbye to a few of her basketball
A Publication of US Lacrosse
©BRIAN SCHNEIDER
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