In Search of Lost Education

The sound is the part Mariam Elias mentions most.

It was huge, she says, loud enough that all of Damascus heard it. A tower of smoke rose over the city, and her two young sons, riding with her through morning rush hour on the way to school, asked what it was. “I have no idea,” Mariam told them.

Later, Mariam and her husband, Bahij Dahdal, learned that two cars loaded with more than 2,000 pounds of explosives had detonated along a major highway. “There are some structures still standing, but there is no face to this anymore,” a BBC reporter said at the scene of the May 2012 blasts. “This is the most powerful explosion to rock Damascus, and I can say the whole area looks like a wasteland.”

The explosion was just a few miles off the route Mariam took from their home to the International School of Choueifat, where she taught and two of her sons were enrolled. At the school’s morning assembly, she learned that some of her sons’ classmates and their parents were among the dozens killed in the blasts.

“That was the first thing,” Mariam reflected. The first thing that made her realize—really realize—that she and her family were in danger in the war that would rock Syria for more than a decade. “I don’t think it’s safe anymore just to be outside. Even to be inside—you don’t know if your building is going to get targeted or not,” she said.

Mariam doesn’t remember exactly when the second thing happened, just that it was soon after the first.

Choueifat closed for a few days, then reopened, and despite their growing misgivings, Mariam and Bahij did what so many Syrian families had been doing in the months since civil war came to Damascus: They went on living. But as Mariam followed the highway home from the school one night, a group of armed men cut off the road, firing rifles into the air and threatening the commuters.

“The kids saw this,” Mariam said. “I pressed the gas, and I just fled.”

After that, Mariam and Bahij couldn’t live in denial any longer.

“We realized it’s just not a safe place for them,” Mariam told The Assembly in the upstairs of a quiet coffee shop in Wake Forest, where she and her family now live. “We’re at risk by simply just going to learn. As parents, we do not accept that.”

It was neither the first nor the last time that Mariam, Bahij, and their family would move in search of an education that would secure a better life, though it would, thankfully, be the most harrowing. 

The family is now settled in North Carolina, and a host of diplomas hang on their walls. Mariam completed her Ph.D. at North Carolina State University in December. Bahij is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, one son is an Elon University graduate serving on its board of trustees, and another is completing his senior year there, interspersed with international research trips. Two younger children are still in the early stages of their academic journeys.

“We believe that education is the most powerful tool that could help to rebuild our life and create better opportunities—not just for ourselves, but also for our children,” Mariam said.

Runs in the Family

Mariam’s faith in education began with her father, who spent more than 30 years in the field, first as a teacher, then as principal at an elementary school in Al Usulha, the small village in southern Syria where she was raised. His passion was contagious: out of his eight children, four have become teachers.

“He was always telling us that education is the perfect tool to fight in life, and no matter what, you have to get your degree because that’s going to be something to put into the future,” Mariam said.

Al Usulha had limited opportunities, so Mariam attended high school in the nearby Suwayda City, then moved to Damascus for college to study engineering drawing.

She met Bahij shortly after graduating.

He had grown up in Damascus—“a city boy,” Mariam said with a laugh—who studied for a career in hotel and tourism management at a local community college. But a chance meeting during an internship led Bahij to a job selling medical devices for Hewlett-Packard.

Bahij’s company shared an office with Mariam’s employer, her first job after college, and a conversation about Christmas blossomed into a mutual attraction as they uncovered their similar backgrounds. Both are Catholics from large families with roots in southern Syria. They were even reading the same book.

“We would ride together on the bus,” Bahij started.

“And have more conversation,” Mariam finished.

They married in 2000, when she was 21, and he was 27.

Their first son, Rafi, was born two years later, and their second, Rony, a year and a half after that. Hewlett-Packard’s medical division was purchased by Philips, and Bahij stayed with them. Mariam was taking time off from work when one of her sisters suggested she apply to teach math at her school.

She made the leap into the family profession before they welcomed a third son, Ramen, in 2009.

Starting Over

That was the situation when the war began.

The fighting started in Daraa, near Bahij’s familial home in southern Syria, and at first, he and Mariam were optimistic that it would end quickly.

But as the war inched north over 2011 and 2012, the Damascus suburbs, where both Bahij’s office and the International School of Choueifat were located, became conflict hotspots. Checkpoints made it impossible for Bahij to reach his office, and he worried the hospitals that were his clients, which were treating the wounded from all sides, made for easy targets. Whole neighborhoods nearby were razed, so he stayed home, sending emails whenever sporadic internet access allowed.

Home wasn’t entirely safe either.

Bahij and Mariam lived in Al Mazzeh, a western Damascus neighborhood with a reputation for supporting Syrian then-President Bashar al-Assad, which attracted violence. Their apartment complex wasn’t attacked, but one on the other side of a commercial highway from theirs was “impacted badly,” Mariam said. There were shootings at another building across from them. They began forbidding their sons from playing outside due to the risk of kidnappings.

“We had to move everything away from the windows because of the glass from the bombs and the shootings,” she said. “You feel like this kind of earthquake. The whole house shakes.”

On the day of the highway bombing that first forced them to acknowledge the danger, Bahij called Mariam.

“You remember, when you called me, you said, ‘Just making sure—’” Mariam began.

“‘Just making sure you come home today,’” Bahij finished. “I hugged them at the door. I don’t believe they are safe. Then we start to communicate we need to leave.”

The family emigrated in July 2012, two months after the bombing. 

They chose North Carolina because Bahij’s brother had settled in Durham after moving to the United States for a dentistry program years before. Still hopeful the war would end quickly, the family hoped to return to Syria. The couple explained the trip as a vacation to their children, a chance to run free outside away from the threat of violence—violence that Ramen, then a toddler, thought was coming whenever thunderstorms rolled by. They didn’t pack to stay for the long term.

“We’re at risk by simply just going to learn. As parents, we do not accept that.”

Mariam Elias

But things in Syria got worse. Al-Assad’s brother was targeted in a bombing that summer, and the family heard rumors, intermittent and contradictory, that both their school and Bahij’s office had been destroyed by shelling. So they decided to stay in the United States for their children’s sake.

“The main reason was to keep them safe,” Bahij started. “We’re not thinking at that time what the future is going to bring. Everybody thought it’s a temporary war and everybody’s going to go back home—”

“Your life is set up there,” Mariam continued.

“It’s not easy to adapt to a new job—” Bahij added.

“With three kids,” Mariam finished.

The Obama administration granted the family asylum later that year.

Life Lessons

“They were going to have to start all over,” said ​​Erin Kalbarczyk, a family friend. “The compelling thing about it was they were happy to do it. Here they were, totally uprooted with their children and having to start all over in terms of education so they can begin to make a living like the one they made back home.”

Once they decided to stay in North Carolina, Mariam and Bahij began planning for the future, which meant planning for education.

“We had to open a new page because you already closed the door behind you,” Bahij said.

Raleigh’s Millbrook Magnet Elementary School was the first stop. Rony was so used to his mother staying at Choueifat all day that he kept asking when she would come back to school with him. So Mariam volunteered in Rony’s class every day, and when a teacher went on maternity leave, she took a position as a long-term substitute.

“The pressure was on her huge because it’s impacted her,” Bahij said. “She used to be with them on a daily basis, guide them. Now she needs to do the same thing, but in a different language.”

The family moved to Raleigh, then Wake Forest, and a series of schools followed. Rafi moved on to middle school, while Rony switched to Wake Forest Elementary, then Wake Forest Charter School, then all three boys moved to Saint Raphael Catholic School before eventually settling at Cardinal Gibbons High School.

“It was always looking for better schools, better opportunities,” Mariam said.

“Here they were, totally uprooted with their children and having to start all over in terms of education so they can begin to make a living like the one they made back home.”

Erin Kalbarczyk, family friend

Being in the classroom again made her consider her own future. Bahij, who was working part-time at Food Lion, did the same. 

They both enrolled at Wake Tech in 2014 and met Kalbarczyk, who was then an academic advisor at the school.

At the time, the community college system wasn’t friendly to immigrants, Kalbarczyk said. She later learned that the first advisor Mariam and Bahij met with told them they didn’t belong. (Kalbarczyk said the treatment of immigrants has improved since then.)

Despite the obstacles, Bahij finished his associate’s degree before moving on to UNC-Chapel Hill for a bachelor’s in computer science, working a number of internships along the way, including one at UNC Health. When he saw a job posting for a technical consulting job at Philips, he applied—and mentioned his past with the company during the interview. 

“They were really, really surprised and impressed and said, ‘Oh, you still have that loyalty for this company?’” Bahij said.

Bahij was hired in 2021.

Mariam, meanwhile, had transferred to N.C. State in 2014 to study technology design and engineering, moving directly into a master’s degree while running the university’s makerspace, where students can access 3D printers, laser cutting, and other technologies.

“After I graduated and COVID hit, they said we need teachers to teach at N.C. State, but you have to have a Ph.D.,” Mariam said. 

The university offered funding, so she began teaching courses while pursuing her doctorate, which focused on education and learning in science, technology, engineering, and math. 

“I think what sets her apart is her perseverance,” said Aaron Clark, her dissertation committee chair. 

Mariam taught her own courses—something “pretty rare” in the program, Clark said—while joining a leadership program, a professorship preparation program, and an honors society, all while raising Rafi, Rony, Ramen, and Melina, the daughter Mariam and Bahij welcomed in 2019.

“She’s very intellectually curious and has an extremely high commitment to excellence,” Clark said. “So not only did she come and do that, she was probably always tops with everything that she did.”

“We had to open a new page because you already closed the door behind you.”

Bahij Dahdal

Mariam’s hooding ceremony was in December.

“Pursuing our degrees wasn’t about the degree; it was more proof that we could rise again,” Mariam said.

She and Bahij tried to mask the sleepless nights from their children, the stress of the precision in their schedules to ensure they could attend class, make dinner, get to work on time, and still ferry the kids to their many activities. But Mariam and Bahij also wanted to provide an example of how much education can do.

“I felt so encouraged to continue research because I’ve seen my parents value higher education,” Rony, 22, said. “It was very hard to deal with as a little kid, but I look back on it now, and I’m grateful.”

The Next Generation

Rafi, the eldest at 23, also seems to have taken the example to heart. 

He graduated from Elon’s accelerated dual degree program in business analytics in 2024, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in four years. Now a strategy analyst at the construction consulting and banking firm FMI, he also serves as a youth trustee on Elon’s governing board. A university press release noted that he “aspires to attend medical school, where he hopes to apply data-driven insights to improve patient outcomes and clinic operations.”

“Rafi Dahdal represents the very best of what an Elon education makes possible,” said Connie Book, Elon’s president. “He pursued with curiosity and passion the many opportunities that Elon provides its students.”

Rony has similar ambitions. When asked about his education, he seems to vibrate with enthusiasm for all the things he’s studying—and the many others he could add.

Rony is set to graduate from Elon in May with a triple major in computer science, mathematics, and philosophy, filling what time remains with multiple research projects. 

He got the bug after joining a National Science Foundation project aiming to mathematically model how human bodies respond to the virus that causes COVID-19. Most of the students who applied to join the project were juniors and seniors, said Hwayeon Ryu, the Elon professor who ran it. Rony had just finished his first year.

“I had some doubt about having a first-year student in my research group,” Ryu said. “But he showed high motivation and enthusiasm.”

That experience led to another project building an autonomous robotic arm to tend to crops. These two endeavors helped earn Rony the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship, awarded by the Goldwater Foundation, as a sophomore. As a junior, he received Elon’s $20,000 LUMEN Prize to support his attempt at using LiDAR, a kind of laser detection, to gather vital signs without physically touching a patient, which would be useful for long-term and continuous monitoring. Last summer, he received his own NSF funding to work at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, where he used AI to analyze breast cancer screenings to improve early detection.

“My plan is to earn my doctorate and continue doing research—research like this, finding a lab that works with data that is meaningful and produces solutions that are meaningful,” he said. He’s awaiting decisions on his Ph.D. applications.

Ramen, a junior at Cardinal Gibbons, is an avid soccer player, while Melina is an elementary school student at Raleigh’s Ravenscroft School, where Mariam teaches computer science and coaches robotics.

One Big Thread

There’s an irony in Mariam completing her educational journey, cementing her family’s success in North Carolina’s educational system, just as the programs they have relied on face upheaval.

As Rony prepared to leave for Sweden, the U.S. research community agonized over threatened cuts to funding, including at the NSF, though none of Rony’s projects were impacted. His early love for science was also fostered by a weekly computer science program for underrepresented minorities—the kind of diversity program Republicans have criticized.

In November, the White House removed protections for Syrian refugees, which would have forced many families to leave the country had a federal court not blocked the order. President Trump also paused consideration of all Syrian immigration cases and banned Syrians from traveling to the United States.

Mariam and Bahij are reluctant to wade into these political debates.

“It’s kind of beyond our scope to discuss,” Mariam said. “Because if you want to discuss something, you would need to have a good knowledge about everything that led to this, so I don’t think we are in a position to speak about those kinds of decisions.”

What they are sure about is that they are thrilled to be Americans today. The family became naturalized citizens in 2018, and despite the difficulties of immigration, adapting to a new language, and the stereotypes they’ve occasionally faced, Bahij and Mariam say they have nothing but gratitude for North Carolina and its universities—particularly Elon, which they credit with providing a launching pad for Rafi and Rony.

“It’s not about classes, it’s about relationships,” Mariam said. “It’s about navigating through the world—teaching them those skills.”

But Rony worries about the threats to higher education, calling research “one of the most fundamental human rights.”

“We have one thread that is linked back to people thousands of years ago, all humans working on this one big question of the place we live and the rules that it goes by,” he said.

Rony applied to domestic Ph.D. programs, but he’s added others in Europe in case funding dries up. His time in Sweden—which included a community of scholars from multiple countries in a single lab—also convinced him that research must be a global endeavor.

“My entire family, we’ve been pursuing education because we believe it leads to good change, to ourselves and to others,” he said. “I think limiting factors of research and immigration hinders the good that can be done.”

But if he has to leave the country to continue his journey, he has role models to follow.

“This work is also dedicated to those who have had to leave their homes and start anew, not by choice, but with courage and resilience in the face of uncertainty,” Mariam wrote in the dedication to her dissertation. “My journey began in a country far from here, and I was not only able to adapt, but also to contribute. It takes time, but we are all capable of it.”