My name is Mahmoud Aghiorly
and I am a volunteer translator with TED.
I am from Syria,
and I am from a city called Aleppo, located in the north.
This city is an ancient city, actually --
it's been there for 3,000 years.
But now, within four years, everything just vanished.
Most of my places, memories and buildings that I love
are destroyed.
They're just burned down, or bombed, just ruined.
These places are not there right now.
We will tell Adam so many stories,
but actually, it's very difficult for us that he can't live them.
And it touched me in my heart, actually, as a woman and as a mother ...
that my baby will not have the ability to visit ...
his father's place or his mother's place.
So, yeah.
Me and my brother are both civil engineers
and we were dreaming of having an engineering consultant office there
but the location of the proposed engineering office
was in a heated area,
so it was also mostly destroyed.
So I think even your imagined future
is destroyed or burned down.
I spent around five years in Kuwait,
then I emigrated to Australia here by 2015.
We came here on November 2nd, last year.
Everything was dark,
and when the sun rose, it was a new life.
Everything seems beautiful,
everything is green, so many flowers.
Nour AlHaj Yehia: We want Adam to live in a better world.
We want him to have a great life.
And I think that he was the main reason
why we took that emigration decision.
It was not an easy decision to take.
Moving to another country
that is totally different than what we're used to
is not that easy.
We are so happy right now,
and we know that we did the right thing
for us, and for Adam as well.
Mahmoud Aghiorly: Starting from February, till August,
I was searching every day and sending around 10 or 12 CVs.
Actually, the main advice was to change my name,
because "Mahmoud" sounds so traditional.
The second advice
was that they asked me to hide my place of birth
and the origin of my certificate.
They told me, "Don't mention anything about Syria."
I didn't choose the country that I was born in.
I didn't choose my name.
So people are judging me with things that I didn't choose.
I choose how I'm going to deal with the problems.
And having a proper channel of new ideas
is something very essential for people who are coming from war zones
and people who are coming from a lost past.
TED will provide you with the proper channel of so many ideas
from so many people around the world.
You can just directly relate to someone faced with the same problem,
directly relate to someone who just emigrated to another country,
you can directly relate to someone starting a new family,
someone facing problems.
Mahmoud has a great power of loving and giving.
And I think volunteering --
(Baby cries)
is a way of loving and giving.
Translating from a language to another language
is a great power.
Mahmoud Aghiorly Arabic TED Translator
Since 2009 474 translations