A kiss to the forehead marked the culmination of years of work to get Shamikh Badra’s 79-year-old Palestinian mother, Fatma, to Australia.
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Shamikh Badra couldn’t hold the tears back when he got to hold his 79-year-old mother, Fatma, for the first time in 11 years.
Standing in the bustling arrivals hall at Sydney airport last Friday evening, as passengers streamed off a flight from Amman, Jordan via Singapore and were embraced by their families, he bent down to wrap his arms around her and planted a single kiss on her forehead.
Despite praying for the moment to come for weeks, months, years, Shamikh couldn’t let out a single word when it finally came around. “Today, after 11 long years, I finally held my mother in my arms again,” he later wrote on Facebook.
