Methkal Khalawi (Homs, Syria, 1990) thinks he has to write an autobiography of his last fifteen years, and it would probably seem like a work of fiction. In 2011, with the Arab Spring, a civil war began in Syria between the regime of Bashar al-Assad and various armed groups among the civilian population. Khalawi was imprisoned by the Islamic State for two weeks, escaped, and managed to leave the country six months later. "I lived through very difficult situations, I spent days living on the street, without food; they shot at us; they told me they would cut my throat. Told like that it sounds like an adventure, but the memory is difficult," he confesses. Ten years later, he is now planning to return to Syria to visit his mother and all his family, with whom he has only spoken via WhatsApp since then. "I remember when I left, she didn't want to say goodbye to me, she covered her face with the sheet, I said 'goodbye' and left." He is now a different man. "I'll only go for a visit, now I'm Catalan!" he says, smiling with a hint of white teeth and in perfect Catalan. He is now the father of little Sama (Heaven, in Arabic), has a Catalan partner from Molins de Rei, and a project in hand: an exclusively Catalan social network, Xiuxiuejar.com. The son of a family with a nomadic tradition and thirteen siblings, Khalawi was a student of electronic engineering and English literature and worked in an oil extraction base when the war stopped his life. He managed to flee to Turkey, where he worked in a textile factory in Istanbul for 14 hours a day. From there he went to Greece, where he got stuck, working as a translator and for NGOs. His destiny was to resort to the mafias, with the aim of reaching Ireland, because he mastered English. But then he met a Catalan girl who was looking for testimonies from refugees. They were in contact for six months through Facebook. "We fell in love," he says, smiling again.