A 12-foot puppet on an international journey stopped in San Diego on Saturday. The puppet named Little Amal, meaning “hope” in Arabic, represents a 10-year-old girl who is a refugee from Syria.
“I think that she’s a symbol of resilience,” Vrisika Chauhan, a UC San Diego student, told NBC 7. “She represents the story of so many individuals in our country and stories that are not told.”
Chauhan has been studying Amal in her UCSD dance class. She explained that she was speechless when she saw the puppet in person.
“She, herself, represents us and people and community,” she said.
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Chauhan joined a few hundred other community members in San Ysidro to walk with Amal. The puppet has been to 13 countries and met more than 1 million people, according to her team.
“Greece, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium,” David Lan, one of Amal’s producers, told NBC 7. “And tomorrow, she will cross the border and spend three weeks traveling south through Mexico.”
Amal has been on the road since 2021, but her U.S. visit started in early September. She has gone to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville and many other cities.
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“I always thought maybe she would come to San Diego, and I thought, well maybe she would be downtown or Seaport Village or something like that,” Denise Lopez, a lifelong San Ysidro resident, told NBC 7. “But when I heard San Ysidro, I thought, ‘Woah! Look at us!'"
Lopez said she was familiar with Amal because of her adventures in other far-away places.
“It was like seeing an opportunity coming to a place where opportunities aren’t always there,” Lopez said. “It was like a door opening for the arts and theater to come to San Ysidro.”
Lan shared that one of the primary goals of bringing Amal to so many different cultures, places and environments is to bring awareness to the challenges refugees face.
“One of Amal’s talents is to give people courage, is to remind them that even though they’ve been supporting asylum seekers, migrants, refugees for years, there’s always more to do and there’s always more people to support you,” Lan said.
Amal planned to make several other stops on Saturday in San Diego including in Balboa Park and Mission Beach.
To learn more about Amal and her mission, click here.
