For most people, the first time they use a 3D printer is to create a simple object - a fridge magnet or a bookmark. Asem Hasna, then a 20-year-old Syrian refugee in Jordan, began with a prosthetic hand for a woman who lost hers in Syria's civil war.
Hasna had met the woman in 2014 in Zaatari, the refugee camp 65 kilometres north-east of Amman, the capital of Jordan. The young woman, who has requested anonymity, lost her right hand during an attack and was struggling to care for her two daughters. Hasna, now 23, had just joined Refugee Open Ware (ROW), an Amman-based organisation that taught refugees how to 3D-print affordable artificial limbs for amputees. ROW had employed someone to train staff, but he left a few days after Hasna joined and had not been replaced.
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Hasna knew nothing about 3D printers. "I was excited about helping all amputees, but this lady was one of the first people I met," he says. "Her husband was in Syria and she was struggling with daily tasks."
In November, Hasna began attending a 3D-printing course, but it was cancelled after only a few days. He asked if he could take a printer back to his apartment. There, using manuals and YouTube videos, he mastered the 3D printer, an Ultimaker, in three days. Hasna then downloaded a printable file for a hand, adjusted the measurements for the woman's arm and set the printer going. 3D printers work by melting plastic filament and laying down the material in thin layers through a nozzle, gradually building up the programmed 3D form. Hasna began by printing the palm of the hand. It would be 100mm long and made up of about 500 0.2mm-thick layers. Each layer took a few seconds. He watched the printer work until he fell asleep. "When I woke, there was this organic shape of the palm of the hand." He then printed the fingers and hinges. The whole hand took 13 hours.
In January 2015, Hasna travelled to the woman's home in Zaatari, where, a doctor fitted her with a new hand. "Many young Arab women feel ashamed of having artificial limbs," he says. "She was an exception, because she just wanted to be able to cook and to look after her children." The first thing she did was brush her daughter's hair.
In 2009, when Hasna was 15, he lived in Qatana, a Syrian garrison town of 30,000 people, 24 kilometres south-west of Damascus. The Hasnas were a respectable, middle-class family: his father worked as a translator for the Ministry of Defence, his mother as a pharmacist for the state chemist. They were comfortably off, although, like most people, they worried about Syria's economy. The state, with its infamous mukhabarat, or secret intelligence agency, was oppressive and the old, centralised state-heavy economy sluggish. Most young people Hasna knew dreamed of leaving the country.
He wasn't sure what he wanted to do until 2009, when a new teacher arrived at his school and introduced him to computers. "He used computers to show visually the relationships between abstract concepts and their applications for mathematics," Hasna says. He became hooked, and set his sights on a mathematics degree. He decorated his walls with pages of equations.
Two years later came the first protests against Bashar al-Assad's regime. "Young people really wanted to say something," he says. "They wanted to do something. Maybe, as young people, we were crazy, so we thought we could start this protest." But the protests soon turned into violent clashes with security forces. Four demonstrators were killed on March 18 in the city of Daraa, a month before Hasna's 17th birthday. Hasna went on marches, but was careful not to discuss it to avoid detection by government intelligence services. Some of his friends signed up as rebel soldiers. As the unrest intensified, he helped injured protesters as a paramedic at a clandestine clinic. "Being a soldier was not the best way I personally could help my people, my country," Hasna says. "I didn't want to kill anyone. I know that some people must be killed, but I wouldn't do it."
With the conflict growing more violent, he continued to work as a paramedic and enrolled as a maths undergraduate at Damascus University. In January 2013, Hasna was engaged to his high-school sweetheart, Marah. In Islam, couples take betrothal vows on their engagement and confirm the marriage with a ceremony later. In this case, events overtook the couple before a ceremony could be arranged. On Friday, February 8, Hasna and his father were in the local mosque when a neighbour rushed in. He told them that some mukhabarat officers and about 20 regular soldiers had just come to their house, which was 200 metres from the mosque. His father went to speak to them. Hasna watched through the mirrored-glass windows of the mosque as the soldiers and the mukhabarat filed into his family's home. About an hour later, they brought out his father, who had been beaten, and drove him to prison. Hasna has not seen him since. After taking his father, the mukhabarat began visiting the family home and relatives' houses looking for Hasna. Two weeks later, he escaped to Khan al-Shih, a rebel-controlled town about five kilometres from Qatana. There, Hasna began working full-time at a makeshift field hospital, which consisted of an operating theatre and four beds in an underground vegetable warehouse. There were bodies everywhere, he says, a permanent stench of sterilising fluid, and so much blood on the floor that orderlies worked constantly to keep it clean. Soon after he started, he says, a mother was brought in with her baby boy. They had been on a bus that was shot at by government soldiers; a bullet hit the woman in her side, passed through her body and hit the baby whom she had been holding. Both survived.
A few weeks later, a battle erupted in the neighbouring village. On the first day more than 100 casualties were brought in. Medics worked for three days without sleep. The hospital was politically neutral and treated civilians, opposition fighters and regime soldiers equally. Hasna performed first aid on three government soldiers. "Most of the severely injured died," he says. "Someone was shot in the head. What can you do? Nothing. You have to save the life of someone with a better chance of living."
On April 27, 2013, Hasna and another paramedic took an ambulance to retrieve battlefield casualties. He was helping two men when he spotted a government helicopter. It was co- ordinating with an artillery team to shell the ambulance, so he got the men in the car as fast as he could. As he slid into his seat, everything went black. "For the first 30 seconds, I couldn't hear or see anything," he says. As the dust settled, Hasna saw blood everywhere. Then he realised most of his left leg below the knee was missing.
He was saved by Manar, a nurse who had befriended him. When Manar heard the news, he sped out in a car to where Hasna, his colleague and the two casualties had managed to get clear of the burning ambulance. Manar raced them to hospital. Surgeons stopped the bleeding from Hasna's wound and arranged for him to travel 100 kilometres to the south to have his leg amputated.
For three days, Hasna travelled in a vegetable truck with 13 injured men, slipping in and out of consciousness. They travelled mostly at night through rebel-held territory. When they passed government bases, they were fired on. No one was hit, but two men later died from their injuries. When he reached Amman, Hasna was hallucinating. In lucid moments he worried about Marah and his mother, who were unaware of his fate.
Hasna had 12 operations in six weeks to amputate his lower leg. He obtained a SIM card, called his family and then passed the time by watching prosthetics videos on his phone. Soon, he realised what he wanted to do when he was discharged: help other amputees.
When he was discharged from hospital, Hasna moved into an apartment in Amman with a cousin. He spent the rest of 2013 in physiotherapy. At the start of 2014, Manar helped him secure a place for eight months as both patient and student on a US State Department project to supply prostheses, and to train 12 prosthetic technicians at a medical centre in Amman.
In the autumn, after he finished the course, he met Kilian Kleinschmidt, an outspoken German social entrepreneur who was then the UN's senior field co-ordinator in charge of the Zaatari camp. Noting Hasna's experience with the US State Department initiative, Kleinschmidt told him about a project he was working on with ROW. The Jordanian refugee project was a pilot scheme. With 3D printing, Kleinschmidt explained, refugees could produce whatever they needed. "Intelligence services and others from the government think 'My God, these are just refugees, so why should they be able to do 3D printing?" Kleinschmidt explained in a 2015 interview. "Why should they be working on robotics?' The idea is that if you're poor, it's all only about survival… That concept that you can connect a poor person with something from the 21st century is alien to even most aid agencies."
However, the Jordanian authorities only allowed ROW to have printers on site for a few weeks before bureaucratic issues and the concerns of various authorities forced them to withdraw. "One fear," says Hasna, "was that Syrians might start using the 3D printers to make weapons."
There were general security concerns in the area at the time, not helped by the fact that it is known as a centre for smuggling. For a time between 2016 and 2017, the importing of 3D printers was effectively banned throughout Jordan. ROW staff worked with the Jordanian authorities to help devise a safe, freer policy.
ROW eventually set up in Amman instead. It was there that, in January 2015, Hasna 3D-printed his first of many creations: the prosthetic hand. Soon, he was hacking the printer so it could print using new materials, and teaching others how to use it. "Walking into his home," recalls Dave Levin, ROW's co-founder and executive director, "you'd see a group of severely injured Syrian refugees hanging out around a shisha, with several Ultimaker 3D printers humming along." They helped refugees from all over northern Jordan to print prostheses that, while cruder than high-quality, factory-made versions, cost as little as ten per cent of the price, and were affordable in the camps.
Hasna learned how to use 3D scanners that allowed him to scan and then print prostheses and replacement parts. He was able to print a replacement part for his prosthesis - a flexible component called the heel pump - for 80p. "It is difficult to print materials strong enough to fully support an adult's body's weight," Hasna says. "However, small replacement parts such as this are very important. If you walk with a comfortable prosthesis, you will fall in love with it, and you will not be shy about showing it."
After noticing that many of the refugees, particularly young women, experienced crippling shame about wearing replacement limbs, Hasna began experimenting with different designs. "In our culture, unlike in Europe, people don't really accept these things," he explains. "Very few doctors or clinics focus on this psychological element." For a six-year-old Yemeni boy who had lost part of his hand, he made, for about £60, a black prostheses inspired by the animated hero from the TV series Ben 10. It came complete with a decal, an embedded computer showing a video of characters from the show, and a detail based on the Omnitrix, a watch-like device that allows Ben 10 to transform into ten aliens. The child, who was being treated by Medécins Sans Frontières, was delighted.
In the spring, a new team member introduced Hasna to the Arduino open-source electronic prototype platform. Hasna used it with cheap sensors to make a £25 echolocation device for a friend blinded by sniper bullets. When worn on the wrist, the device vibrates to indicate the proximity of objects such as walls and steps. "It was exciting to be a producer of technology instead of just being a consumer," Hasna says. "To know the magic ways through which you can write code to help people. When we started doing this, I began to realise that we can use technology to solve humanitarian suffering."
As 2015 progressed, ROW began working with the Royal Rehabilitation Centre in Amman, which is part of the Jordan Royal Medical Services. It is also the biggest prosthetics centre in the country. ROW moved the printers there, and Hasna began training their prosthetists and technicians in 3D printing. Its success with training and innovation with cheap prosthetics attracted the approving attention of government officials and the Jordanian Royal Family. According to Hasna, King Abdullah II is believed to have taken a personal interest in 3D printers, and he donated two of them to a fabrication laboratory that ROW was helping to build in Amman. Hasna also personally met and talked to Queen Rania when she paid a visit to ROW's offices, and took an interest in his work.
Hasna, however, could work only voluntarily for ROW. As a Syrian, in order to be employed legally he required an official Jordanian work permit. The exceptionally high demand for them meant that they were virtually impossible to obtain. He felt that he had little choice but to leave Jordan, and in the autumn of 2015, Hasna and 11 others - four friends and eight relatives - decided to seek asylum in Germany.
Hasna's plan was to head for Berlin. His father, who had been released from prison in August 2013, had arranged a passport for him. Due to postage regulations, the passport had to be couriered from Syria to Lebanon, from there to the United Arab Emirates and, finally, to Amman, taking two months to reach Hasna. Even when he eventually had a passport, he says, he could leave Jordan only after signing a document that an official had - unofficially - amended so that it waived his right to return. Manar, who was by now in Turkey, knew a go-between who could fix a passage with smugglers to Europe from the port of Izmir. They flew from Amman to Istanbul, then took another flight to Izmir, where hundreds of Syrians packed cafés, seeking contacts, names and possibilities. "We met our guy in a café," Hasna says. "He was 18 years old. The Turkish mafia runs everything and he was the interface. He met us because he spoke Arabic. He told us the price, date and where to meet. We didn't see him again."
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Hasna's group went to the location and paid £900 each to another man. "They make more than £40,000 per boat," Hasna says. "He gives you a QR code. When you reach Greece, you send a photo of the code to confirm your arrival. Then the third-party guy releases the money to the guys with the boat, so if you don't arrive, they don't get paid."
Two days after arriving in Izmir, they went to the harbour at midnight, as arranged. Their rigid inflatable boat was being fixed, guarded by armed men. "They seemed relaxed," Hasna recalls. "The police could have arrested everyone but I don't think they felt threatened." When asked if he believes the Turkish mafia is in cahoots with the government, Hasna agrees.
Hasna, who cannot swim, had never been at sea before. There were no lifejackets, and they travelled in darkness. "We didn't see another boat," he says. The crossing to Lesbos took three-and-a-half hours. They stayed for two days in a house arranged by a Greek ROW member, who also obtained permits allowing them to leave. Then they sailed to Athens and travelled by bus with 40 illegal immigrants to Macedonia and from there to Serbia, Croatia, Hungary and Austria. The nine-day journey was surprisingly easy. "I was afraid," Hasna says. "I'd seen footage of Hungarian police dealing [harshly] with refugees. But they helped us cross. It was obvious that Eastern European countries wanted to fuck rich European countries [by letting refugees cross into them]."
They were held in an Austrian reception camp and then taken to the town of Braunau am Inn. After being held at the border for a few hours before crossing the River Inn to Germany, they were taken to another camp. There they headed for Berlin, where a friend of ROW was working with refugees. His relatives went to Norway. In October 2015, Hasna and four friends arrived in Berlin and applied for asylum.
One morning in February 2017, in a workshop at Cisco's openBerlin Innovation Center in Berlin, Hasna sits watching as two 16-year-old Syrian refugees, Zaid and Hassan, learn to 3D-print a battery case for robots. Bespectacled and bearded, Hasna is charismatic and smiles a lot. Clad in jeans, a black sweatshirt and sneakers, he walks with a slight roll on his left hip. He cheerfully rolls up his jeans to show his steel and carbon-fibre prosthesis when he talks about it. "In summer I like to wear shorts, and show this metal part of my body," he explains.
The boys frown in concentration, snip wires and sigh as they accidentally drop tiny screws. When Hasna goes to get some equipment, I ask if it helps being taught by someone from their country. "It's not that. There are just good and bad teachers. Asem is a good teacher," Hassan says. "I spend 90 per cent of my time here," Hasna says of the converted warehouse with its industrial-chic demonstration areas, workshops, co-working desks and leisure spaces. "I work every day for eight hours, and I come most weekends. I can work better here, because at the centre I share a dormitory with four other guys."
By the centre, Hasna means the refugee centre in north Berlin, where he lives. He was granted asylum in November 2016. Until then, his employment opportunities were restricted by German law, which gives German and EU citizens priority over job applications. In spite of these obstacles, Hasna is now becoming known for his work with refugees. He teaches robotics at Berlin's ReDI School of Digital Integration, a non-profit for refugees, and interns with Cisco, where he comes in on some weekends for hackathons and his personal tutoring. He remains a part of ROW, still advising it, and helping to develop a syllabus for teaching 3D printing in Jordan. He has given a talk at TEDx Berlin and met Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg when she visited Berlin in January.
Hasna with the 3D printers stored on the top floor of Cisco's openBerlin Innovation Center, where refugees can attend 3D-printing workshops and tutorials
"It was easy to identify Asem as one of the stars of our sessions with ReDI School," says André Diener, technical leader of Cisco's openBerlin Innovation Center and Hasna's mentor. Levin agrees. "He is brilliant, genuine and very humble, and we hope he'll always be a part of the organisation," he says. "Our idea is to find 100 Asems, and to empower them to lead change in their communities. The brightest and the best are ours to lose; the consequences of not supporting them are frightening." Levin regularly receives texts from Hasna with pictures of code he's been writing. Hasna told him that one day he'll go back to Syria and use similar code to help build infrastructure for the internet of things. To this end, in January 2017 ROW opened a fabrication laboratory and training centre in the city of Irbid, 30 kilometres from the Zaatari camp.
Hasna's family remain in Qatana. He hasn't seen them for four years. His father was fired from his job and his records "lost", meaning he can't officially work or travel. Of his 20 closest childhood friends, two are still alive. Manar now lives in France. When he talks about his home and family, Hasna flits between sadness and concern. "Now I'm in Germany, my life is perfect compared to other people," he says. "But I am not happy, because I can't imagine how I will ever go back to my country. The long-term effect of the Syrian war is much bigger and more severe than we think. The kids who were born during this war, how will their lives be? There is something broken in the heart of every Syrian."
He tells me a story about a friend who was recently killed in Khan al-Shih, two weeks after the birth of his first son. The friend had three brothers and two sisters. One brother was killed a year ago; a second has been held by the government for three years; the third brother and his two sisters are in Germany. His mother was arrested and held for almost a year. When she was freed, she discovered that two of her sons had been killed. "How can I describe this kind of suffering?" Hasna asks. "When I compare my suffering with my friend's mother, I feel guilty. Why does she have to suffer this much? She really wants to die, to just leave this life, because every single day, she…" he trails off.
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In the Innovation Center, winter dusk gathers outside the windows. Zaid and Hassan focus on the printer as it whirrs in the background. Zaid is studious. Hassan is more of a hipster, with a blond-streaked quiff and sweatshirt bearing the words "Light It Up". There's a sense of avuncular authority about Hasna as he sits instructing them, their Arabic punctuated with universal tech-speranto - silicon, Arduino, MakerBot. It's odd to consider that some people are hostile towards refugees such as Hasna and his pupils. "This is the easiest reaction," he says. "It's easy for some local people to say foreigners are shit, and it's very easy for foreigners to respond to that by attacking this country. The hardest way, the longer way, is to be good and to prove to everyone that I can help people and add value to this country. In ten years' time, I can maybe pay back this country. It helped me when all the Arab countries didn't. Not everyone can think like this, but it's how I see it."
The printer stops and the boys finish their jobs. We watch as the robots - hand-sized plastic chassis with motors, proximity sensors and 3D-printed components - scoot around avoiding obstacles. "Every time I print something, I feel really good," Hasna says. He still remembers his first 3D-printed creation. The emotional rush he felt when he made that hand will always be with him.
Richard Benson is a London-based author, journalist and critic. He wrote about The LADbible in issue 09.16
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
