Deborah Felmeth and her husband, Syrian native Mouawia Bouzo, have lived and worked almost equally in Damascus, Syria, and Waltham, Vt., over the past 34 years. This week Felmeth poured out a number of complex feelings and the situations from which they arose as she communicates with friends, acquaintances and average citizens caught up in the Syrian change of regime.

On Dec. 26 a friend in Damascus told me about life in the Syrian capital right now:

“We go to bed afraid, we wake up afraid, we work afraid, we don’t know what is going on, nor what will happen. You know those two nights, the 7th and the 8th of December, we heard gunfire all day and all night coming from everywhere and no one knew what was happening. My neighbor downstairs called me at 4 a.m. Saturday night and shouted, ‘The government has collapsed, Daesh are taking over.’ This is what she said. It had been, everyone knows this, only one week since the first move of Hayet Tahrir Al Sham, formerly known as Jabat Al Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate, to move from their hothouse of the last 10 years in Idlib toward Aleppo.”

Aleppo, city of textiles and stone, where Abraham milked his goats, where a thousand and one stories have been born and lived their crooked lives, told and retold each time with something added, something missing, in the cobbled streets and stone alleyways, those cool and inviting courtyards where love stories have never seen their end. We still live here. After Aleppo rolled over it was only a day until the obvious, and Hama was in the sights of this rebel band.

Hama, whose stone aqueducts, from the time the Romans occupied Syria 2,000 years ago, still transport water, distributing it to a wider area than the straightforward flow of the Orontes, or backward flowing river because it flows south to north, home to the memory of the 1982 massacre in which thousands died, as this freshly fallen dictatorship eliminated the possibility of Islamist extremism with a violence that shut the door on that philosophy with what they hoped was permanence. We still live here.

Onward the rebels moved to Homs, butt of a thousand jokes, home to a military college, administrative hub, shoddy sister to more beautiful Hama, critical cotter pin in the machine of the man behind the curtain. And nothing happened here either, no violence, no fight, no soldiers, no diplomatic movement, not from Syria, nor Russia, nor Iran, nor any of the Arab States, nothing save a few pickup trucks filled with bearded men with guns, growing in numbers, growing in their astonishment, growing the weight of a huge undertaking in the making in real time. Really quicktime. We still live here.

Damascus then. The fears reached a fever peak, for she is without peer, even Muhammad PBUH said as much, and she is home to those who ruled the country, for 54 years. Without a word he left. Without bloodshed the government collapsed. It is a miracle there was no battle. There are those who died, as revenge is being meted out, though the de facto ruler claims that justice will be meted out legally, with representation, for those who sided with and carried out the fallen regimes directives. It is too soon to tell. We are cautiously hopeful and we are afraid. Pray for us.

But I meant to tell you of Christmas in Damascus. Every year it is a more and more decorated and beautifully outrageous affair of light and music, sweets, pageants, services, bands, merriment in all of the warren of the old city where we live, our apartment having a biblical address on the Street Called Straight. On Christmas Eve a tall, beautifully decorated Christmas tree was burned in Hama, the first real sign of the fears realized. So the young people of the Christian quarter of Damascus made it their mission to patrol the streets of the old city, to restrict the traffic, to ensure the safety of this old Christian community. Our friend Fadia said she approached home on Christmas Eve in a taxicab with a great assortment of bags and boxes, far too much for one to carry, and found the street toward her apartment barricaded. Speaking to one of the young men, who recognized her, she pleaded to be allowed to drive to the apartment door and he let her, closing the barricade after she had gone through. Safely at home, with parcels and packages and all manner of Christmas delights in food and drink, safely at home she locked the downstairs door. There was still only one hour of electricity for every seven hours without. Barely enough to charge the phone, no internet. It is frustrating. There is much fear. There is much kindness. And no one knows what will happen.

This is it. No one knows. Pray for peace. Pray for the Israelis to return to the agreed upon borders and the buffer zone of 1973, leaving their newly grabbed land in the Golan Heights and the slopes of Mount Hebron to the Syrians who have lived peacefully there for millennia. Pray for the Kurds in northern Syria to be left alone by the Turkish government as they seek to administer their own region in Syria. Pray for the Americans to leave the gas and oil in the east of Syria for the Syrians who struggle to heat their homes this winter more than any before, worse even than under the dictatorship they have recently been liberated from. Pray for the Palestinians to be given full rights to live their lives in their homeland. Pray for all life. Then practice your prayers.