Firsthand: In April 2012, Abdulhadi Al Saadi (also known as Hadi), left his home country of Syria as the civil war in the country began to escalate.

In June 2023, he established Damascus Delights at Tampines MRT station, an eatery that serves authentic Syrian cuisine in the form of shawarma.

Previously, in the first part of our interview, he spoke about what life was like in Syria before the civil war, the brainwashing he experienced as a child in support of the country's dictator, and what he saw when the Syrian government decided to subject the city where the first protests broke out to a full-blown siege.

In the second portion of Mothership's three-part interview with Hadi, he shares with us the struggle to keep up with his education as he moved from Lebanon to Egypt to Malaysia, the emotional turmoil he experienced amidst the realisation that returning to his home and former life would no longer be possible, how it affected his mental health and his decision to eventually stop reading the news about what was happening in Syria.

From the moment he left Syria for Lebanon in 2012, things were "tough", Hadi said.

"I was crying every day," the 28-year-old told me when I asked him how he felt following the news about Syria.

"I was following (the news) heavily...because we want to know when (the conflict) stops so we can go back," he added.

"What happened? When can we come back? Did he (Syria's then-President Bashar Al-Assad) fall already? Did the president run away or something?" Hadi said.

More importantly, he wanted to know when he could resume his daily life.

In recounting the full emotional toll of being uprooted, Hadi said :

"I (wanted) to go back to my school, I missed my school so much. I was crying everyday because this is my life. This is where I was born and I have my friends, you know, my cousins, all these peopl...