SILVERADO CANYON – “Crazy.”

“Dangerous.”

“You’ll get killed.”

Her response?

Sama Wareh packed her knapsack and threw a farewell party for family and friends. She also wrote her will.

“I wanted to give them big hugs before I left,” says Wareh, 29, a Silverado Canyon artist known for wearing a cowboy hat and riding a Ninja motorcycle.

She knew she might get killed walking into a war zone alone. But she could think of no other way to help 135,000 Syrians who’ve fled civil war and now are struggling to survive winter in neighboring Turkey.

Take away the very real possibility of death or serious injury, and Wareh’s plan was simplicity itself: Fly to Turkey. Find refugees. Buy them food, blankets or shelter with the $8,000 she’d raised in Orange County.

And that was it. Until a few hours before her flight, when a family friend dropped off two suitcases of medicine to take, along with this message:

“Please, in Reyhanli, find the little boy with no leg. He’s seven. Find him, and tell him something for me.”

••

Last year, Wareh backpacked through South America. She almost died in a bus crash. She almost was raped. And she almost died in a landslide while hiking to Machu Picchu. But each time she survived, unscathed, with a newfound confidence in travel.

And in life.

“If you walk in love – of your surroundings and everyone you’re going to meet and everything you’re going to do – everything comes together,” she says. “I’m a firm believer in that. I guess that’s faith, right?”

This year she planned to hike through Nepal, Tibet and China.

She arranged to take off the month of November from her job at the Environmental Nature Center in Newport Beach, where she’s a traveling naturalist. She bought Asian travel books and told everyone she knew.

And then a cousin was killed in Syria.

“He wasn’t active in the revolution,” Wareh says. “It could’ve been as simple as posting something on Facebook. He was stabbed to death and left at his parents’ door.”

When she heard the news, Wareh fell to the ground and cried. That night, she listed her motorcycle for sale to buy plane tickets.

Not to Asia, but to the border of Syria.

•••

By day, she shows birds to schoolchildren. By night and on weekends, she’s a fearless artist.

Once, when her niece visited from England, they bought cheap clothes at a garage sale, spray-painted themselves copper and pretended to be statues on the Huntington Beach Pier. From there, they got called to a wedding reception where no one batted an eye at their get-ups.

That’s Wareh, they said.

“She has this spirit about her that is like one in a million,” says close friend Puneh Alai, 27, a law firm manager who lives in Newport Beach. “The first day I met her, I felt like I’d known her all my life, (maybe) even in a previous life.”

Wareh, born in Mission Viejo to parents from Syria, has closely watched the uprising that began in Syria in March 2011. She’s watched the death toll grow to more than 60,000 and the homeless reach 1 million.

A recent event in Orange County drew more than 1,000 Syrian Americans and raised tens of thousands of dollars for refugees – including $5,000 for one painting by Wareh.

Soon after, she emailed family and friends: “I know where I’m going.”

The State Department was warning Americans not to go to the border of Syria. She understood the danger.

“I know there are bombs,” she wrote in her email. “But I’m going anyway.”

Wareh landed in Turkey, with the two suitcases of medicine, $8,000 she could access via ATM, and little else.

She drank tea with a family who slept on carpets pulled from the trash. She hugged widows unable to buy their kids’ next meal.

“Did you fall out of the sky?” one asked after Wareh bought groceries.

“I am forever indebted to you,” one said after Wareh paid her family’s rent.

“This is from the American people,” Wareh replied, “and the Syrian community that cares for you.”

Her trip included a 16-hour bus ride to the Syrian border. A night spent shivering in the winter cold. And hours spent listening to gunfire, bombs, sirens.

She met a 15-year-old boy who stitched wounds at a refugee clinic because no one else could. And she met a truck driver who carried the body of his 7-year-old daughter across the border to bury her.

After buying milk for refugee camps, after buying space heaters for families and diapers for babies, she pulled into the border town of Reyhanli and went looking for someone.

••

It’s rare enough that a young woman might walk alone into a war zone to help strangers.

It’s rarer still when you know this:

For years, Americans of Syrian descent avoided organizations of any kind. They feared retribution against families in Syria from the Assad government’s lethal secret police. That changed in 2011, when Syrian troops began shooting civilians, according to Hussam Ayloush, chairman of the fast-growing Syrian American Council, a group that advocates for a free Syria.

At first, Orange County’s Syrian Americans were reluctant to raise their voices. A dozen people showed up at their first protest. Now thousands turn out at events. And many are returning, on their own, to help.

One Fountain Valley man, Omar Chamaa, has taken several trips to Syria with medical supplies. He’s now close to bringing the boy with no leg back to Southern California for medical attention.

“The boy needs to know we’re trying,” Chamaa told Wareh before she left. “Please find him.”

So on the ninth day of her trip, Wareh found the border town of Reyhanli, found the refugee clinic and found the boy whose leg was amputated after a bomb attack.

“The man who visited you last month wants you to know,” she told him, “that he’s coming back to help you.”

“I’m waiting,” the boy said.

“Some things take time,” she told him.

When you’re alone in a war zone with just a cowboy hat and a backpack, sometimes you bring blankets. Sometimes you bring medicine.

And sometimes you bring hope.

Contact Wareh at warehart.com

Contact the writer: 714-796-6979 or

Contact the writer: tberg@ocregister.com