Children leave a makeshift school at the end of lessons at a camp in the Bekaa. Photograph: Bilal Hussein/AP Feisal has saved his village, now transplanted, and watched it grow. But there is no pleasure or happiness in it, only despair and fear. Thirty children have been born since they arrived. He says it is very hard when children are born because of the extra costs. His youngest son, Mouyad, is 18 months old. Feisal worries that hell become homeless, an itinerant illegal labourer earning $2 a day.
He cannot afford to register Mouyad or any of his family as refugees with the Lebanese government a cost of $2,000 for his immediate family and so, Feisal, as an illegal refugee, rarely ventures away from the camp.
We sit here all day, Feisal says. We cant go out unless its a funeral or well be picked up by the Lebanese army. We go crazy.
Hes grateful to Lebanon for hosting them. But, he says, a life without working is nothing.
Theres always hope, Feisal says. If there wasnt hope wed be dead. But this is not a life here. At war you have only yourself to worry about. But here you have many people to worry about. Every day this is the war. Here, every day.
Feisal takes us for a tour of his camp. He wants to show us how they live. Down a muddy lane he takes us into a tent which inside, astonishingly, is revealed to be a school. A score of small children sit at low bench tables, listening attentively to their teacher, a young woman called Naja. The schoolroom is triumph of magical thinking: there are childrens pictures on the wall, some charts, a small bookcase with books. It is one of the most moving rooms in the world.
They learn English, mathematics, Arabic, geography and history, with 30 older children attending in the morning and 30 younger ones in the afternoon. I ask Naja what they thought on the day they left their village.
We didnt think, Naja says. We were terrified. We fled. Shells and missiles were hitting our village. We daydream about missiles. We cry. My heart starts burning when I think of this.
One small boy jumps over a table, pulls his jumper and shirt up, and turns his back to us to show us where shrapnel wounded him when he was three. His classmates shriek with laughter.
The children talk of their dreams. Winsam dreams of Syria. Hani wants to be a doctor. Daline wants to be a doctor. Kinana wants to teach Arabic. When I ask them why they would choose these jobs they all answer to help rebuild Syria.
We only teach them to keep hope alive, says Naja.
Feisal, until this point impassive and silent, standing back, mutters something.
I ask the translator what he said.
This is not a school, the translator says.
Its a beautiful school, I say. I dont think Ive ever seen a more beautiful school.
Feisal shakes his head, and for the first time I sense something other than pride and patience, the indomitable will of the survivor, the public stoicism of the headman. He seems angry, enraged in a quiet way. He points a Gauloise stub to the plastic lining flapping in and out in the winter winds and shakes his head.
He holds his smoking hand to the ceiling that might cave in tonight or tomorrow, to a world that might continue and shouldnt, that may or may not be here in a few hours, to a waking dream that is a living nightmare, and it is clear how much he hates it all, how he longs simply to wake up and once more see his peach trees in fruit. He mutters again, and the translator translates again.
Cant you see, this is not a school, Feisal is saying, the translator says, a little embarrassed. Look, he says, where is there a school? Its a joke.
<iframe class="fenced" srcdoc=" .break:before{content: ”;display: block;width: 140px;margin-top: 40px;height: 8px; background-color: #951c55;}p{margin: 0px;}”>Zaras black scarf wraps around her mournful face. She is 60 years old and demands I see inside her tent. Its eight in the morning, a blizzard has come and gone, not as snow as feared, but as sleet and rain and wind. Every tent has leaked. Inside is a dirty puddle, ankle deep, covering the entire floor. Her bedding sits on its side, wet, and, who knows in such weather, in a damp, leaking hovel, how long it will take to dry? Zara suffers from arthritis in her knees and has a chest infection. She has lived here for four years. She stares at me, her face a question to which I can make no answer.
Of what do you dream? I ask.
Zara starts coughing, a deep wet bark, and for a long time is unable to stop.
Of returning home to Syria, Zara says finally, when she has caught her breath. Of peace and of happiness.
<iframe class="fenced" srcdoc=" .break:before{content: ”;display: block;width: 140px;margin-top: 40px;height: 8px; background-color: #951c55;}p{margin: 0px;}”>Six-year-old Omar coughs again, and tells us he also collects plastic bags. One large garbage bag of compressed plastic bags is worth 80 cents, he says, enough to buy a pack of four flat breads.
Omar had lambs, sheep and chickens to play with at our home, his father, Hamidi, says. Any sort of food.
Hamidi, an illiterate farm labourer in his mid-50s, has a long face like a noble piece of beef jerky and the seeming tolerance of a man who can wait several lifetimes. His familys story unfolds in such a matter-of-fact and easy way that it is almost possible to miss the hopelessness of their world. Its early morning in the Bekaa and we are sitting in a freezing shanty clad in hessian potato sacks. In it live the 10-strong family of Hamidi and his wife, Kartana, who have fled the horrors of Aleppo.
As we talk, Omar sits on the floor drawing machine guns and grenades. Other than the pencils and paper we have brought, and his own glass jar with half a dozen marbles, Omar has no toys. He dreams of going back to the farm his father laboured on near Aleppo. He has bad dreams of people coming into their homes with guns. Most mornings Omar walks 2km to the vegetable store in the nearby town, collects food scraps off the floor, walks home, and the family boil up the scraps for lunch.
If you came to visit us in Syria we would have killed a lamb for you, Kartana says. Our life before the war was amazing.
We didnt know how to close a door, Hamidi says. We were blessed, our land was blessed.
We were safe, Kartana says. We had nine children. The best thing is safety, that when you sleep you sleep safely.
We opposed the regime in our head, Hamidi says. Ours was an opposition of the mind, not of weapons.
But eventually the weapons of others found them and they too had to flee. Hamidi was kidnapped, ransomed, given up as worthless, and only reunited with his family two years later.
The $5 aid for each person a week they now receive only runs to a maximum of five people a family. They are a family of 10 seeking to live on $100 a month or $10 each a month and whatever else they can scrounge.
I have to feed 10 people every day, Katana says. We live on bread, tea and bread.
A man warms himself by a bonfire at a Turkish border crossing gate. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images We all work in summer in the fields, Hamidi says, but now in the winter there is no work.
If there is not enough food, Kartana says, Hamidi and I dont eat.
What will you have for lunch? I ask.
We dont know, Kartana says.
The familys only other source of money during winter is what their nine-year-old son, Jamal, makes as a welder. Jamal works seven days a week, leaving at 8am and returning at 6pm, for which he earns $3 a day. His employer keeps back half his pay each week to make sure he returns to work.
If you dont have patience, Hamidi says, you dont have religion. The most important thing is our dignity. If we have that we can survive on bread and water.
But dignity is dissolving in the mud and sleet of the Bekaa valley, where kids run around barefoot, families starve to buy medicine and nine-year-olds work seven days a week in welding shops.
I am told how Nazir, their 13-year-old daughter in a pretty green dress, is about to be married off to her 14-year-old cousin. There is no one else of their tribe in the refugee camp they are in and Kartana feels their daughter isnt safe if left alone. And they cant feed her. Now someone else, she says, can provide for her and protect her. Its the best they can do for her, for themselves. Nazirs prospective husband works as a shepherd, sleeping with his flock. Their wedding will be a small celebration in the tent of potato sacks for an hour with perhaps 15 people.
We will make her hair look pretty, Kartana says.
In Syria it would be seven days of singing, dancing, eating, Hamidi says, holding his hands aloft as though an alternative wedding might still be found and caught falling from the sky above. All the tribe would come, he says. Six hundred people!
When I ask Nazir how she feels about her impending marriage, she smiles and looks down at the baby she is holding. Her gaze wanders to the damp floor mat. The baby coughs and coughs, and Nazir says nothing.
Sometimes a month passes and no one enters our tent, Hamidi says. But in Syria there are always people. My mother is still alive but sick in Syria. I would like to see her again. Thank God for everything.
Hamidi rarely leaves the tent of potato sacks. He doesnt like it outside. He has sat inside for two years. Waiting to return to his home in Syria.
Omar coughs deep and hard. The baby coughs. Kartana says Omar has bad dreams of being covered by an avalanche, a mountain of snow coming down from the ranges that wrap around them, burying them all forever. In his dream only he survives, without family.
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