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This Refugee Is 3D-Printing Lost Limbs for Syrian War Survivors - VICE

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This Refugee Is 3D-Printing Lost Limbs for Syrian War Survivors - VICE

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As a teenager, Ibrahim Mohammad helped distribute food and clothing in the early years of Syria's war to refugees in the Bekaa Valley, a region in Lebanon that now holds over 360,000 refugees. Many were missing legs due to bombings, rockets, and artillery fire; many more were missing arms. The camp's inhabitants had access to few basic resources-let alone prosthetic limbs, or advanced technology that could mitigate their suffering.

While doling out rice to refugees, Mohammad could see firsthand how bad their living conditions were, and he could also relate to their feelings of hopelessness. A refugee from the Palestinian village of Beit' Anan, he grew up in a camp just outside Beirut. Electricity was largely unavailable-when he wanted to read after dark, he'd stand beneath a streetlight-as was fresh water.

Today, Mohammad studies mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester and works in a lab researching large-scale energy grid solutions. The opportunity came through AMIDEAST, an American nonprofit that works to help refugees and other youth from the Middle East obtain US scholarships and take part in cultural exchange.

The organization is one of many that could now face significant challenges in light of President Trump's executive order to temporarily suspend entry for all refugees and individuals from seven Muslim countries. Following a federal appeals court ruling that blocked key parts of the ban, Trump has said he is considering measures to restore it, including drafting a "brand new" order.

After the initial cost of the printer-approximately $1,300-each hand costs just $50 to produce. Not only are they inexpensive, but recyclable and environmentally friendly.

The chance to study at a Research 1 university equipped Mohammad with the resources needed to match previously unavailable technologies with humanitarian aid. As a refugee, his own experience has given him a keen awareness of the level of need and suffering in the camps, as well as a drive to help meet and alleviate it.

Palestinian refugees comprise approximately ten percent of Lebanon's population, yet they are officially without citizenship. "Palestine sees me as Lebanese and Lebanon sees me as Palestinian," Mohammad said when we first spoke in July, "which I guess means I'm stateless." They have virtually no political or social rights, and little economic opportunity-there's a 90-percent unemployment rate in the camps, and refugees are banned from over 20 professions, including law, medicine, and journalism. As a refugee, Mohammad was expected to sell drugs, join a militia, end up in jail. Sometimes, while helping his father sell orange juice from a street cart, he was harassed by the police. They'd try and take his daily earnings, as selling juice in the street is technically "illegal." He was once fined $100; at the hearing he asked the judge, "Would you rather I steal instead? I'm trying to earn an honest living, and you're punishing me." That time, the judge ruled him not guilty-but over the years, he and his father incurred over $1,000 in fines for similar charges.

Mohammad kept hoping that someone would come along to make life better for him and others in the camp, but no one ever came. Rather than let anger consume him, he decided that even if bigotry towards refugees existed, he wouldn't let it exist in his mind. He refused to believe that he was less than anyone, and that mentality sometimes helped to change the attitudes of those around him who thought otherwise. While working as a mechanic, he'd say good morning to a Lebanese client who came in daily; every morning, the client responded by spitting at him. He kept saying it, though, day after day. After a month, the client stopped spitting. And after six weeks, the client said good morning back.

During his junior year, advisors from AMIDEAST visited his UNRWA-run high school. Mohammad filled out an application for their Hope Fund program, which specifically secures US scholarships and cultural exchange opportunities for Palestinian refugees from camps scattered throughout the Middle East. That summer, while out buying cups for his father's juice cart, he got a call from AMIDEAST's educational advisors requesting an interview.

Mohammad initially assumed his father would say no-Mohammad was helping to support their family, so they'd need him to stay in Lebanon-but instead, he skipped work to take him to the appointment. With this new, tangible opportunity in sight, he decided that he would become the person who never came to help him.

Nancy Qubain, one of the founders of the Hope Fund, suggested that he consider the University of Rochester. He went to the school's website and was confounded by the pictures of students throwing water balloons at one another. It all felt too good to be true-almost artificial. "You don't see people throwing things at each other and being happy about it in the camp where I grew up," Mohammad said. He kept browsing the site and learned about their energetics lab's omega laser, the strongest in the US after Berkeley's. He was inspired by the school's motto, Meliora, which translates from Latin to "ever better." As someone who was personally invested in improving the way people live, it spoke to him.

Mohammad had never been outside Lebanon when he arrived for his freshman year. Things in the States seemed incredibly hectic to him: his peers had different backgrounds, and he was reluctant to share a lot about his own. "It's hard to connect with someone who's never had to worry about being able to afford food, or whose parents came to help them set up their dorm room, or who doesn't have to work and still gets an allowance." But as he began to open up and make friends, he realized they didn't need to be from similar backgrounds to connect.

Mohammad was at work in the lab at Rochester when we last spoke in early January, despite the fact that it was winter break. He'd just come from the gym and was wearing a black sleeveless shirt, his shoulder-length dark hair pulled back in a bun. Now a senior, he took a class in his sophomore year with Douglas Kelley, a professor who specializes in fluid dynamics; he taught Mohammad the implications of liquid metal batteries. "They have enough capacity and enough electricity to power a city," he told me. "They can play a huge role in making renewable energy more efficient."

Mohammad also met Omar Soufan during his sophomore year while working on a water-related project in the Dominican Republic with Engineers Without Borders. Soufan grew up on the outskirts of Damascus; his family is still in Syria despite the fact that so many others around them have fled. They were both engineering majors, and both committed to putting the skills and resources they were gaining at school towards aid work. Recalling the suffering he'd witnessed while volunteering in the Bekaa Valley, he wanted to do something to help Syrian refugees in that region who'd been mutilated by the war.

Seeing so many of his friends get killed or end up in prison has pushed him to do as much as he can as soon as possible. "When you give someone like me an opportunity to study at a university in the US," he said, "you shouldn't expect anything less."

They contacted Soufan's uncle at the Syrian-American Medical Society, who connected them with the Syrian Medical Relief Office (SMRO) in Majdal Anjar, a village in the Bekaa located along the road that links Beirut and Damascus. They then spoke with SMRO's coordinators and asked what their facility needed most urgently.

While SMRO's facility had ample leg prosthetics for amputees, the clinic lacked upper limb prosthetics, which, as Ibrahim came to learn, can be much more complicated to produce. "With legs, you basically need something to stand on," Mohammad said. "But with arms you need hands, ones that match, and that allow you to at least grip." The problem was the price: Prosthetic arms cost a few thousand dollars a piece, and given the number of amputees, many of whom were children who would outgrow their prosthetics, such a high cost was infeasible.

Mohammad spoke with Professor Kelley about this dilemma. Through his cycling club, Kelley had met a professor at RIT named John Schull who researches 3D-printed prosthetics and participates in e-NABLE, a global network that provides free, open source designs for printable prosthetic hands and arms. e-NABLE's technology involves 3D-printed lower arms made out of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic that use a tension mechanism in order to clamp the hands on and off. After the initial cost of the printer-approximately $1,300-each hand costs just $50 to produce. Not only are they inexpensive, but recyclable and environmentally friendly.

After connecting with Professor Schull, Mohammad and Soufan set out with the goal of transferring e-NABLE's remarkable technology to the clinic in Majdal Anjar. They also solicited the help of 3D LifePrints, a UK-based company that helps amputees in developing countries obtain 3D-printed lower arm and hand prosthetics, and that prints from flexible rather than hard plastic, meaning you don't need multiple parts to each hand. The material that the palm is made out of is flexible filament-"flexi-fil"-which can bend and stretch.

After they first contacted SMRO, Soufan and Mohammad raised $7,000 to purchase rehabilitation equipment for the facility. Last summer they established Prosthesis for New Syria, with the goal of raising enough funds to purchase two to three 3D printers and enough flexi-fil. They'd like to set up the printers in SMRO's facility, and then gather a sample of patients in need of lower arm prosthetics. So far they've raised $4,300, and have purchased a 3D scanner.

Eventually they'd like to make the entire process self-sustainable. Rather than asking a doctor to apply the prosthetic limb, they would 3D-scan and print the prosthetic, mold and print a socket for the limb using 3D-molding software, place the socket on the cut, and place a printed hand on the socket. Since many amputees can't afford to travel to the clinic, and since the idea of setting up a fixed facility in such a volatile, dangerous region seems unsustainable (at any moment it could be robbed or destroyed), making the process self-sustainable could allow for a mobile facility. They'd ideally place all of the necessary technology in a van-the 3D scanner, the printer, and a computer-and travel to each patient.

For Mohammad, one of the most valuable resources in life is time. He's comforted by the fact that no matter how rich you are you can't buy more of it: He has the same number of hours in a day as anyone. Seeing so many of his friends get killed or end up in prison-and knowing these are fates he may've narrowly escaped-has pushed him to do as much as he can as soon as possible. "When you give someone like me an opportunity to study at a university in the US," he said, "you shouldn't expect anything less."

Mohammad eventually wants to visit camps around the world-in Haiti, Kenya, others in Lebanon besides the one he grew up in, where his family still lives. He wants to meet refugees from different backgrounds, and use the tools he's gained at Rochester to help increase their access to electricity and other resources. He wants to watch a child regain the ability to catch a ball, and eventually, regain potential for a job that requires the use of hands. He wants to know that opportunities like the one he was afforded will continue to exist for refugees like himself, who had little hope for a future ahead and who now have the resources to help those still suffering.

He wants other refugees to know his story, that even though he grew up in a camp, he had the chance to achieve something he's proud of. He graduates this May. And while the current landscape for refugees in the US is especially bleak, he wants his trajectory to remain an attainable possibility. "The best thing you can give someone," Mohammad said, "is hope."

Follow Zaina Arafat on Twitter.

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This Refugee Is 3D-Printing Lost Limbs for Syrian War Survivors

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As a teenager, Ibrahim Mohammad helped distribute food and clothing in the early years of Syria's war to refugees in the Bekaa Valley, a region in Lebanon that now holds over 360,000 refugees.

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The remarkable way 3D printers are saving lives in refugee camps

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The remarkable way 3D printers are saving lives in refugee camps

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The remarkable way 3D printers are saving lives in refugee camps

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Refugee camps are usually seen as scenes of crisis. But one startup wants to change that.

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Refugee Open Ware Wants MakerSpaces and 3D Printing to Help the Syrian Refugee Crisis | 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing

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Refugee Open Ware Wants MakerSpaces and 3D Printing to Help the Syrian Refugee Crisis | 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing

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3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing

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Regardless of the political rhetoric and bickering over how to respond to it, there is an undeniable crisis in Syria that only seems to be getting worse. As the civil war continues, and with Russian bombs dropping, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians continue to pour out of a nation torn apart by civil war and into often less than hospitable neighboring countries and the uncertainty of refugee camps. Conditions in the camps are, to put it lightly, less than ideal. The lack of fresh water and food is a constant struggle, while overcrowding often leaves many families, including their children, lacking even the barest of shelter or accommodations.

With 800,000 refugees, Jordan is one of the countries that has been hit hardest by the massive exodus of refugees from Syria. Refugee Open Ware (ROW) is a Jordanian startup that is hoping the principles of makerspaces can help alleviate the strain, improve conditions in refugee camps all over the world and give refugees valuable skills that they can take back with them when they are eventually able to return home. The concept is to bring popup FabLabs to active war and refugee zones and teach locals to 'hack' what supplies and materials they have on hand and turn them into the materials and tools that they need.

The startup was launched last year and has grown into a virtual consortium of like-minded individuals, companies and corporations who are pitching in together to help. Everyone from the FabFoundation to Ultimaker to ColorFabb to dozens of humanitarian organizations and even Jordan's leadership the Royal Hashemite Court have come together - all in service of helping ROW's founders Dave Levin and Loay Malahmeh build their first Innovation Center in Jordan's capital city, Amman.

"Much of what we're doing is trying to disrupt the whole nature of humanitarian relief, of civil defense, perhaps of warfare itself. The whole idea with the democratization of production, which is the main characteristic of the next industrial revolution, is that anyone can get access to these advanced manufacturing tools," Levin told Popular Science.

The 500-square-meter innovation center will eventually become FabLab Amman, and be a community space with the tools and supplies to help anyone make their own technology, and create solutions to unique problems found in war zones and refugee camps. The Amman innovation center is currently open to anyone and has already been used by refugees, educators, students and entrepreneurs alike. The eventual goal of the innovation center is to act as a model that can be cheaply and quickly put in place in other areas, and Levin and Malahmeh have already started working on two new locations. They are opening a second location in Amman and another in the northern city of Irbid near the Zaatari refugee camp, currently hosting between 80,000 and 100,000 refugees. They also want to open up a FabLab inside of the Zaatari camp itself, but are currently working out the details with the Jordanian government.

The FabLabs will be fully stocked with a wide rage of equipment, including everything from basic tools to 3D printers, soldering irons, inexpensive electronic components and computers. The hope is that they can help solve many problems experienced at the camps, such as repairing damaged tools and components, printing replacement parts and even new tools for tasks that they didn't even know they needed. But it can also teach the refugees the skills to open up their own FabLabs and deal with the realities of (hopefully) returning to a home that was turned into a war zone. Obviously tools and equipment will be in short supply, so reusing or repurposing what is available will be a necessity, and the makerspaces can help with the process of cleaning up and rebuilding their homes and lives.

Naturally the problem of unexploded ordnance is going to be an issue in Syria for years to come, and a makerspace is an ideal location to workshop and build solutions. Locals can 3D print inexpensive replicas of the unexploded ordnance to help train the teams who will be disarming and removing them. They can also assemble devices that will help people detect and avoid any unexploded bombs. With the tools available to them in a makerspace it would even be possible to develop web apps that people can use to tag locations of unexploded bombs so teams can come in and remove them without having to extensively search the area.

It is cheaper to design, develop and fabricate both high-tech and low-tech solutions to virtually any problem imaginable than it has ever been before. A makerspace has the potential to help change the world in unimaginable ways. Having a space that is designed for crowdsourcing solutions and full of inexpensive fabrication tools can offer wounded communities the ability to put their lives back together one step at a time. If you'd like to learn more about ROW you can read the great write up about them in Popular Science here. And if you would like to offer help, assistance or donate to their organization you can visit their website here. Tell us your thoughts regarding this powerful new program in the ROW Creates 3D Makerspaces for Refugees forum over at 3DPB.com.

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Refugee Open Ware Wants MakerSpaces and 3D Printing to Help the Syrian Refugee Crisis

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Regardless of the political rhetoric and bickering over how to respond to it, there is an undeniable crisis in Syria that only seems to be getting worse. As the civil war continues, and with Russian bombs dropping, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians continue to pour out of a nation torn apart by civil war and into often less than hospitable neighboring countries and the uncertainty of refugee camps.

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A daily hustle to survive: This is the life of a Syrian refugee | Public Radio International

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A daily hustle to survive: This is the life of a Syrian refugee | Public Radio International

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BEIRUT, Lebanon - It is March 2014. Two-and-a-half-thousand Syrians are arriving in Lebanon every day. Many end up in the northern city of Tripoli. By 8 a.m. there is a long line outside the grey concrete walls of the UN compound. A tea seller moves up and down, an urn on his back. The line doesn't move. Within a week, the United Nations will register its one-millionth refugee in Lebanon. The UN agency that is supposed to look after these people, the UNHCR, can't cope. There isn't enough money. It is even cutting aid for the refugees already there. Some of them come to the compound, too. The line gets longer.

People don't talk much. They just stare ahead, and wait. Near the entrance, though, a woman in a black abaya and hijab starts shouting. She is small but her voice cuts through the noise of traffic in the distance. "I've been coming here to get food for my children for three days." Everyone looks. This is Mariam al-Khawli. She is from a small town just over the Syrian border. She has four children, a sick husband. "Every time I come, I get turned away," she shouts. "Every time, they promise to help if I come back tomorrow. Those promises are empty."

Then she does something unthinkable. She pours gasoline over her head and sets herself alight.

"Every time, they promise to help if I come back tomorrow. Those promises are empty."

For a couple of days of headlines, Mariam was a symbol of how desperate the refugees had become. That was the word we all used in our reports to explain what she had done: "desperate." But I didn't really understand her terrible act of self destruction outside the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, (the UNHCR). So in August I went back to see her family to get the whole story, from the beginning.

Like many ordinary people who do something extraordinary, the details of Mariam's life were both typical and revealing. What happened to her family happened to many refugees, millions of them, who fled Syria.

Mariam had come from Tal Kalakh, a Syrian farming town of 20,000 people. There were mosques and two- or three-story breezeblock homes, all set in the green hills close to the Lebanese border. She lived there with her husband, Ahmed Daher, and their four children. Their house had a small garden with a peach tree and a walnut tree.

In the spring of 2011, Syria caught the fever sweeping the rest of the Arab world. People took to the streets to demand more freedom. At first, they did not call for President Bashar al-Assad to go. Many hoped only that he would reform the one-party state he had inherited from his father. When the protests began in Tal Kalakh, Mariam's family stayed away. "Politics is not my business," Ahmed thought. He didn't watch the news. He stuck to driving the vegetable truck he owned. Mariam just wanted to get their four children a good education. The extended family thought that was odd. No cousins, aunts or uncles had been to college. But that was Mariam's ambition for her children.

Everything began to change one day in May after Friday prayers. More than 3,000 people marched through the town, chanting: "The people! Want! The fall of the regime!" Men in uniform blocked their way. The mukhabarat, the plain-clothed secret police, stood behind the uniformed men, giving orders. Ahmed stopped his truck at a gas station across the road. "Go home!" a loudspeaker ordered. "Disperse! We will shoot." The men in uniform raised their Kalashnikovs. The two sides were barely 10 yards apart. No one in the crowd moved. No one believed the security would fire. It was still the beginning of the uprising.

Everyone waited.

There was a sound like firecrackers. Rifle shots. Thousands of people ran in blind, disbelieving panic. A neighbor's son lay on the ground, hit by a bullet. Others fell, dead or wounded. That is how Ahmed remembers it. "It was a peaceful demonstration, no weapons, nothing," he said. He drove home as fast as he could to tell everyone what had happened. But they already knew. Women were in the street, ululating. People shouted: "They fired. They fired."

"Beat us, yes, we expect that perhaps," Ahmed said. "But no one thought they would actually shoot." Ahmed and Mariam decided they would now join the protests. Around the country, others did the same, their minds made up by the regime's violence. In Tal Kalakh, though, there were no more big demonstrations. It wasn't safe. Instead, people gathered in small groups on side streets and in orchards outside the town.

"No one thought they would actually shoot."

Then, the arrests began. Some said more than 1,000 people were detained that summer in Tal Kalakh. "They took whoever went out to call for freedom," Ahmed said. The prisoners came back with broken bones and marks from electric shocks or cigarette burns. Some did not return at all. "They took two young men, twins, a lawyer and doctor. They didn't just arrest them. They killed them. Their mother lost her mind. The town was calm on the outside but it was boiling underneath. It felt like it would explode at any minute."

Ahmed told me the story of what happened next. At this point, it has entered Tal Kalakh folklore. The Daher family lived near the army barracks. The troops were not allowed cell phones, or TV. They were not allowed out. Officers had suspended all leave because soldiers who went home rarely returned. One night a soldier found a way to slip away to visit a nearby grocery store. A television was on: Al Jazeera. The soldier saw refugees lifting razor wire and streaming into Turkey. A woman in a headscarf was being interviewed. He watched. He couldn't believe it.

"That's my mother. What's happening?"

"The regime is killing people," the shopkeeper said.

"What in the name of God is going on out here?"

"The whole country's been turned upside down and you have no idea?"

"I swear, no. It's like a prison inside the barracks. They told us: 'It's Israel. It's militant gangs.' But that's my mother."

The soldier went back to the barracks and gathered his friends. They decided to escape. He shot the officer who had said they were fighting Israel. There was a gun battle inside the barracks: loyalists against defectors. The violence spilled into the streets as the defectors fled. The whole of Tal Kalakh watched green tracer fire arc back and forth across the town. There was nothing on state TV about it, of course, but by lunchtime the next day everyone knew what had happened. The Dahers' street buzzed with the story of the soldier and the soldier's mother. The shopkeeper swore it was true.

The defecting soldiers joined a new organization called the Free Syrian Army. The armed rebellion had begun.

The FSA began to appear everywhere there were people who supported the uprising. The war arrived in Tal Kalakh one evening in May 2011, when the regime decided to make an example of the town. Tanks and armored vehicles drew up along the main road outside. In the early hours of the morning, the shelling began. Mariam, Ahmed and three of their children hid in a bathroom in the center of the house. Their daughter Ala'a, their oldest child, was away taking exams in the capital, Damascus. No one slept during the bombardment. "God is our protector," they said to each other as the ground shook and windows shattered inward. It continued until just after 6 a.m. The family emerged slowly and carefully. They found nothing left of the house next door but a pile of rubble. Ahmed and Mariam didn't even have to discuss it: They knew they had to leave.
*****
Those were the first days of the conflict. The war is now in its fifth year. There are more than a thousand armed groups allied to one or the other of the main factions: Jabhat al-Nusra, Al Qaeda's ally in Syria; the Islamic State, now notorious, and an even more extreme religious group; and the FSA - or what's left of it. They fight each other as much as they fight the regime. Every few months, a UN official warns of a "humanitarian catastrophe." Even the UN itself now describes such periodic alarms as "white noise." But the figures, if you stop to think about them, are shocking.

Half of all Syrians, more than 11 million people, have left their homes, according to the UNHCR. Many have gone elsewhere within the country - there are 7.6 million "internally displaced people," as they are called. Four million people, like Ahmed and Mariam, have crossed Syria's borders, becoming refugees.

Many have given up hope of ever returning home and are heading for Europe, causing what the continent's politicians call the worst refugee crisis there since World War II. Some 1.9 million refugees remain in Turkey, 630,000 in Jordan. A massively disproportionate burden has fallen on Syria's smallest neighbor, Lebanon, a country of 4.5 million. There are 1,172,753 Syrian refugees in Lebanon, according to official figures, though hundreds of thousands more have not registered and the real total could be more than 1.5 million.

That means one in four people in Lebanon is a refugee - one in three taking into account 450,000 Palestinians who are already there. It is hard to believe that Lebanon has absorbed so many Syrians, not just because of the size of these numbers but because the refugees are often nowhere to be seen. Street kids at the traffic lights or outside a restaurant are all that many Lebanese see of a massive refugee population in their midst. There are no large camps you can point to, no neat rows of tents or temporary housing stretching away to the horizon as in Turkey or Jordan.

At the start of the Syrian crisis, the Lebanese government made a political decision not to build - and to prevent anyone from building - new settlements for people fleeing the Syrian war. The Lebanese did not want another big, permanent refugee population. They already had the Palestinians. In the slums of southern Beirut, where most Lebanese would never venture, you can find refugees living 15 people to a single room, all eating, sleeping, sitting, and praying in the same cramped space. In this way, one-and-a-half million people can disappear, though of course a one-and-a-half million people cannot disappear entirely.
*****
11:30 p.m. July of this year. A hot and humid Friday night in Mar Mikhaël, Beirut's Brooklyn. Drinkers stand shoulder to shoulder outside the bars. There are girls in tiny shorts, long hair tumbling down their backs; guys wearing the "hipster uniform": Converse sneakers, skinny jeans, big beards. Beards are still popular despite stories of the airport police mistaking hipsters for jihadis. There is a cacophony of thumping hip hop and revving engines. BMWs, a Camaro, even a Ferrari, inch down the main street.

A waiter threads his way through the crowd with a tray of shots. A tiny hand flies up and tries to grab one. The waiter laughs and pushes away a grinning kid with matted hair and filthy clothes. There are half a dozen children working this part of the street. One is curled up against a wall, pretending to sleep, a 5,000 lira note (just over $3) in the crook of his arm, so people get the idea to leave money. The others tug at drinkers' sleeves, trying to sell roses or pointing at their mouths and saying: "No food. Give me just one dollar."

All but one in this group of child beggars are from Syria. We buy roses and sit on the curb to speak to them. The smallest is a little girl who tells us she is seven, her name is Rana, and she came from Syria a month ago. But my photographer recognizes her as a street kid he has been taking pictures of for the past two years. When he first met her, she said she was called Amal. Whatever her name is, she is, literally, street-wise. We ask to interview her. A negotiation follows.

Amal: "It will cost you 10,000 [almost $7] and you get three questions."

Me: "OK, but can we ask you the questions first?"

Amal: "Yes - that's one question."

Me: "We can't hear you. Can we talk in the café over the road?"

Amal: "No, and that's another question."

Me: "Tell me about your family."

Amal: "I don't know my family. I don't even know their names."

Me, sighing: "OK ... how much do you make out here in a night?"

Amal: "Only 20,000. Now give me the money. Then I will have 10; I'll only have to get another 10 to go home."

She grabs my recorder and starts singing into it tunelessly. I give up, having met my match. Amal shouts to a friend: "Do you want to speak to them? They'll give you a tenner. Tell them your stories. Tell them you need to make 20 a day."

The oldest in the group is Basmah, who says she is 14. While Amal is irrepressible and cheeky, Basmah is reserved and regards us with wary eyes. She refuses to have her photograph taken. She tells me that her family left their home in Syria when mortar shells began to fall on their street. At first, they stayed with an aunt in southern Syria. Then they heard that their house had been completely destroyed. They had nothing to return to. So the family took a bus to Lebanon.

I ask Basmah if she had to beg when they lived in Syria. For a handful of families this was a way of life even before the war. No, she says, they were poor - her father sold tissues at traffic lights - but she used to study like any other girl her age. "If we were still in Syria we wouldn't be selling flowers. We would be at school."

It is a similar story for most street children. I have interviewed a number of them over the years. There were the two little boys who sold roses by the traffic lights on the seafront. They got a bus from their refugee camp every day before sunset and worked until they sold all their roses. Sometimes that was six the following morning.

"I accept my fate," said one of the boys, Bilal, who was 10. "We are a family of eight. I have to support my brothers and sisters." His 11-year-old friend A'ala refused to see rose-selling as begging. "I would rather be in the gutter than beg," he said. "I have a 2-year-old brother. My mother is pregnant. My dad is sick. It's up to me alone to bring bread to the table."

Bilal was quiet but A'ala was cocky, swaggering around in a baseball cap that was too big for him. He would leap onto the running board of a big four-wheel-drive vehicle and rap on the window until they bought a rose or sped away, making him jump off. A'ala was proud to be the only earner of his family. He could smoke, buy Kentucky Fried Chicken if he made extra cash, and stay out as late as he wanted. He was tough, a bully in fact. The smaller children shrank away when he approached, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

"If we were still in Syria we wouldn't be selling flowers. We would be at school."

After years fending for themselves, many street children have hardened. A'ala said he wanted never to go back to school. Amal, the feisty little girl, might have told me the same had I not run out of questions. And street beggars are a fraction of the huge group of refugee children who have to support their families by working. This is what aid workers mean when they talk about a "lost generation" of Syrian children.

When street kids are arrested, the police sometimes take them to Home of Hope, Lebanon's only children's home. It is reached by taking the road that winds up Mount Lebanon east of Beirut. The 40-minute drive out of the capital makes it hard to find for those looking to exploit children. The director, Maher Tabarani, told me that many of those brought to him had been sexually abused. I wondered if that was what had happened to Basmah, the 14-year-old who was so reserved and suspicious.

"My mom took my kidney and gave it to someone so she could make money."

An 11-year-old girl had just been left there by the police, Maher said, part of a ring of underage prostitutes. They sold roses and gum on the streets but every so often a taxi arrived to take them to have sex with a client - $20 a time. The pimp who ran this operation was the girl's mother. "If you speak to this girl, you think you're talking to a 30-year-old woman," Maher said.

He once took in some Syrian Turkmen children. Their families had been offered somewhere to stay by a Turkmen businessman. It was in a slum in southern Beirut, and there was only a single room for each family, but it was cheap, and the offer came from one of their own. The "businessman" turned out to be a gangster. He raised the rent: $150, $200, then $300 a month for each room. The families sank into debt and they learned, too late, that the gangster had a reputation for terrifying violence. It's OK, he told them, put your daughter to work for me and we will settle the debt.

In this case, and others, it was the parents or an uncle or aunt who pimped the child, Maher said, though they were part of a bigger network. This was what made the child prostitution networks so hard to crack - that and the secrecy surrounding anything to do with sex in a conservative society. I said I had heard about married women in hijab and abaya standing outside a camp in the south to sell themselves for about $7. Everyone knew this was happening but it was barely spoken about. Yes, Maher said, he had heard the same, though he said they sometimes took less.

A little boy interrupted us. He was painfully thin and looked about six or seven. He was really 11, Maher said. This was Nawras, who was something of a celebrity. Everyone at the home knew he had once appeared on a Lebanese talk show to describe how his mother sold his kidney. I had heard about Lebanon's illegal market in body parts - $10,000 dollars for a kidney or a cornea.

He showed us the scar. "My mom took my kidney and gave it to someone so she could make money," he said. "I told her: don't take it. Wait until I grow up." The surgical wound was painful for a long time, he said. His mother used to rub cream into it. Maher believed his story. He told me the boy's mother worked as a cleaner and a prostitute. Two weeks earlier she had dumped Nawras on the street and told him not to come home. She did not want to look after him any longer. He was hyperactive and incontinent. At Home of Hope, he wore diapers.

Nawras was Syrian-Palestinian, originally from Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus. He said he had come to Lebanon at the beginning of the war, though he could not remember exactly when or why. He still had a brother missing in Syria. As we talked, he told me that what he wanted, more than anything, was to have a bicycle. "These kids have nothing," Maher said. "Their parents don't want them back. They say it's better for them here. They eat, they sleep, they drink, please keep them."

Of course, Maher saw the worst cases at Home of Hope, children whose lives were hard even before the war. But the number of refugee street kids was growing, he said. He has been forced to send some of the children brought to him by the police to juvenile prison. He had no room. Things just got worse and worse. He could see no solution.
*****
May 2011. Mariam and Ahmed didn't want to leave their daughter, Ala'a, behind in Syria, but they had no choice. The family took little more from the house than the clothes they wore and their IDs. Mariam phoned Ala'a, telling her: "I will come back for you." Tal Kalakh was only five miles from the Lebanese border but they knew the journey out would not be easy. It was illegal for men of conscription age to leave the country. Bribes would have to be paid: $1,000 for Ahmed and his oldest son, a large portion of their savings. A taxi to the border was 10 times the usual price. Ahmed had to leave his truck - his livelihood - behind.

There were now checkpoints along the road out of town. Men trying to pass through the checkpoints often disappeared. There were snipers on the roofs of government buildings and they shot at people in areas that were part of the uprising. Tal Kalakh was mainly Sunni. The surrounding villages were Alawite, the religious sect the president belongs to, and it seemed that the inhabitants were also shooting at those who fled. Ahmed and Mariam would never have imagined this state of affairs. Everyone had lived side by side in the village that was their home before Tal Kalakh. They always said: a visitor wouldn't be able to tell who was who. Ahmed didn't even know his best friend was Alawite until he was 19.

Their taxi drove them out of town, accompanied by the sound of gunfire and mortar fire. The driver dropped them at the border. A narrow river, a stream really, marks the line between northern Lebanon and Syria. There was an official crossing - a bridge with checkpoints at both ends. But by late May it was already so hot that the river was shallow enough to make it across by stepping on the rocks jutting out of the water. The Dahers and thousands of others entered Lebanon this way.

They arrived in a rugged bit of hill country called Wadi Khaled. A local family took them in. They were Sunni Muslims like the Dahers and most of the refugees. The Lebanese family asked for nothing in return. After a week, the Dahers still hadn't heard from Ala'a. When they finally made contact, they found out she had managed to get from Damascus to Tal Kalakh. And so Mariam left on foot, back over the rocks in the river, to find her. Ahmed was ill, with a lung problem, but Mariam had always been the determined one. She returned to Syria, and then made it back out - again - this time with Ala'a.

Everyone had been in Wadi Khaled a month when Ala'a told her father that the exams needed for university entrance were being held in Tal Kalakh. It seemed unfathomable, but she wanted to go back. "What are you talking about?" he said. "The town is in chaos. There isn't even anyone there." Mariam intervened. The children would get an education, whatever it took. She would go with Ala'a back to Tal Kalakh. So they set off for Syria on foot, back over the illegal river crossing, someone watching from a hill to make sure they were OK. When they got back to Tal Kalakh, the town was almost empty, just soldiers on the streets. Ala'a was able to take her exams. And she did well, 205 marks out of 240. " Fa, it was just physics that let me down," she said: "I didn't have a chance to study it." Mother and daughter hugged one another.

With Mariam and Ala'a already in Tal Kalakh, the rest of the family decided to return, making their way again over the river and through the unpredictable checkpoints. The shelling had stopped. But life did not get better. Slowly and steadily, the situation deteriorated. Ahmed couldn't make his living delivering fruit and vegetables; there were too many checkpoints, too many "gangs" on the roads. In Tal Kalakh, 100 yards separated the FSA and the regime. No one could move. Worse, it became impossible not to choose sides. "You had to pick up a gun," Ahmed said. "I am against the regime but I don't like violence and killing. Who would I fight? On one side is your countryman, on the other side, your countryman too." After another year in Syria, they again made the journey - ever more dangerous now - back to Lebanon.

"On one side is your countryman, on the other side, your countryman too."

This time, they slept in a mosque in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. Ahmed got a day or two of work every week driving a taxi. They did fine, at first. They had savings. But days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months became a year. The money ran out. Now what, they thought? There was food aid from the UN, though it mortified them to have to stand in line, waiting for charity. The UN gave out food boxes for Ramadan: rice, pasta, and lentils, as well as soap and toothbrushes. Mariam went with her mother - the children's grandmother - who was collecting an uncle's ration.

There was a crush outside, guards shouting for everyone to get back. No one moved for hours. The old lady approached a guard. "My son, I have asthma. I can't stand in the sun for so long. Please, let me inside to sit down." According to family legend, the guard replied: "Even if you have cancer, you wait outside. Leave if you want. It's all the same to me whether you eat or not." Mariam marched up to the guard, enraged. There was a shouting match. It ended with her screaming: "I hope you get cancer." The refugees cheered.

The UN's food boxes became e-vouchers, plastic cards that looked like credit cards - they were even provided by MasterCard. The UN added money to the cards every month, $30 for everyone in the family. The UN also paid half their rent. Mariam did everything she could to stretch the money out. Delay the rent, pay the college fees. Sell the food ration, pay the landlord. Borrow a few thousand, buy some food. It was a miserable carousel, a crisis every day, every small victory creating a new problem for the day after. She was determined: the children would get an education, a future. Ala'a, the eldest daughter, studied business. Amjad, the eldest son, studied journalism. The two younger children went to school. Don't let them go out to work. Don't let them beg, Mariam told herself.

But the UN and other refugee agencies were running out of money. The Dahers learned that they would not longer get help with half their rent. The struggle became nearly impossible. Then their food card stopped working.
*****
Things are different in Turkey. The country is Syria's biggest neighbor. So far, it has taken in close to 2 million Syrian refugees, almost half of all those who have fled the country. But Turkey has a population of 75 million, and the refugees are looked after well. In 2012, I was in one of the first Turkish camps built for Syrians. A woman pulled back a curtain in her tent to show me sacks of rice and bottles of cooking oil. She was getting so much food she kept the surplus to sell in the market. The war had not yet visited her village in northern Syria, she told me, but she was poor and had heard how generous the Turks were being to refugees.

They are known as the "five-star" camps, and the Turkish government is rightly proud of them. Two young men from the prime minister's office - both wearing shiny suits - arranged for me to visit one day this summer. They showed me rows of neat, white Terrapin buildings, all with air conditioning and televisions. There was a school, a playground, and a park with neat flowerbeds. There was also, it soon became clear, a poverty of spirit, an emptiness amid the plenty.

Adnan was 35 years old but looked 45, an ample belly beneath his robe. He sat cross-legged on the floor of his caravan, one eye on the TV as we talked. He had been a shopkeeper in Syria but saw no reason to work in Turkey. "I could work if I wanted to. But really, everything is provided for us here anyway." He got a pass to leave the camp twice a month, and that was enough. He went on, perhaps aware of the officials outside his door: "All thanks to the Turkish government. We want for nothing, thanks be to God. We are happy like this."

"May God return us back to Syria."

A few rows away lived a woman I'll call Asma. She was in her 30s, from Aleppo, and had been there for three years. Her youngest child was born in the camp. "I thank God for bringing me here," she said. "Water, electricity, heating: everything is provided. They even gave me a fridge. We are in paradise, truly." But she was lonely. Her husband had a job in the nearby town, while she could rarely leave. "There's never anyone new to talk to," she said. As we left, she took my translator aside and asked for his number "just to chat." It was an extremely risky thing for a married woman from a religious family to do. It showed the depths of her unhappiness. "May God return us back to Syria."

Others have given up hope of ever returning. One was my friend Yilmaz, a student in his 20s with a ponytail. He and some friends decided they would smuggle themselves from Turkey to the European Union. Yilmaz had come from a wealthy family in Syria. In Turkey, he was a journalists' fixer and worked for the press office of the Syrian National Council, the opposition's government-in-exile. Everyone in his group had jobs in Turkey - there was a bricklayer, a musician, a barber - but the wages were half what they used to make in Syria. They could not plan for any kind of future. And they had ambitions.

The journey to Europe began with a secret Facebook group called "Wanderers' Bus Stop" in Arabic. "This group has nothing to do with arranging illegal trips," the page says disingenuously. "It is not responsible for any loss, theft, or death." But Wanderers' Bus Stop is where you go to meet a smuggler. It has telephone numbers, places to stay, details of routes through Greece, Macedonia and Serbia - all swapped among the group's 40,000 members. "It is about how to go to Europe, from the first step to the last step," Yilmaz said. He got a number from the page and went to a place locals called "smugglers' street" in a town on the Turkish coast.

"They were forcing people on with weapons. They don't care what happens. 'Live or die; go, don't go,'; that's what they tell you."

The town was on the Izmir coast, used by the people smugglers because it is only a few miles from the Greek islands. You can see the European Union from Izmir. The smugglers buy disposable boats, Zodiac inflatables with outboard motors. They are piloted by the refugees themselves and used only one-way. The cost of passage would be $900 to $1,000 per person, the smuggler told Yilmaz. "It's easy money for them," Yilmaz said. He was right. The boats cost about $4,000 each, including the engine. With 40 or more passengers per boat, people smuggling is more profitable than moving drugs, and a lot less risky: $30,000 to $40,000 a boat. A dozen boats can leave from Izmir every night - 500 people heading to Europe, half a million dollars paid to the smugglers.

Yilmaz and his friends went to a money changing office. The bureau took a cut and put the money in escrow. Once they got to dry land, they were to call the smuggler and give him a code word to unlock his money. Yilmaz and his group had to say "Coca-Cola." There were 20 people in the group. They split up to take taxis to the rendezvous point. The taxis turned off the road and up a dirt track, dropping them at the edge of a forest. The taxi drivers knew what was going on. "Good luck. God Bless you," they said as their passengers got out.

A flashlight flickered. They headed toward it. There was a group of about 150 already waiting in a clearing. It was 11 p.m. At 3 a.m., a small truck arrived. Around 80 of them were pushed into the back. "It was hard to breathe," Yilmaz said. "You are stuck. There is no light. You can't even see your fingers. The truck is driving fast. There are women and children shouting." Three hours later, they stopped and got out into a bigger truck with more refugees. This time it was a four-hour drive.

It was fully light when they got to a rocky inlet, the sea lapping against the shore. There were three boats waiting. One was full of Iraqis. Yilmaz and his friends were shown to a second boat. The young men carried it into the water. The smugglers started to pile people in: 30, 40, 50. There were 67 people in the boat in the end. "They were forcing people on with weapons," Yilmaz said. "They don't care what happens. 'Live or die; go, don't go,' that's what they tell you." He feared they would all drown on the crossing so he jumped out. His friends followed. The smugglers eventually agreed to give them another boat.

As they cleared the inlet a Turkish police boat moved to intercept them. A loudspeaker ordered them back. They kept going. The police circled them a couple of times, then headed away. An hour later, they were in Europe. Yilmaz's cousin steered the little Zodiac straight ahead to land on the Greek island of Lesbos. They had made it. One of their first acts ashore was to pose for a selfie. They set off on the 40-mile walk over the hills to the refugee registration center on Lesbos.

On another part of the beach, a British man greeted the migrants. Eric Kempson was 60 and had lived on Lesbos for 16 years. He made a living carving olive wood souvenirs for tourists. Now he also helped refugees. We joined him at dawn one day, parked on a hillside. There were pine trees and whitewashed houses, a glinting sea. It was a landscape from the vacation brochures. We waited. Hours went by with no sign of the little Zodiacs. Eric handed me some binoculars. There was a patrol vessel from the European border force. Eventually it moved on.

The refugees and the smugglers were watching too. An hour later we saw the first Zodiac, a dot on the horizon. "The currents are very strong," Eric told me. "It can be vicious." He remembered standing on the beach, watching helpless as five boats got into trouble in high seas. The last one did not make it. "The front end of the boat went up in the air and the back end went up in the air, with a few people left in the middle. Then everyone was in the water. You could see the splashing. These people can't swim. I'm sorry," he stopped, overcome. "The thing is about the last boat, it was mainly women and children."

The water was choppy but the little Zodiac kept coming. The dot grew larger as it bounced over the waves. We could see the faces of the people, grimacing in the spray, holding on to the sides. Parents had their arms wrapped around their children. We raced along a road and down to a rocky beach to meet them. When we got there the refugees were already puncturing the boat - the smugglers tell them to do this. There was a loud hiss. A man from the island - a fisherman - rushed forward to get the valuable outboard motor.

"Will the police here beat us?"

A young woman in a headscarf - she looked Uzbek or Tajik - stood rigid on the shore. She burst into tears. A grandmotherly German tourist hugged her. "It's over now, you're safe," she said. "You're in Europe." A Burmese man - a Rohingya Muslim, one of the most persecuted groups of people in the world - looked around anxiously and asked: "Will the police here beat us?" Eric stood by the open trunk of his little hatchback, handing out dry clothes, bottles of water and sandwiches. Once, he and his daughter had patched up a man with his arm sliced open. They put some antiseptic on the arm and wrapped it in a towel. Another time a woman had a broken ankle. She had been thrown from a boat onto the rocks. One man had a heart attack. They called an ambulance but it never came.

Eric said some of those he met were not prepared for refugee life. "Some of these people are rich, especially from Damascus. To put them in this situation, it's unbelievable," he said. "One woman came up, very petite, with a grey silk headscarf. She tapped me on the shoulder and she said in perfect English: 'Excuse me sir, I would like a shower and I would like to use the toilet.' I said: 'Sorry madam, I can't help you. I can give you a toilet roll and you can use the field.' A lot of them are very wealthy people. They've never had to squat on the side of the road. It is humiliating for them."

Tourists watched the latest arrivals. "Just fack off, you dirty people, roo-nin' our 'oliday," shouted a peroxide-blonde woman with an Essex accent. But another British vacationer, who said his name was Bob, handed the refugees bottles of water. He was a former army sergeant with a regimental tattoo on his forearm.

The locals are as divided as the tourists. Eric told me one hotel owner was sheltering refugees and feeding them. But Eric also once had his tires slashed by members of Golden Dawn, the Greek nationalist party.

He said the demographics of the refugee boats had changed. A year ago, you would see a boat with 10 men, all paddling: Afghans or Iraqis. Maybe Iranians. Now you were seeing 50 or 60 people crammed into a single Zodiac, mostly Syrians, many of them women and children. The official figures from the UN refugee agency are that 300,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean illegally so far this year, 200,000 of them landing in Greece, about half of those in Lesbos; 70 percent of the new arrivals are Syrian.

Yilmaz and his friends took a special refugee ferry to Athens. It was overcrowded. He stayed a couple of weeks, deciding whether to buy forged papers, like ID cards and passports. They are easily available in the Greek capital if you know the right people. He decided he didn't need them. They went up through Greece. At the Macedonia border, the police tried to stop them, lashing out with batons. They were locked up for a time. But they were more worried about the criminals who kidnap refugees in northern Macedonia. It can cost $3,000 to be released, which must be wired from families in Turkey.

Yilmaz told me his dream would be to reach London, but that might be difficult because of the English Channel. For now, he is happy to have made it to Germany, 28 days after he set out from Turkey. He posted another selfie, this time from the German town of Osnabrück. It was just one of a stream of updates he sent out from his smartphone during the voyage. The journey was hard but his photos are joyous, optimistic. They show young men on an adventure, starting new lives. Yilmaz plans to finish his university studies. He wants to become a photojournalist. He left a new wife behind in Turkey and will send for her. She will make the same illegal crossing he did.

Yilmaz and his friends certainly feared for their lives in Syria - he says he was once imprisoned by the "Islamic State" - but they had all been in Turkey, most of them for a year or two. Some governments might regard them more as economic migrants than refugees. The EU has just agreed to divvy up 120,000 of the recent Syrian arrivals among member states. It was a deal that nearly didn't get made and a debate continues to rage in Europe over how many people to take. Some argue that Europe shouldn't turn away from those in need. Others fear that there are tens of millions more refugees - Syrians and others - waiting on the EU's doorstep. But whatever we call the Syrians now in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq - refugees or migrants - there is no doubt how desolate their lives have become.
*****
"We wonder: How have we come to this? Subject to charity, to pity, to the whims of those who confer favor, or not, who choose what to give, or not to give. Fa, the human being has dignity above all. We are scolded like children and insulted. No one can tolerate that. 'Go away. Leave here.' Until when?"

When Mariam's food card stopped working in March 2014, she went to the gray-walled compound of the UNHCR in Tripoli. She found many others there who were having the same problem. The first day, she couldn't even get inside to see anyone. The guards were indifferent. "Come back tomorrow." On the second day, she got to the head of the line. The same. "Come back tomorrow." On the third day, she got up early and talked to Ala'a in the kitchen. The landlord's wife came around to chat, everyone laughing. She set off again for the UNHCR. The line was as long as ever. She waited for hours in the sun. She knew what the answer would be. "Come back tomorrow."

She turned to a man in the line and asked: "Where is the nearest gas station?" He thought the question strange, as they had all come on foot, but he knew the answer and gave her directions. She walked off. About 20 minutes later, Mariam returned, a plastic water bottle full of gasoline in her hand. What happened next was what psychologists would call a "cry for help" It wasn't just a metaphor in this case as Mariam first shouted for the UNCHR to restore her food aid. The French new agency AFP reported her words: "Every time, they promise to help if I come back tomorrow. But those promises are empty."

Then came her last, terrible act. The fuel poured down her head, over her face and neck, over her shoulders, soaking her headscarf and abaya. When she set herself alight, everything ignited. There was a whoosh. She screamed and crumpled. The next day, I spoke to the tea seller outside the compound: "We saw a woman fall to the ground. Then we saw flames," he said. "People got scared and ran in all directions. We tried to throw water over her."

We asked the UNHCR how this could happen. Aid to families was being cut, they said. Donor governments had so far given only 14 percent of what was needed for that year's budget. The tragedy might show everyone just how bad things were, the UNHCR spokeswoman said, optimistically.

"One day we have food, the next day we don't. It is the same for all refugees."

That was March 2014. There were a couple of days of news reports about Mariam's self-immolation, but the story was soon forgotten. Today, three quarters of the way through 2015, the UNHCR has only 35 percent of what it needs for the year. When Mariam set herself alight, the food cards were loaded with $30 a month for every refugee. Now it is $13.50. And since last month, the UNHCR has been forced to remove 136,000 refugees in Lebanon from food assistance.

Mariam was taken to the hospital. We filmed her propped up in bed, sedated, her head, face and upper body swathed in bandages. Somehow, she had survived. After visiting her, we climbed the stairs to the family's bare two-room apartment. Ahmed hardly said a word. Her daughter Ala'a spoke for everyone. "One day we have food, the next day we don't. It is the same for all refugees." But as I sat with the family, I couldn't help wondering: Was Mariam mentally ill? Was there something else that pushed her to do this?

When I went back to see the family again this summer, I realized how much I had misjudged her. The story of their lives revealed Mariam's unequal struggle to make sure her children did not beg or go out to work. And that they got an education. A year after Mariam set herself alight, the older children - still refugees - remained at university. Mariam, however, had died from an infection that took hold after her first skin graft. As in my first meeting with the Dahers, Ala'a spoke for the family. She was like her mother, a strong personality. Ala'a thought Mariam had been broken by the daily humiliations of being a refugee. " Wallahi - I swear - we value our dignity above anything," she said. "We wonder: How have we come to this? Subject to charity, to pity, to the whims of those who confer favor, or not, who choose what to give, or not to give. Fa, the human being has dignity above all. We are scolded like children and insulted. No one can tolerate that. 'Go away. Leave here.' Until when?"

The family got their food credit eventually. "My mother lived two months and 10 days after the incident. Just after that, they reactivated the card. Honestly, if we didn't need it so badly I wouldn't have taken that card."
Ala'a, after the loss of her mother. Coda
Majaz Shoaib lay down. She had a headache. She had not eaten since the day before. $1 for a packet of flatbread. There was no point thinking about food but she couldn't help it. $2 for a kilo of lentils. She got $7 a day for work at a factory. Her son Yamen got $3.50 a day working at a market stall. He was 10, no longer in school. My children should not be illiterate like me, she thought. If he can't read and write, what kind of life will he have?

Thirty-five, on her own with five children. Refugees. She hardly thought about her husband, Abdel Kareem, anymore. He is gone and God will take care of him. He had been taken at a checkpoint on their way out of Syria. "Look after the children. Look after yourself. May God ease your path," were his last words to her, the children watching as soldiers led him away. That was two years ago.

If I had known our lives would be like this, I would never have had five kids. No one knows the future, whether good or bad. We just have to do our best to survive, day by day.

She had sent the children out to play in the camp. They would be back soon. The two eldest would just go to bed. They understood she had nothing. The youngest were seven and five. They would cry. She could beat them. But that didn't always work when they were really hungry. If she had to, if she really couldn't stop them from crying for food, she could threaten to leave them, as their father had done.

That shameful admission came at the end of a three-hour conversation with Majaz, in a Lebanese camp. "If I had known our lives would be like this, I would never have had five kids," she told me. "No one knows the future, whether good or bad. We just have to do our best to survive, day by day. For tomorrow, only God knows."

Paying $1,000 for a smuggler to take them to Europe, as Yilmaz had done, was impossible. She couldn't even find food for dinner every night. She had lost the battle Mariam fought to educate her children. At least she had not sent them into the streets to beg. But she looked utterly defeated. Four million refugees - 7.6 million displaced inside Syria. There are many like her.
Paul Wood is a Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a BBC foreign correspondent.

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A daily hustle to survive: This is the life of a Syrian refugee

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BEIRUT, Lebanon - It is March 2014. Two-and-a-half-thousand Syrians are arriving in Lebanon every day. Many end up in the northern city of Tripoli. By 8 a.m. there is a long line outside the grey concrete walls of the UN compound. A tea seller moves up and down, an urn on his back.

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UNHCR - The sea route to Europe: The Mediterranean passage in the age of refugees

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UNHCR - The sea route to Europe: The Mediterranean passage in the age of refugees

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The sea route to Europe: The Mediterranean passage in the age of refugees

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How Refugee Camps Receive and Distribute Essential Supplies

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How Refugee Camps Receive and Distribute Essential Supplies

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Host countries across the Middle East and Europe have responded to the Syrian crisis by establishing refugee camps, but with the arrival of unprecedented numbers of refugees and limited resources with which to accommodate them, these camps face enormous logistical challenges.

First, there's rarely enough food to go around - camps tend to distribute around 75% of each refugee's recommended calorie count, and food shortages have led to infighting for rations and, in several tragic cases, death. Worse yet, chronic malnutrition makes people susceptible to diseases like cholera and polio, especially when confined in close quarters with other malnourished people. Although some camps allow refugees to tend to small personal gardens, worldwide droughts and desert climates make this impossible for the majority of Syrian refugees.

The refugee's struggle for adequate nourishment differs largely by location: one German camp's cafeteria-style excess is a separate world from Lebanese camps that can only allot a meager $13 per person each month for rations. For the most part, food is supplied via contributions from UN agencies, private organizations, and other NGOs or nonprofits.

Refugee camps also struggle to provide access to clean water. According to UNHCR estimates, more than half of global refugee camps are unable to supply the recommended minimum of two liters of water per person per day. If clean water is not provided, refugees may attempt to drink from impure sources, which can contribute to the spread of cholera, diarrhea, and similar illnesses.

Additionally, many camps do not feature conveniently located water taps. That means that a simple trip to stock up on water can consume a huge fraction of an already malnourished refugee's daily calorie count. As a result, water is often the focal point of efforts to optimize a refugee camp's operations. In Chad's Ab Gadam camp, for instance, UNHCR performed substantial research in order to find and source clean water. Methods included trucking it in from a nearby lake, collecting it during storms, and even constructing a treatment plant.

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How Refugee Camps Receive and Distribute Essential Supplies

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Host countries across the Middle East and Europe have responded to the Syrian crisis by establishing refugee camps, but with the arrival of unprecedented numbers of refugees and limited resources with which to accommodate them, these camps face enormous logistical challenges.

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There is a clear link between nutrition and public health. Communicable diseases brought on in part by malnutrition are responsible for millions of preventable deaths each year. Mass population movements can result in high rates of malnutrition, sickness and death.

Shortage of food also makes people more vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation. Poor quality diets and vitamin and mineral deficiencies contribute to delayed childhood development, causing irreparable damage. Additionally, for those who live with chronic illnesses, such as HIV/AIDS, adequate nutrition is vital in maintaining the immune system.

At UNHCR, we work to improve nutrition through strategic funding, as well as partnerships with the World Food Programme (WFP) and others. We have also identified essential aid packages to boost services for populations in need, as well as training, standard guidelines, strategic plans and staffing practices.

We monitor the nutrition of people of concern through the Health Information System, regular surveys and nutrition-related databases.

Food Security

UNHCR and WFP have implemented multi-storey gardens (MSG) in refugee camps through its partners in Kenya since 2006 and Ethiopia beginning in 2008. These gardens are part of a food security strategy to support dietary diversity and enhance refugee contributions to their own food consumption. The MSG are particularly indicated for the dry and non-fertile areas where the refugee camps are located and where both the soil quality is not ideal for farming and water quantity inadequate. Issues of water harvesting, pest control, nutrition, meal planning, women's empowerment and the actual construction and maintenance of the multi-storey garden are addressed in training modules.

Infant Feeding

Natural disasters and emergencies have a devastating impact on people's lives. The effect on women can be particularly severe, both mentally and physically.

Some women may become malnourished, while others can lose the confidence or strength to breastfeed their infants. With support networks shattered, there may be even more demands on a mothers time to get food for her family, find shelter and plan for an increasingly insecure future.

Our teams at UNHCR work hard to ensure that children and their mothers receive nutrition and care in times of crisis.

Micronutrients

Micronutrient deficiencies represent a largely invisible but often crippling form of malnutrition, affecting birth and maternal outcomes and child development and learning potential.

Iron deficiency anaemia and vitamin A deficiency are amongst the most visible forms of micronutrient deficiencies in refugee populations, but these are just the tip of the iceberg and in reality the refugee populations often suffer from multiple micronutrient deficiencies.

The High Commissioner for Refugees has put a high priority on improving the nutritional status of refugee populations and decreasing the burden of anaemia and other micronutrient deficiencies.

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United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

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There is a clear link between nutrition and public health. Communicable diseases brought on in part by malnutrition are responsible for millions of preventable deaths each year. Mass population movements can result in high rates of malnutrition, sickness and death. Shortage of food also makes people more vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation.

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Food, Water, Sanitation, and Housing in Refugee Camps

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Food, Water, Sanitation, and Housing in Refugee Camps

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How does it feel to be a refugee? | News | Al Jazeera

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How does it feel to be a refugee? | News | Al Jazeera

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Many of the actors in Terrestrial Journeys live in the Palestinian refugee camps [Bridgette Auger/Al Jazeera]

Beirut - On a cold December evening in the main reception room of a grand, run-down 1930s villa in west Beirut, a group of Syrian and Syrian Palestinian actors sat huddled on the floor, surrounded by their audience.

Another actor stood over the group, gently asking a series of questions in different European languages - German, English, French and Russian - meant to mimic the feeling of a language classroom that many refugees attend after arriving in a new country.

As the questions were answered, the lights dimmed, and moments later the performance shifted to different area of the room.

Suddenly, the actors began stamping on imaginary cockroaches on the old villa's marble floor, a scene designed to reflect the dismal living conditions faced upon arrival from Syria at Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps.

Before the war, I had a nice house with three shops. Here, I can barely afford rent. I am happy to perform, to relay our experiences. I am not just a refugee; I am a Syrian, and this is a human story that people should hear.

Fadwa Awayti, a Syrian refugee

Terrestrial Journeys, an exploration of the refugee experience directed by British-Iraqi Dina Mousawi, was performed this month in the Zuqaq el-Balat neighbourhood of west Beirut. Mousawi is hoping to launch a similar show in the United Kingdom.

"Last year it was rare for the topic of emigration, the possibility of leaving Lebanon for Europe and elsewhere, to come up in conversation," Mousawi told Al Jazeera. "[But] when I arrived in September, it was all anybody wanted to talk about.

"Once, during rehearsals, I gave the group some sticks and asked them to improvise a scene from home. After a couple of minutes they had created a boat, and acted out this scene paying a smuggler $1,000 to board a boat that then capsized at sea. It wasn't a scene from home - it was tragic."

Many of the actors in Terrestrial Journeys live in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila and Burj el-Barajneh in Beirut. Living conditions in the camps are notoriously poor; Shatila was originally built in 1949 for 3,000 people, but is now home to more than 22,000. Electricity supplies are unreliable, access to safe drinking water is limited, and poverty is endemic.

Thousands of Syrians have settled in these areas since the start of Syria's war, due to the availability of relatively cheap rents compared with other areas of the Lebanese capital. But this year, many have travelled onwards to Europe, dissatisfied with life in Lebanon.

Wessam Sukkari, a 38-year-old Syrian Palestinian and mother-of-two from Yarmouk camp in Damascus, said her husband travelled earlier this year to Germany from Turkey via Hungary.

"I want to join him," Sukkari, one of the actors in Terrestrial Journeys, told Al Jazeera, "but I refuse to travel by boat."

Restrictions against Syrian refugees in Lebanon have increased in 2015 as the Lebanese state has grappled with the influx of more than one million refugees into the country.

Many Syrians living in Beirut's Palestinian camps say they rarely leave their homes, except to look for work, as they fear being detained by authorities for faulty paperwork.

"Now, wherever I go, I take my rental contract and identification papers," Nidal Daher, a 28-year-old actor from Damascus, told Al Jazeera.

"There are more checkpoints. If I want to go to another area of the city, then someone there must vouch for me. In Yarmouk we were besieged; here we are also surrounded."

Part of Mousawi's inspiration for Terrestrial Journeys was her own experience of migration. In 1986, at the age of eight, Mousawi emigrated from Baghdad to the UK to escape the Iran-Iraq war. It is a topic she has explored previously in her work.

"When I arrived in the UK, I idolised Saddam Hussein. Growing up in Iraq, the propaganda would portray [Ayatollah] Khomenei in this terrifying way; by contrast, Saddam was handsome, neat, and good-looking. When I had nightmares, he would protect me," Mousawi recalled.
READ MORE: Refugee crisis highlighted in Africa film festival
Mousawi's own experiences helped to establish empathetic bonds between the actors and director in Terrestrial Journeys, cast members told Al Jazeera. Their daily rehearsals also provided a break from daily stresses.

"I wake up excited to come to rehearsals," Daher said during one of the show's rehearsals earlier this month. "We have fun, we laugh, we joke - but we also cry and reflect on difficult experiences."

Fadwa Awayti, 58, the oldest member of the cast, came to Lebanon from Yarmouk camp more than four years ago, near the beginning of the Syrian conflict. One of her sons who remained behind was killed by a sniper, she told Al Jazeera, while one of her daughters has relocated to Sweden.

Awayti says she has fantasised of opening an Arabic bakery and pastry shop in Sweden, but with an aging husband and a brother to look after inside Shatila camp, she is not optimistic that it will happen. She still dreams of one day returning to Syria.

"Before the war, I had a nice house with three shops. Here, I can barely afford rent," Awayti said. "I am happy to perform, to relay our experiences. I am not just a refugee; I am a Syrian, and this is a human story that people should hear."

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Beirut - On a cold December evening in the main reception room of a grand, run-down 1930s villa in west Beirut, a group of Syrian and Syrian Palestinian actors sat huddled on the floor, surrounded by their audience.

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How does it feel to be a refugee? Hear their words | Oxfam International

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How does it feel to be a refugee? Hear their words | Oxfam International

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While the need to address the refugee crisis is at an all-time high, unfortunately so is the level of anti-refugee rhetoric and misinformation about refugees. Yet, they are ordinary people like you and me, who have lost everything. They've left their entire lives behind, often with just the clothes on their backs. They come here to start over. They want to make sure their kids can go to school. They want to work and they want to contribute to our communities. Just like us, they seek a life of dignity, freedom and security.

The 'I Hear You' project is a video series that highlights the real life, word-for-word stories of refugees from around the world. It features 14 actors speaking and interpreting the words of refugees from Syria, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who have fled danger and are unable to tell their stories publicly due to threats to their security.

Hear their words.

Margot Robbie - The law student

Margot gives her voice to a young student who cannot lose hope because one day she'll be a lawyer.

She remembers her first year at college. She was 17. But then the college was bombed. She recalls her house, her teachers, her friends. She misses her best friend the most, she doesn't know where she is now. More than the absence of comfort it is the lack of education that is the hardest for her. She would have liked to continue her studies, to present cases in court, to defend people in need of her help. She loves the law. She has lived in a refugee camp for four years, but she still hopes she'll be a lawyer one day.

" I want you to know that I'm very brave and courageous. "

John gives his voice to a teacher who tells what it means to teach when there is nothing left.

There is no school in the camp. His young students have no books, no pens, no paper. So he improvises, uses simple tools, writes letters in the dirt instead of on a blackboard. Some children have been here in the camp for so long that they have never gone to a real school. When he spots a particularly bright student, the most difficult thing is to find a proper school so the child can continue to study. Sometimes, he manages to do it. He doesn't lose hope. "One day, we'll go back," he says.

" We are not like this, this is not us. "

Gael gives his voice to a poet who lives in the memory of a lost love.

It's been four years now but he remembers everything as if it had happened the day before. He was a student, but also a poet. Encouraged by a teacher, he began to write more, arousing the interest of a girl he was in love with. Although he read her his poetry he never revealed his feelings. He comes from a poor family, whereas hers is a very well-to-do background, he was convinced that they had no future together. Then one day he found the courage to tell her that all his poems were for her.

" Sometimes the mind can't function, and it's the heart that takes over. "

Minnie Driver - The stay-at-home mum

Minnie gives her voice to a mother struggling and fearing for her children.

She remembers with tenderness those mornings when she got the children prepared and walked them to school because she was too afraid of the traffic. She remembers her beautiful garden, the weekends they used to spend by the sea. Her son, who was so bright at school, is now sitting around all day in the refugee camp where they live. The day when their house was bombarded she kept with her all the report cards, the family photos, the videos of her wedding. But these are memories, in real life "All is gone," she says.

" I love my kids so much, they deserve better than this. "

There are over 65 million people in the world today who have been forced to leave their homes because of violence, persecution and war.

Now is a time for solidarity and compassion, not a time to close our minds, our hearts, or our borders. We must stand together as one global community against the same intolerance and fear that drove so many people to flee their homes in the first place.
Add your voice, sign the petition now Read and share more stories
Oxfam is working in more than 20 countries affected by the refugee crisis to help people who have fled their homes because of violence, conflict or persecution. We are providing food and clean water, and making sure people have the information they need to stay safe and obtain access to legal aid.
Support our work with refugees

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How does it feel to be a refugee? Hear their words

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The 'I Hear You' project is a video series that highlights the real life, word-for-word stories of refugees from around the world. As they are unable to tell their stories publicly, 14 celebrities interpretate their words. Watch the videos and hear their heartbreaking stories.

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Refugee Facts

What is a Refugee?

A person forced to flee their country because of violence or persecution.

Who is a refugee?

A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so. War and ethnic, tribal and religious violence are leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries.

52% of all refugees and other people in need of international protection come from just three countries: Syria, Ukraine, and Afghanistan.

Who is an internally displaced person?

An internally displaced person, or IDP, is someone who has been forced to flee their home but never cross an international border. These individuals seek safety anywhere they can find it-in nearby towns, schools, settlements, internal camps, even forests and fields. IDPs, which include people displaced by internal strife and natural disasters, are the largest group that UNHCR assists. Unlike refugees, IDPs are not protected by international law or eligible to receive many types of aid because they are legally under the protection of their own government.

Countries with some the largest internally displaced populations are Colombia, Syria, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Yemen.

Who is a stateless person?

A stateless person is someone who is not a citizen of any country. Citizenship is the legal bond between a government and an individual, and allows for certain political, economic, social and other rights of the individual, as well as the responsibilities of both government and citizen. A person can become stateless due to a variety of reasons, including sovereign, legal, technical or administrative decisions or oversights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights underlines that "Everyone has the right to a nationality."

The true extent of statelessness is estimated to be much higher than estimated, as fewer than half of all countries in the world submit any data and some of the most populous countries in the world with large suspected stateless populations don't report on statelessness at all.

Who is an asylum seeker?

When people flee their own country and seek sanctuary in another country, they apply for asylum - the right to be recognized as a refugee and receive legal protection and material assistance. An asylum seeker must demonstrate that his or her fear of persecution in his or her home country is well-founded.

What is the 1951 Refugee Convention?

The 1951 Geneva Convention is the main international instrument of refugee law. The Convention clearly spells out who a refugee is and the kind of legal protection, other assistance and social rights he or she should receive from the countries who have signed the document. The Convention also defines a refugee's obligations to host governments and certain categories or people, such as war criminals, who do not qualify for refugee status. The Convention was limited to protecting mainly European refugees in the aftermath of World War II, but another document, the 1967 Protocol, expanded the scope of the Convention as the problem of displacement spread around the world.

Help Refugee Families

As a monthly donor, you'll become one of our most valued partners, and you'll know that every day you are helping to bring hope, comfort and support to the world's most vulnerable people.

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What is a Refugee? Definition and Meaning | USA for UNHCR

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A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality or political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so.

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Photographer Reveals Where Syrian Child Refugees Sleep | Bored Panda

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Photographer Reveals Where Syrian Child Refugees Sleep | Bored Panda

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Magnus Wennman, an award-winning photojournalist from Stockholm, has published a gutwrenching photo series revealing what is happening to the children in the Middle East and on Europe's doorstep as they flee the conflict in Syria. To create "Where The Children Sleep," he traveled throughout the regions where these children and their families are fleeing to to tell us their stories.

Lamar, 5 years old, Horgos, Serbia

Back home in Baghdad, the dolls, the toy train, and the ball are left; Lamar often talks about these items when home is mentioned. The bomb changed everything. The family was on its way to buy food when it was dropped close to their house. It was not possible to live there anymore, says Lamar's grandmother, Sara. After two attempts to cross the sea from Turkey in a small, rubber boat, they succeeded in coming here to Hungary's closed border. Now Lamar sleeps on a blanket in the forest, scared, frozen, and sad.

Abdullah, 5 years old, Belgrad, Serbia

Abdullah has a blood disease. For the last two days, he has been sleeping outside of the central station in Belgrade. He saw the killing of his sister in their home in Daraa. "He is still in shock and has nightmares every night," says his mother. Abdullah is tired and is not healthy, but his mother does not have any money to buy medicine for him.

Ahmed, 6 years old, Horgos, Serbia

It is after midnight when Ahmed falls asleep in the grass. The adults are still sitting around, formulating plans for how they are going to get out of Hungary without registering themselves with the authorities. Ahmed is six years old and carries his own bag over the long stretches that his family walks by foot. "He is brave and only cries sometimes in the evenings," says his uncle, who has taken care of Ahmed since his father was killed in their hometown Deir ez-Zor in northern Syria.

Maram, 8 years old, Amman

Eight-year-old Maram had just come home from school when the rocket hit her house. A piece of the roof landed right on top of her. Her mother took her to a field hospital, and from there she was airlifted across the border to Jordan. Head trauma caused a brain hemorrhage. For the first 11 days, Maram was in a coma. She is now conscious, but has a broken jaw and can't speak.

Ralia, 7 and Rahaf, 13 years old, Beirut

Ralia, 7, and Rahaf, 13, live on the streets of Beirut. They are from Damascus, where a grenade killed their mother and brother. Along with their father, they have been sleeping rough for a year. They huddle close together on their cardboard boxes. Rahaf says she is scared of "bad boys," at which Ralia starts crying.

Moyad, 5 years old, Amman

Moyad, 5, and his mother needed to buy flour to make a spinach pie. Hand in hand, they were on their way to the market in Dar'a. They walked past a taxi in which someone had placed a bomb. Moyad's mother died instantly. The boy, who has been airlifted to Jordan, has shrapnel lodged in his head, back and pelvis.

Walaa, 5 years old, Dar-El-Ias

Walaa, 5, wants to go home. She had her own room in Aleppo, she tells us. There, she never used to cry at bedtime. Here, in the refugee camp, she cries every night. Resting her head on the pillow is horrible, she says, because nighttime is horrible. That was when the attacks happened. By day, Walaa's mother often builds a little house out of pillows, to teach her that they are nothing to be afraid of.

Ahmad, 7 years old, Horgos/Roszke

Even sleep is not a free zone; it is then that the terror replays. Ahmad was home when the bomb hit his family's house in Idlib. Shrapnel hit him in the head, but he survived. His younger brother did not. The family had lived with war as their nearest neighbor for several years, but without a home, they had no choice. They were forced to flee. Now Ahmad lays among thousands of other refugees on the asphalt along the highway leading to Hungary's closed border. This is day 16 of their flight. The family has slept in bus shelters, on the road, and in the forest, explains Ahmad's father.

Shiraz, 9 years old, Suruc

Shiraz, 9, was three months old when she was stricken with a severe fever. The doctor diagnosed polio and advised her parents to not spend too much money on medicine for the girl who "didn't have a chance." Then the war came. Her mother, Leila, starts crying when she describes how she wrapped the girl in a blanket and carried her over the border from Kobane to Turkey. Shiraz, who can't talk, received a wooden cradle in the refugee camp. She lies there. Day and night.

Shehd, 7 years old

Shehd loves to draw, but more recently, all of her drawings have had the same theme: weapons. "She saw them all the time, they are everywhere," explains her mother when the little girl sleeps on the ground alongside Hungary's closed border. Now she does not draw at all. The family brought neither paper nor crayons with them on their flight. Shehd does not play anymore either. The escape has forced children to become adults and share concern for what happens in an hour or a day. The family has had difficulty finding food during their wandering. Some days, they have had to make do with apples they were able to pick from trees along the road. If the family had known how hard the journey would be, they would have chosen to risk their lives in Syria.

Amir, 20 months, Zahle Fayda

Amir, 20 months, was born a refugee. His mother believes her son was traumatized in the womb. "Amir has never spoken a single word," says Shahana, 32. In the plastic tent where the family now lives, Amir has no toys, but he plays with whatever he can find on the ground. "He laughs a lot, even though he doesn't talk," says his mother.

Juliana, 2 years old, Horgos, Serbia

It is 34 degrees Celcius. The flies crawl on Juliana's face and she shifts uneasily in her sleep. Juliana's family has been walking through Serbia for two days. This is the latest phase of a flee that started three months ago. The girl's mother lays her thin shawl over her daughter on the ground. Fatima calms down. A few meters away from their resting place, feet are tramping by in a never-ending flow of people. It is the end of August and Hungary is about to barricade themselves with barbed wire to shut out this stream of refugees. But for a few more days, it is possible to pass through the border city of Horgos. As soon as evening comes, Juliana's family will go for it.

Fara, 2 years old, Azraq

Fara, 2, loves soccer. Her dad tries to make balls for her by crumpling up anything he can find, but they don't last long. Every night, he says goodnight to Fara and her big sister Tisam, 9, in the hope that tomorrow will bring them a proper ball to play with. All other dreams seem to be beyond his reach, but he is not giving up on this one.

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Photographer Reveals Where Syrian Child Refugees Sleep

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Magnus Wennman, an award-winning photojournalist from Stockholm, has published a gutwrenching photo series revealing what is happening to the children in the Middle East and on Europe's doorstep as they flee the conflict in Syria. To create Where The Children Sleep, he traveled throughout the regions where these children and their families are fleeing to to tell us their stories.

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Unlike a camp, cities allow refugees to live anonymously, make money and build a better future. But they also present dangers. Refugees may be vulnerable to exploitation, arrest or detention, and can be forced to compete with the poorest local workers for the worst jobs.
At UNHCR, we work to maximise the skills, productivity and experience that displaced populations bring to urban areas, striving to help those who have lost so much to find the safety and security they deserve. This, in turn, helps to stimulate economic growth and development within host communities, while enhancing universal access to human rights.

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United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

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Unlike a camp, cities allow refugees to live anonymously, make money and build a better future. But they also present dangers. Refugees may be vulnerable to exploitation, arrest or detention, and can be forced to compete with the poorest local workers for the worst jobs.

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How do refugees survive these tough times?

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How do refugees survive these tough times?

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Moreover, there's also another 25-million 'internally displaced persons' inside their own countries which need looking after. In fact, the United Nations is constantly pounding the news media with dire reports warning of widespread famine and disease in these refugee camps. Their latest news report yesterday says that more than one-third of these refugees are no longer fed each day, let alone survive. And with famine growing worldwide, even more refugees will be created - people who will start drifting to other countries as a last-ditch survival strategy. see and see

What happens to all those refugees?

Many of these refugees end up living in camps, surviving only on daily handouts from UN-donor countries. Many are genuinely fleeing persecution, armed conflict, murder, rape, and mutilation. But what happens to those refugees who survived all this hardship, but who can't go back to their own countries? Do they just die in these camps, as the United Nations' publicity-machine so often seems to imply?

Here in Dokkum, total population 27,000, we also have about 12,000 asylum-seekers housed in the local, well-utilised asylum-seekers' centre - many are Kurds from conflict regions such Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and used to be known as Kurdistan. These refugees have their own school here and are also free to move around where-ever they wish - they aren't locked up as they are in so many other countries. And if they obtain legal asylum-seekers' status, they can work here, too.

Kurds get a raw deal

Now, if there's one nation which has for centuries, been getting a really raw deal, it must be the Kurds. This Indo-European nation can trace its history back to the Medes, 700 years before Christ. There's now some 20-million scattered all over the middle-east, yet the Kurds used to have an autonomous homeland.

They now are facing chronic suppression in many countries such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. Increasingly, their young people - denied equal opportunities in their host nations -- are also scattering into a new Kurdish diaspora all over the world. Some of these long-time refugees have even settled here in Dokkum, in the northern European climate of Friesland.

But how exactly do these refugees survive the rapidly-toughening economic times?

Hesam Kekay from Kirkuk

I asked local Kurdish refugee Hesam Kakay, whom I first met ten years ago here in Dokkum when he was a newly-arrived, penniless traveller, hoping to find a safer haven than the one provided under the now dead Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. He couldn't speak a word of Dutch then. Now he's fluent, and has his own flat in nearby Leeuwarden.

Ánd through sheer grit, a huge amount of patience and talent, this quiet, gentle man is beginning to carve out a niche for himself in the Dutch art world - although he's got a nursing diploma too, 'just in case'.

The entire Kakay clan is artistic, he says proudly. As do so many traditional north-Africans and Middle-Easterners, Hesam too would be able to list all the names of his ancestral clans. He keeps it short and easy for me though: he's is one of seven sons of the Amin Hama Kakay clan, he says. They are the direct descendants from an ancient Kurdish line of artists, sculptors and painters - and nowadays, also photographers.

And while he's a highly skilled photographer, see he much prefers to paint with acrylic, he says.

Also, he really never stops drawing. While we sat chatting in our mutual friend Gonnie Ezerman's art gallery in Dokkum, he scribbled away at these wonderful little abstract designs on scraps of paper - designs which often also show up in many of the acrylic paintings around him and painted paper sculptures displayed all over the gallery.

Democracy is pretty chaotic...

Kakay, now 40, left his home town of Kirkuk in Iraq ten years ago -- at a time when the Kurds were greatly persecuted and suppressed by the late dictator Saddam Hussein. "Now there was a mean man...' he says. His mother died when he was very young: "People still don't get old in Kirkuk, it's the deprivation and poverty.' And right now, things are pretty chaotic: "Suddenly democracy is coming at us from all sides and everybody is allowed to say everything they never were allowed to under Saddam. It will need time to settle down,' he says.

Ever since the death of their father a while back, the family has scattered all over the Kurdish diaspora worldwide: two brothers are in the United States, another one in Germany...

He started painting the minute he arrived in Dokkum in 1999 and was granted asylum status after a long wait. "I paint. It's what I do to express my feelings the best about the beloved homeland I have left behind,' he says. The Kakay clan can trace their ancestry back many centuries, when Kakay ancestors were already carving statues in their mountainous homeland region, which has now been so utterly destroyed by countless wars. "We Kakays express our deepest pain and sadness through our art,' he says. Like his older brothers, Hesam also is greatly inspired by ancient civilization and religious myths, fables and popular art alike.

He just completed his 25th exhibit within ten years in Europe see - and despite the economic times, these went better than he had expected: "I even sold a few pieces,' the soft-spoken artist said with a shy smile.

It's not easy though:

"It's a fact though that in difficult financial times, the first thing people stop buying is art. My brother Noraldeen in Germany also had an art exhibit at around the same time as mine, and he didn't sell a thing,' he said.

Wants to go back - but only to an independent Kurdistan

So how does he see his future now, with economic times clearly growing so much tougher, I asked.

He shrugs: "One thing's for sure.''I won't be going back to Iraq unless we Kurds can get our own autonomic homeland. Then we have something to go back to. I want to be a Kurd, we all want to speak our own language, which is still being suppressed widely. We want our own parliament, and rebuild our own country, the one we used to have before we were scattered so widely."

I'm an European now...

Since every government in the world seems to be so firmly opposed to letting them have their independent Kurdistan back again - what will he be doing in the meantime? I asked.

"Stop being a refugee and just get on with my life. I'm an European now,' he said.

Refugees aren't helpless:

And that's the good news which the United Nations never tells the world: namely that refugees aren't all helpless and just sitting in tents waiting for food-handouts; on the contrary, the vast majority do adapt and adjust to the new societies around them, and usually they can integrate with time and become part of the rich social fabric of our global community.

Just like Hesam and his talented brothers have already been doing over the past ten years and many millions of refugees worldwide are also doing right now. As soon as they can get out of the UN's bleak tent cities, that is.

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How do refugees survive these tough times?

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With the economic crisis hitting rich and poor citizens so hard worldwide right now - how do the world's many millions of stateless refugees survive? The UN says there are 9 million refugees, and begs for more funds because donors have stopped giving...

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“How long do refugees live in camps?” - UNHCR Northern Europe

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“How long do refugees live in camps?” - UNHCR Northern Europe

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Za’atari Camp in Jordan, home to more than 80,000 Syrian refugees

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UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is a global organisation dedicated to saving lives and protecting the rights of refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people.

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Refugees and resettlement | International Rescue Committee (IRC)

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Refugees and resettlement | International Rescue Committee (IRC)

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Refugees don't choose to leave their homes. They have to in order to protect their life and their family's. Right now there are more than 60 million forcibly displaced people in the world, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. Just over half were uprooted by conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia.

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Who are refugees and displaced persons?

They are men, women and children fleeing war, persecution and political upheaval. They are uprooted with little warning, enduring great hardship during their flight. They become refugees when they cross borders and seek safety in another country. They are displaced when they are forced to flee their homes, but remain within the borders of their native country.

The 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, as amended by its 1967 protocol defines a refugee as a person who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country..."

The United States will not recognize persons who have participated in war crimes and violations of humanitarian and human rights law, including the crime of terrorism, as refugees. They are specifically excluded from the protection accorded to refugees.

See a list of famous refugees through the ages.

What is the difference between a refugee and a migrant?

Refugees are forced to flee their homes and seek safety in another country, often times without warning. Migrants are people who make a conscious decision to leave their countries to seek a better life elsewhere.

Learn more about the difference between refugees, migrants, immigrants and asylum-seekers.

How many refugees and displaced persons are there, and who makes up the majority of the refugee population?

Right now there are 68.5 million forcibly displaced people in the world, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. Half of all refugees are children.

What are the options for resettlement?

Most refugees and displaced persons return to their communities when peace and stability return to their country. When conditions in countries of origin remain unstable or there is a danger of persecution upon repatriation, some refugees are able to stay in a refugee settlement in another country. Unfortunately, many host countries are unable to accept refugees permanently. Resettlement in a third country, such as the United States, is the last option, and is available to only a tiny fraction of the world's refugees.

The United States has a tradition of offering refuge to those fleeing persecution and war. The U.S. government maintains a long-established humanitarian program that grants sanctuary in this country to a limited number of refugees who cannot safely return home or stay in a host country. The IRC annually helps as many as 10,000 refugees resettle in the United States.

How many refugees have the opportunity to resettle?

Very few refugees are ever even considered for resettlement. There are three internationally accepted durable solutions for refugees:

Voluntary repatriation. Refugees return to their former country of nationality when conditions prevail that allow return in safety and dignity;

Local integration. Local settlement and integration of refugees in their country of first asylum upon receiving agreement from the host country;

Resettlement. Most frequently used for refugees whose life, liberty, safety, health or human rights are at risk in the country where they have sought refuge. Resettlement to a third country becomes the primary objective or priority when there is no other way to guarantee the legal or physical security of the refugee.

How does the U.S. determine if a refugee is eligible for resettlement?

Applicants for refugee admission to the U.S. must satisfy the following criteria:

The definition of a "refugee" as determined by U.S. government officials.

Be among those refugees determined by the President to be of special humanitarian concern to the U.S.

Be otherwise admissible under U.S. law.

Not be firmly resettled in any foreign country.

Although a refugee may meet the above criteria, the existence of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program does not create any entitlement for that person to be admitted to the U.S.

How many refugees does the U.S. accept for resettlement?

The United States accepts a limited number of refugees each year. The President in consultation with Congress determines the authorized target for refugee admissions through a Presidential Determination.

How do refugees make it to the United States?

The Department of State's Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) oversees the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program through U.S. embassies worldwide. The State Department develops application criteria and refugee admission levels and presents eligible cases for adjudication by officers of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

USCIS officers travel to the country of asylum to interview refugees who fall within the priorities established for the relevant nationality or region. The USCIS officers interview potential applicants to determine whether or not they are refugees as defined under U.S. law. A refugee of any nationality may be referred by UNHCR, however this does not guarantee admission to the U.S., for they must still qualify under U.S. law.

Upon completion of security and medical screening, the USCIS officer may approve the refugee's application for U.S. resettlement. After approval, arrangements are made for his/her placement with a U.S. voluntary agency and travel to the U.S.

What happens to refugees when they come to the United States?

Refugees must rebuild their lives from traumatic and tragic circumstances. The majority embrace their newly adopted homeland with tremendous energy and success. They go on to work, attend universities, build professions, purchase homes, raise children and contribute to their communities. Ultimately refugees obtain citizenship and become fully participating members of society. They become Americans.

Many refugees come to the United States without any possessions and without knowing anyone. Other refugees come here to be reunited with family members. All refugees receive limited assistance from the U.S. government and non-profit organizations like the IRC. We help refugees find housing, learn about life and customs in America, secure jobs, learn English, and become citizens. We provide most of the basic things they need to restart their lives here and we help them overcome cultural barriers so that their adjustment is as easy as possible.

What benefits do refugees receive?

The circumstances under which refugees leave their country are different from those of other immigrants. Often in fleeing persecution, they are without the luxury of bringing personal possessions or preparing themselves for life in a new culture. Recognizing this fact, the federal government provides transitional resettlement assistance to newly arrived refugees. In the first 90 days, agencies such as the IRC contract with the Department of State to provide for refugee's food, housing, employment, medical care, counseling and other services to help the refugee make a rapid transition to economic self-sufficiency.
Learn more about the IRC's refugee programs.
How can I help refugees?

Everyone can help refugees by welcoming them as new and valuable members of American society. You can help refugees by volunteering at a local resettlement agency, becoming an English tutor, a tour guide, a mentor to a family, donating money, furniture and household items, teaching other people about refugees, and employing or encouraging local businesses to employ refugees. Find volunteer opportunities at the IRC office nearest you.

You can also support the work of the IRC financially.
Read about more ways to help refugees.
Can the IRC help me get refugee status in the United States?

The International Rescue Committee does not conduct direct refugee resettlement. You must approach the nearest office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for assistance. The UNHCR will determine if your case qualifies for resettlement to any of the international resettlement countries, including the United States.

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Who are refugees and displaced persons? They are men, women and children fleeing war, persecution and political upheaval. They are uprooted with little warning, enduring great hardship during their flight. They become refugees when they cross borders and seek safety in another country.

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According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), by the end of 2015 over 65.3 million people had been forced to leave their homes. Some 21.3 million people were refugees and 2.3 million people were seeking asylum.

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Since David Cameron announced that the UK will be resettling 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next 5 years we've been asked loads of questions. What is refugee resettlement? How does it work? Who are the people coming to the UK? What happens when they get here? Here's the low-down on resettlement.
Refugees: the global context

The world is facing the greatest global refugee crisis since the Second World War.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), by the end of 2015 over 65.3 million people had been forced to leave their homes. Some 21.3 million people were refugees and 2.3 million people were seeking asylum.

Over half of the world's refugees come from just three countries - Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. The majority of the world's refugees are hosted by developing countries with Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon being the current top recipients of refugees. Turkey hosts 2.7 million refugees. Lebanon, a country the size of Wales, now hosts over a million refugees.

What is refugee resettlement?

Refugees are fleeing persecution, violence and conflict and are often unable to travel far beyond the borders of their home country. They often live in refugee camps or urban settings for years; many children have lived their entire lives in refugee camps. One of the ways in which the UN's Refugee Agency (UNHCR) helps such refugees is to offer resettlement to another country. Many refugees who are selected by the UNHCR for resettlement have health needs that cannot be met in the country where they are living; 24% of refugees submitted for resettlement are survivors of violence and/or torture.

Refugee resettlement involves the selection and transfer of refugees from a country in which they have sought protection - usually somewhere with a large number of refugees who are living in camps or urban settings - to a third country which has agreed to admit them as refugees and where they can rebuild their lives.
"If we hadn't been able come to the UK my brother might not have been alive."
Ayham was only a young man when Syria's brutal conflict began and his father was murdered. Two years ago, he and his family were resettled in the UK so that his little brother could receive treatment for leukaemia. Now Ayham works with the Refugee Council, helping other resettled Syrian refugees adjust to their new lives in Britain. Read his story.

How many refugees need to be resettled?

According to the UNHCR, of the 14.4 million refugees of concern to the UNHCR around the world, less than one per cent are submitted for resettlement - which means many refugees face a long, uncertain wait to hear if they will ever be able to rebuild their lives in safety.

Who is resettled?

Refugees are resettled if their life is at risk or they have specific additional needs and there is no hope of them ever returning home. Many refugees who are resettled are survivors of torture or other forms of violence.

Since 2014 Syria has become the largest country of origin for resettled refugees. The top countries of origin also include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Somalia and Myanmar.

Since the outbreak of the conflict in 2011, 80,000 Syrian refugees have been referred for resettlement.
Find out more about projected resettlement needs in 2017.
Where are people resettled?

According to the UNHCR the USA, followed by Canada and Australia, resettled the most refugees during 2015.

Unfortunately, Europe generally accepts very few refugees for resettlement.

In the specific case of Syrian refugees, you can see which countries have agreed to resettle Syrians here.

How many refugees are resettled in Britain?

Since 2004, Britain has been resettling around 750 refugees every year through the Gateway Protection Programme which helps resettle refugees from all over the world.

The first group of refugees to arrive for resettlement under the Gateway Programme was a group of Liberian refugees, who arrived in Sheffield on 19 March 2004. Since then, the UK has offered places via this programme to people fleeing states well known for conflict or poor human rights records, including Somalia, Myanmar, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

However, during times of crisis, Britain has operated specific resettlement programmes to help offer protection to people on a larger scale; giving homes to thousands of Vietnamese refugees, Ugandan Asians and refugees fleeing the Balkans' wars.

Following a campaign led by the Refugee Council and considerable public pressure, the Government announced in January 2014 that it would set up a special resettlement scheme to help Syrian refugees. For the first 18 months of its operation, this scheme was pitifully small in scale, resettling just over 200 refugees.

In September 2015, the Prime Minister announced the scheme would be significantly expanded to resettle 20,000 refugees by 2020. The number of Syrian refugees resettled in Britain stands at just 2,898 since the conflict began.

In January 2016, the government announced that the UK will offer safety to more refugee children and their families. The UK has asked the UN's Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to identify 'children at risk' - including unaccompanied children and those at risk of forced marriage - currently living in the Middle East and other conflict zones who could benefit from being resettled here. This is in addition to the Government's pledge to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020.

As of September 2016, none of these children had arrived in the UK.

How does resettlement in Britain work?

The UN's Refugee Agency UNHCR identifies refugees in need of resettlement in the region. They then submit these candidates to the British Government who decide which cases to accept.

Refugees who are to be resettled to Britain receive health assessments and cultural orientations prior to arrival and the International Organisation for Migration ensures their safe arrival into Britain.

A great deal of planning happens before resettled refugees arrive in Britain; local councils, service providers and charities like the Refugee Council all work together to ensure that everything is in place to ensure a smooth transition.

Resettled refugees are always met at the airport by organisations such as the Refugee Council. They are taken to their new homes - usually private lets - and they are helped to adapt to their new surroundings.

Organisations like the Refugee Council support refugees throughout their first year in the country: we offer personalised support and help people access the job market, education, healthcare and mainstream services.

Once they are settled, resettled refugees are able to begin the process of rebuilding their lives in safety; richly contributing to our country in a variety of ways. Refugees who have been resettled in Britain include people who have gone on to work in our NHS, teach our children, and open their own businesses.
How long do resettled refugees stay?
Refugees being resettled through Britain's Gateway programme arrive with indefinite leave to remain. That means they can stay forever, in acknowledgment that the only reason they are coming to the UK is because the UN's Refugee Agency has decided it's not safe for them to keep living in a refugee camp or precarious urban situation and there is very little hope of them ever returning home.

Syrian refugees arriving through the Government's Vulnerable Person's Relocation Scheme are granted five years' Humanitarian Protection. Unlike refugees from other countries who are resettled through the Gateway Programme, Syrians have been displaced for a relatively short period of time and the British Government hopes that in the future they will be able to return to Syria.

Of course, almost all refugees dream of going home one day when it's safe to do so.

What rights do resettled refugees have?

All refugees, including those who are resettled through both the Gateway Protection Programme and the Syrian Vulnerable Person's Relocation Scheme are able to work and access mainstream services. However, Humanitarian Protection means the Syrians resettled here have slightly different entitlements e.g. to higher education.

How is resettlement different to asylum?

Fundamentally, there is little difference between resettled refugees and refugees who are granted asylum: they are often fleeing exactly the same conflicts, exactly the same persecution though their journeys to safety are very different.

Refugee resettlement and different countries' asylum systems are separate processes.

Refugees who are resettled are usually identified as refugees in camps near to their country of origin, before being flown to the country where they are being resettled. In Britain, people who are resettled here are already recognised as refugees prior to their arrival in the country, and they do not go through the asylum system.
Read the story of our colleague Akoi, who lived in a refugee camp for 12 years before being resettled to Britain.
Under international law, anyone has the right to claim asylum in Britain. However, as with most other European countries, a refugee has to have already arrived in Britain before they are able to make a claim for asylum.

Britain offers no 'asylum visa' - this means there are no safe, legal ways for a refugee to reach Britain in order to claim asylum. Unlike resettled refugees, refugees who claim asylum in Britain have often undertaken a perilous journey at the hands of smugglers before arriving here.
"I was desperate for my daughters just to survive." Read the story of Aziz, who fled Iran and faced a desperate journey with his family.
Britain's asylum system is tough and complex and refugee protection is only granted to asylum seekers who can show the Government that they have a well founded fear of persecution in their home country. There are many flaws in the Government's decision making process, and many people have to appeal to the courts in order to be recognised as refugees. You can read more about the asylum system and how it works here. People who are granted asylum receive five years' refugee protection, after which they can apply for indefinite leave to remain.

The other main difference between refugees who are resettled here and refugees who are granted asylum is the support they receive once they have been recognised as a refugee.

As you have read, resettled refugees are provided with housing and receive a year of specialist support to help them access the job market and mainstream services.

None of this support is available for refugees who have been granted asylum and they are left to fend for themselves. Many newly granted refugees find themselves homeless and destitute precisely at the point when the British Government accepts they need protection. Read more about the problems new refugees face here.

What more could Britain be doing?

Britain has a proud tradition of protecting refugees but given the scale of the global refugee crisis facing the world, we could be doing much more to help.
Read about some of the things we're calling for Britain to do here. Find out more about our work. Subscribe to our e-newsletter today.

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Since David Cameron announced that the UK will be resettling 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next 5 years we've been asked loads of questions. What is refugee resettlement? How does it work? Who are the people coming to the UK? What happens when they get here? Here's the low-down on resettlement.

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Where the world’s refugees live - The Washington Post

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Where the world’s refugees live - The Washington Post

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Turkey has the largest refugee population with over 2 million.

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There's a critical factor that affects America's role in the global refugee crisis that often goes unmentioned: the Atlantic Ocean.

Data compiled by the United Nations' refugee agency allows us to map the distribution of refugees by country. As you might expect, many are centered in the countries that adjoin areas of conflict.

While the United States is home to more refugees than other countries in the Western Hemisphere, the number of refugees who have settled in the United States trails 16 countries. Those include Germany and Russia - large countries that are much more accessible from recent areas of conflict, like Syria.

It's worth comparing those refugee populations with the populations of the countries themselves. The two largest countries are China and India, as you may remember from high school. The United States is the third-largest country in the world, according to estimates from the CIA World Factbook.

Our relatively small population of refugees and our relatively large overall population means that the United States has one of the lower refugee populations as a percentage of our overall population.

There are 69 other countries that have a larger ratio of refugees to their populations.

Which countries? Mostly ones that are able to be reached by land from regions of conflict.

As Canada and Australia make clear, though, that's not always the case.

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Analysis | Where the world's refugees live

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A look at the countries that have the most refugees as a percentage of their total population.

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Rescue facts: Where do refugees live? | International Rescue Committee (IRC)

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Rescue facts: Where do refugees live? | International Rescue Committee (IRC)

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More than 60 percent of refugees live in an urban area or city-not in a refugee camp? Here are the facts you need to know about where refugees live.

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WHAT DO SYRIAN REFUGEES EAT? - Don't Believe in Jet Lag

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WHAT DO SYRIAN REFUGEES EAT? - Don't Believe in Jet Lag

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Food is given either by monthly food vouchers by the UN or donated food packages.

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We've often asked ourselves the question above. Food holds an important place in the Levant. In this region of the world, it doesn't matter how little food a family has, they will systematically welcome you with open arms and beg you to stay for supper - and it will ALWAYS be delicious. So what happens to those who were forced to flee their country, which serves one of the best cuisines in the world?

It's been calculated that the food energy requirements for refugees (men and women) in emergencies is 2100 calories per person per day.

Food is donated to refugees in two different ways -but never both together. Either they receive food vouchers, which are generally provided by the United Nation's through other organizations. Each family member gets one monthly food voucher, which they can redeem at selected vendors in the area. Those who work receive smaller amounts - as the World Food Program wants to help refugees attain independence.

Families can also receive food packages, which are donated monthly. The same packages are donated to each family, no matter its size, meaning that a family of 5 receives the same quantities as a family of 8.

The table below shows the content of a food package donated by the Good Shepherds Sisters to refugees in the Deir el Ahmar town in the Bekaa valley:

The packages can change slightly. If a family requests lentils instead of flour, the organization is happy to assist.
Please support The Good shepherd Sisters community center in Deir el Ahmar, located in the Bekaa valley. The organization schools 350 Syrian refugees (from the ages of 6 to 12). We aim to raise $8750, which is the sum needed to feed the pupils warm meals for a week. If you would like to make a difference in these children's lives: .

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WHAT DO SYRIAN REFUGEES EAT? - Don't Believe in Jet Lag

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We've often asked ourselves the question above. Food holds an important place in the Levant. In this region of the world, it doesn't matter how little food a family has, they will systematically welcome you with open arms and beg you to stay for supper - and it will ALWAYS be delicious.