Nearly 60 million people are currently displaced from their homes by war and persecution — more than at any time since World War II. Half are children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/magazine/the-displaced-hana.html
The Displaced – Hana
At 12, she has lived one-quarter of her life in a debilitating state of suspension as a Syrian refugee in Lebanon.
Hana Abdullah left her home in Mabrouka, a small Syrian town, three years ago, and now lives with her extended family in a makeshift tent settlement in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Photographs by LYNSEY ADDARIO; Text by SUSAN DOMINUS – NOV. 5, 2015
t 4:45 in the morning on a Saturday in early August, stars were still bright in the sky above a refugee settlement in rural Lebanon where Hana Abdullah, a 12-year-old girl from Syria, now lives. The morning call to prayer floated down a dusty road and wound its way around the mostly silent tents. At 5 o’clock, Hana was still sleeping on her bamboo mat by the edge of her family’s tent, her arms folded, her hands under her head. Her baby brother and three of her four sisters slept nearby. Many mornings Hana was up at 4 o’clock. She worked in the nearby fields of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, picking fruits or vegetables, and everyone started early. But today the truck that would take her there was late. Now came its familiar rumble, next the crunching of gravel: She stirred, her mouth twitched, her eyelids fluttered. Then she was up, vertical in one swift movement, stretching, pulling on a hat from a stash of her belongings. She grabbed lunch — a tomato, and a pita she folded around a potato — and ducked outside to wait on one of the benches in front of her tent.
Mustafa, Hana’s 10-year-old cousin, arrived moments later, along with his mother, Suraiya, who began tying the purple laces on his sneakers. He still wore the same green flannel pajamas he had worn for days; clothing was in short supply. Five minutes later, Hana’s 10-year-old cousin Ala’a arrived, prompting Hana’s first smile of the day. A small crowd quickly formed. Soon enough, the temperature would begin to soar, but now there was a chill in the air, and when people started moving toward the truck, Hana ran: She and Mustafa liked to sit with their backs against the cab, so the others would shelter them from the wind.
Today they were picking cucumbers. Earlier in the season, which began in the spring, they picked almonds, a job Hana sometimes missed — at least the trees offered some shade from the sun. Then again, the almonds were stubborn, resisting her fingers. Almonds wanted to stay where they were, attached to the branches that were attached to the anchoring trunk.
Picking plums was not easy work, either. Hana found it tiring, making her way up the tree and then stretching and straining to reach some far branch, and then scrambling down so that she could look up and see what fruit she had missed. Down, up, down, up, down, up. Climbing trees was fun, but not 30 times a day in searing heat, with that Lebanese woman, that mean old maid, yelling at her every time she slowed down. Yalla, yalla, yalla! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! Sometimes girls saw black, fainted and were carried, limp, into a van and then driven to a nearby clinic. Thank God, Hana thought, never her.
At 5:45, they arrived at the cucumber field and spread out along the rows of vegetables. They would work there for the next five or six hours, until they went home for their midday break.
Hana was a carrier. She walked up and down the rows of cucumbers, stopping at each picker who had a full bucket. The pickers dumped their vegetables into Hana’s crate, and then, when that was full — it sometimes weighed 20 pounds or more — she carried it on her bony shoulder, heading toward Suraiya, Mustafa’s mother, who sat at the edge of the field and sorted the cucumbers by size. Back and forth Hana went along a 50-yard path, zigzagging, sidestepping roots and cucumbers. In the early morning, with a frosty white moon still hanging in the pink sky, the walk to unload the cucumbers was not far. But with every trip, the temperature rose, the trek grew longer and Suraiya seemed to get smaller. By midmorning, Hana’s shoulder and back ached, and she was thirsty — there was never enough water. Time sometimes crawled at the settlement, but here, in the fields, its pace felt willfully slow, punishing. By 10:30 a.m., the temperature was high, and Hana was staggering ever so slightly, her breath loud.
Once, as Hana was picking plums and staring at a branch, she suddenly remembered that a tree on her family’s property back home in Syria had a swing. We could have one here, she thought — we could take one of these big buckets for carrying plums and attach it to a rope! We could take turns, maybe during a break — and then she jolted out of her daydream. “Idiot,” she told herself, “who’s going to let you have a swing here?” She went back to work, picking plums, counting the hours until she could return to a home that was really no home at all.
Hana came from Mabrouka, a small town in northeast Syria. She last saw her home three years ago, when she was 9 — so long ago, in the life of a girl her age, that she had forgotten as much as she remembered. From the fields where she picked cucumbers, she could see the mountains that divide Lebanon from Syria; a long drive past those mountains was her childhood home in the country. It was almost certainly rubble now, a pile of rocks burying all they left behind: Hana’s favorite doll, dressed like a queen, with long hair down to her waist; the crystal glasses the family rarely used; the proper mattresses; the flush toilet. Towels. Closets. She loved her childhood home, but if she could build a dream house now, it would have big gates, at least three, and only her fingerprint would open them. The locks would recognize only her voice when she called out, “Open, Sesame!”
It troubled Hana’s father, she knew, that her 5-year-old sister, Haifa, thought this was how they had always lived: in this makeshift settlement, in a tent of nylon and wood, alongside some 40 other tents, most of them inhabited by members of Hana’s extended family. In summer, they felt claustrophobic inside the airless homes; in winter, they worried about the roofs collapsing from the weight of the snow. Last winter, the children frequently scrambled up to clear the snow with their bare hands, waiting, all season long, for gloves that an aid agency had promised; by the time the gloves arrived, it was spring.
In the Bekaa Valley, many refugee children do farm work to help support their families. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Haifa did not remember that they once had air conditioning, or a Chevy parked in front of the house, or childhoods of nothing but play and school. Why, Hana often wondered, had she not appreciated school back in Syria? In Mabrouka, Hana never had to miss school to work — she never worked at all, although sometimes, her dad would give his children some loose change if they brought him a cold drink.
They left that life in the spring of 2012. Hana said she understood little about the political situation that kept her far from home. The protest movement started in Syria in 2011, with the uprising of citizens opposing President Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive government. By the following year, occupied with the uprising elsewhere, Assad’s security forces started withdrawing from rural pockets of Hasaka, the province where Hana’s family lived, and parts of the area quickly felt unsafe: Roaming armed gangs, whose loyalties were not always clear, were extorting farmers, like Hana’s father, for the right to farm their own land. Hana’s family began to hear about clashes between the Sunni Arab opposition and the government. Hana’s father, who had already started working in Lebanon to make extra money, told her mother it was time for them to leave. Hana wanted to bring all her toys, all her dolls, but her mother told her no, there would be toys where they were going. Hana and her siblings had visited their father in Lebanon before, and she did not realize she would probably never return to that house again.
They left for Lebanon by bus. When they reached the border, traffic was at a standstill. Many of the people left their cars, playing cards and picnicking by the side of the road. Her family did the same, relaxing and stretching their legs. Hana heard gunshots; maybe some soldiers near the border were doing some drills, she thought. The mood was almost festive — she was going to see her father soon, for the first time in months. She thought she should look nice for him, so she ran to the bus to find her comb. From the bus, she heard more gunshots and looked outside. She remembers seeing men firing back and forth with Syrian soldiers. Then suddenly she was in the bus driver’s arms, and he was running, carrying her away from the bus with its full tank of gas. Outside, bullets were flying, and before she understood what was happening, she was climbing into a giant cement pipe along with two of her siblings and her mother, all of them cramped in the dark, unable to move, everyone howling or sobbing. “It would have been better to die in our home than die like this,” she screamed at her mother. “Why did you bring us here?”
They ran to an abandoned building to wait out the shooting; how long it lasted, she could not say. Eventually they got back on the bus. That day, her life as a refugee began. She entered a new world, and she never stopped wishing she could return to the old one.
Everyone at the settlement had known that kind of terror. “Please don’t tell me your story,” she would say to her friends, “because if you do, it will make me think of what happened to me.” And then she would tell them exactly what had happened to her. Whenever a disturbing news story about Syria played on a television they had in the tent, the children cried. Hana, too — not so much because they were all disturbed by the latest horror, she thought, but because they were reliving their own.
One of her favorite cousins at the settlement was Abboudi, who was also 12. One day, when he was still living in Syria, militia fighters in masks — presumably extremists in the opposition — walked into his school pulling a Syrian Army soldier. The men in masks forced the students to form a circle in the courtyard. They stood behind the students to make sure they could not run away. Then they shot the man in the back of the head, and cut his head off, to send a message to anyone sympathetic to the government. For Abboudi, that was the end of his childhood as he knew it. He never returned to school in Syria, and several months later, his family joined Hana’s at the settlement.
Hana felt particularly protective toward her cousin Marah, Mustafa’s sister, who was 13 and had been one of her closest playmates back in Mabrouka. Marah’s school, too, had been overrun by men in masks with guns. Now the field labor, for her, was its own kind of trial. It was tough for everyone, but somehow, especially so for Marah. She could not withstand the sun, the physical work itself, the yelling from the supervisor. Hana would throw her arm around Marah on the bumpy truck, as they headed out to the fields, holding her as she would a much smaller child.
Hana holding her cousin Marah as they make the bumpy ride to work in a plum orchard. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
In Syria, Marah’s father was the one who owned the land, who employed the workers — dozens of them. Now her father was gaunt from tuberculosis, and had nothing; now they were the workers, Marah and her mother and her brother. The supervisor yelled at them — cursed at them! Blasphemed at them! — if he thought they were not working hard enough. Marah had succumbed to sunstroke three times already, woozy, nauseated, close to collapse. When her mother took her to the clinic, even the doctor insulted them, lecturing her mother about sending her daughter off to do child labor. Suraiya, poised and elegant, showed no rage but simply explained that without the money Marah made at work, the family would not have enough to eat through the winter.
For a long time, it seemed to Marah that they should just go back to Syria. They would not have to join one side or another — they could just go back to their big house with the sunny eat-in kitchen and its comfortable couch and stay there, quietly. They would not bother anyone, and no one would curse at them and all would be well. Finally, she asked her mother why they could not just do so. “Because they will do worse than yell at us,” Suraiya told her. “They will cut off our heads.” Marah never asked to go back to Syria again.
There are currently estimated to be 30 million children who have been displaced by war — children longing for home, or too terrified to think of home, or trying to forget home and settle somewhere new.
More than from any other country, they come from Syria: Since the war started in 2011, more than four million Syrians have fled the country, at least half of whom are thought to be children. What started as a protest movement had become, by 2013, a full-blown civil war, with various opposition and extremist groups fighting one another as well as the government. Recently violence has spiked along with poverty in Syria; Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan have also tightened their borders, which has compelled more and more Syrians to make the treacherous journey to Western Europe.
But the vast majority of Syrian refugee children — some two million, according to a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimate — have already settled in those nearby countries. There, they endure, with their families, the slow grind of lives in limbo. In Turkey and Jordan, the U.N.H.C.R. or the local government has built sprawling refugee camps; Lebanon has not allowed or built these camps, for fear of creating a permanent Syrian population in this small country (already, at least one million Syrian refugees have arrived in Lebanon, a country of four and a half million). So vulnerable families build haphazard housing, tents that clutter fields by the side of the road, or squat in abandoned buildings. In Lebanon’s cities, the more desperate Syrian children sell paper flowers and beg in the streets long into the night.
Unlike the children en route to Europe, or arriving in Europe, Hana and those like her suffer through a waiting game. Hana seems sustained by an ever-waning sense of hope that she can eventually go home to recapture some of what has been lost, while knowing all the while that already, so early in her life, so much is gone for good.
Inside the settlement, Hana was someone. She was a hand-on-hip kind of girl, the kind whom other children naturally let mediate their disputes. She pierced girls’ ears — only she had the stomach for it — and when she finished her own work in the field, she rushed to help Ala’a and Ala’a’s twin sister, Wala’a, so they, too, could have a break
Her father was someone there, too: the shawish, a leader and the middleman who arranged for his extended family to find work in the fields. Her uncles were the pillars of their communities back in Syria: a high-school principal, the town mayor. Outside the settlement, that meant nothing. “ISIS scum,” a Lebanese man once spat at her father. This was as baffling as it was enraging, since no one hated ISIS more than they all did. Before they moved to the settlement, they lived in two others: Each was set aflame — most likely, she had been told, by Lebanese who did not want them there.
It is illegal for the Syrian refugees to work in Lebanon, which meant the supervisors could treat them badly — sometimes they didn’t pay them after they worked long days. One afternoon, Ala’a and Wala’a came back from picking chickpeas looking wild-eyed. The supervisor who was renting the land had been furious with the group, ostensibly for asking for cold water, but most likely because he realized he had waited too long to harvest his chickpeas, and now they were useless. In a fury, he set fire to a pile of crates, threatening to burn the field along with everyone in it. Usually, Hana hoped to work with Ala’a and Wala’a, but she was glad she had not been there that day.
If Hana was afraid of the supervisors, she never let on. She described herself as “strong of heart,” which is why she was the one, on one of the hottest days, to ask for more water on behalf of the group. “What are you, stupid?” the supervisor barked at her. “I don’t have time to go to the store and back to get you more water.” But she would not be humiliated. She kept working, stone-faced.
The work had gotten easier over time, which was not to say it was ever easy. “It’s better than begging for bread,” Suraiya said. The aid each person received from the World Food Program had dwindled to $14 a month — even Hana knew that was not enough for the families to get by, especially in Lebanon, where prices were high. (The W.F.P. has recently raised the allotment to $21.) So the children worked and the mothers worked. Some of the fathers worked in the field, too — but the Lebanese supervisors, Hana’s father said, preferred to hire children and mothers, who were cheaper, and easier to boss around.
“If you’ve lost your gold, you can find it in the jewelry shop,” the mother of one of Hana’s friends sometimes sang, as she picked cucumbers. “If you lose a child, you might forget. But if you lose your country, how will you find your country?” It was a song from Iraq, an Iraqi refugee’s lament, but it played constantly on the radio stations Syrians listened to. Everyone knew the words.
One long day in the plum arbors, the supervisor told the group of workers from the settlement that each person needed to fill 30 crates with plums. So Hana worked hard and fast to finish, only to be told she needed to fill another 10. Then it was another 10. Ten more. Then it was five. Finally, for the first and only time at work, Hana lost control: “I can’t fill any more crates!” she screamed. As soon as she did, she said, she felt frightened: How would the supervisor react? The supervisor stared at her, furious. Hana got hold of herself; she spoke to the supervisor with some command of her own. “Just tell me, honestly,” Hana said to her. “How many more crates?” She could take almost anything if only she knew: How much more?
Home from the cucumber fields one afternoon this summer, Hana washed her face and guzzled a large bottle of water. Her father worried about the water. He said it had been tested and found contaminated: Two or three people at a time were always sick at the settlement, but no one ever knew whether it was from sunstroke or bad water. But it was all they had; water shortages were already a problem in Lebanon before its population exploded with the start of the Syrian war.
More photos & the rest of Hana’s Story at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/magazine/the-displaced-hana.html
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