The misery of refugee life in Lebanon
Joe Shute sees how one Telegraph -backed charity is helping to alleviate the appalling conditions endured by refugees in Lebanon
‘Idon’t like to cry in front of people,” says Amal Shami, an elegant 54-year-old whose intelligent eyes are framed by a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles. So when, almost inevitably, she does weep during our conversation, Amal clasps her face in her hands and turns to the cracked concrete wall of the shack she currently calls home.
In the room next to us, her disabled daughter Horie (confined to a wheelchair after being born starved of oxygen to her brain) and two grandchildren, Weal, four, and Miral, two, watch silently. Tears are part of the fabric of the Slum of Slaves.
This labyrinthian shanty town in Lebanon’s northernmost city, Tripoli, earned its nickname from the African slave ships that used to dock here in previous centuries. One of the few signs of modernity is the electrical cables that snake along every alleyway, hooked up to illegal supplies. Otherwise, hundreds of people are crammed into decaying tenements in appalling conditions that make this slum look as if it were from a bygone age.
But instead, it grows. Many of the residents are Syrians, including Amal and her family, who came here three-and-a-half years ago.
An estimated 1.5 million refugees (1.1 million officially) from the war across the border have ended up in Lebanon, but the country has not provided a single official refugee camp. As a result, families pay private landlords to live in squalid shacks, sheds and tents. When it rains, it floods; and when the temperatures plunge – as they do at this time of year – family members must huddle together for warmth.
This winter CARE International UK, which the Telegraph is supporting for its Christmas Charity Appeal, is working around the refugee slums in Lebanon to make basic yet lifesaving improvements. The charity is installing water tanks and heaters, shoring up holes in rickety walls, providing blankets and fixing leaky roofs. Some 1,500 families around Tripoli have already benefited.
The former home Amal and her husband Majed lived in near to the Syrian city of Homs was palatial in comparison: three bedrooms, a kitchen, entrance hall, roof terrace and a wonderful garden filled with foxgloves and roses. War has destroyed that, along with everything else.
Her husband still risks his life driving trucks on trading routes into Syria to earn $250 a month – most of which goes on the rent for their cramped home. But the rest of the family are unable to find work in a country where Syrian refugees are effectively excluded from employment – officially, at least.
“When we arrived, I had a lot of gold, but I’ve been selling it off to provide for my family,” says Amal. “It is so humiliating when you apply for a job and people say, ‘You’re Syrian, we can’t hire you.’ ”
A few miles away is another slum bearing an unwanted nickname. Tin Neighbourhood sprawls near to a CARE International UK is a beneficiary of the Telegraph’s Christmas Charity Appeal 2015. For details, and to make a donation, see the page opposite, or go to telegraph. co.uk/charity seaside theme park and overlooks a stretch of beach befouled by dumped human waste. Its name comes from the patchwork of corrugated metal roofs that stretches out over an area the size of several football pitches. Some 2,500 families live here; one third are Syrian, the rest are Lebanese, and serve as a reminder of the country’s own difficult recent past.
Mahaoish and Fatima Hatab and their son Mohammed, two, came from Syria in 2014 after their house was destroyed. “We didn’t know who was bombing whom, but there were so many shells,” says Fatima.
As Mohammed plays in the dust outside their one-room shack, Fatima tells me she is five months’ pregnant. She fears she won’t even be able to afford to feed her newborn, let alone pay for school fees. The rent to the landlord who owns the land on which their shack is built is $130 a month, even though the roof has holes the size of a child’s fist, and mice make forays across the floor on which they sleep under a pile of blankets. This winter, at least, CARE will fix the ceiling to ensure that the family has that one basic comfort.
Back in Syria, Mahaoish worked to support his family as a primary school teacher. Now the best employment he can secure is cleaning classrooms at a university in Tripoli, for which he is paid $330 a month. “Just imagine that you’re a person who used to be well respected and at the top end of society,” he tells me, speaking English in a soft voice. “Now my family and I are even underneath the bottom.”
The last they heard from their respective families, they were living in tents in desert encampments in Syria. Being able to return to them in safety is all Mahaoish and Fatima discuss, night after night, as the rain streams down the inside of their walls.
The difficulty for Syrians in securing gainful employment in Lebanon means many more are drawn up from the city slums to work as agricultural labourers in the hills above Tripoli, where temperatures in winter plunge well below freezing.
It is here where Bejhar Abead, his wife Radwan and their two sons, Khoder (one-and-a-half) and Youssef (four months), live in one room in a crumbling farm outhouse. Their former home was destroyed two years ago when a shell landed on it at 3am. Bejhar and his pregnant wife grabbed a suitcase of clothes and ran.
Nowadays, the 40-year-old earns $13 a day picking fruit in the pomegranate orchards and olive groves, but the month before Christmas he fell from a tree and severely hurt his back. The family are already three months behind on the $210 rent. Like many Syrian refugees in Lebanon, they have also been unable to pay the annual $200 fee to register with the authorities, so are now living illegally, in fear of arrest.
CARE has helped to install a water tank, but the family still cannot afford an oil heater. “We’re worried about the cold weather,” Bejhar says, wrapped in a blanket and woollen hat. “I can’t afford a heater or fuel for a heater, so how do we keep warm?”
But as Youssef screams in the background, Bejhar admits his greatest concern is running out of money to pay for formula milk.
“The baby’s stomach is always swollen,” he says. “We have to buy milk for the child before anything.”
It is a blessing, in one sense, that the ongoing struggle to survive keeps at bay the most painful memories of home. When Bejhar does think of Syria, he feels nothing but despair.
“We had stability,” he says. “Now we don’t have a hope of tomorrow.”
‘Imagine going from the top of society to beneath the bottom’