Healthy

Bekaa Valley, Lebanon - March 2018

Unaccessible health system and total lack of job opportunities calls into question the choice to stay or risking everything on the way back to Syria. A few kilometers from the border with Syria, in the Beka Valley syrian refugee centers, you must always stay perfectly healthy.  It's a group of small compounds, each hosting about 250 people. As soon as children get out of sight parents get worried, that happens everywhere. But here, if you get hurt or sick there is no doctor to take care of you. The NGOs cards for free access to Lebanese public health care dated back to 2011 have expired and the emergency line is dead. So far Humanitarian Organizations have been able to work regularly, providing food, latrines, tents, and even though sometimes they have to eke out water, supplies still arrive. Nevertheless Lebanese law requires a rent for the land where centers have been located and guests have been piling up debts: there's no way of repaying local government, most of men just hoe the ground in the fields for about 3 or 5 hours on a good day, and when the landlords have at least something to pay them with. Whenever children play hide and seek, parents can't limit their worries. They try their best to let them grow carefree but they always look at them wondering what to do to keep them safe. So far no outbreaks occurred, but hygiene's and nutrition's precarious conditions put at risk the lives of all the members of the community, including the elderly and those who can work. Total lack of any chance of treatment forced some to adventure up to the mountains trying to get back to Syria clandestinely. There is no chance to pass the frontiers without paying off the debts with the local government. Some others want to go back to Syria before getting sick, leaving behind their shelters. Among them, there are those who left something in their mother country, and some that managed to sell the house that was left in Syria for little money after fleeing to Lebanon, through intermediaries or acquaintances who were still in Syrian territories. Despite the conditions of Syrian hospitals in some areas of the country, at least there these refugees would be legitimate citizens with rightful access to public health. But the trip to Syria is dangerous and some die on the way. Whenever one decides to cross the border, he climbs onto a donkey, or a friend drives him up to the mountains. Then a motorcycle lies there, half-hidden, to avoid any possible temptation to be reused. Everybody tell stories about friends or relatives who disappeared: they talk about the cold and the hunger that caught them on the way, about the attacks of various terrorist groups on the Syrian side, or about arrests on the border... some have also good stories, like the one about a girl who made it to Syria by hitchhiking and now she's a nurse in a Syrian hospital. Even though she cannot make ends meet, at least they say she's helping her people again. These are just stories, and nobody knows what's best to do. Everybody just knows that they are not going to be helped any more than they are getting now. And mothers can only hope for their children to stay healthy.