Activities at Yaabad School, just outside of Shatila camp. Copyright: Seenaryo, August 2015“These boys had shot up like grass all along the streets of the deserted villages, where the bombing never stopped… Everywhere overflowed with them, as if they had all been suddenly abandoned and had never been anyone’s children. They were the children of chance, living in the hope that an opportunity would come their way, which would uproot them from the ground and toss them into a more welcoming world than this one.” - Samar Yazbek, The Crossing: My Journey into the Shattered Heart of Syria
I first came to Beirut in 2007. I was struck, at the time, by the lack of homelessness in the city. One could walk from one end to the other and see far fewer people sleeping rough than on a similar walk in London, or Paris. The same was true, if not more so, of Damascus.
Now, eight years later – half of those years lived in Lebanon and Syria – life in the city has changed. Slowly, in late 2011, residents began to meet women begging under motorway bridges, saw the ranks of men waiting for temporary work on the roadside swell, and most noticeable were the children everywhere living the lives of adults: selling roses, washing windscreens, hawking ten packs of superglue or beard trimmers or a plastic gadget, sleeping rough.
