“[The journalist] told me to repeat and say ‘as a Syrian refugee’ […] She said you have to say ‘Me, as a Syrian refugee...’ I didn't say ‘Syrian refugee’, I just said ‘as a Syrian’ because the word refugee bothers me.”
This is how fifteen-year-old Reem recounts her experience with a journalist interviewing her about a computer workshop run by a local NGO in the Bekaa valley, Lebanon. Reem fled Homs in Syria with her family in 2013 and her story is one of many. More precisely, it is one among over 26 million men, women, children and young people worldwide who are too often reduced to their condition as refugees.
Lebanon hosts the largest refugee population per capita in the world. After the 2011 uprising against the Syrian regime and its transformation into an armed conflict, more than one million people from Syria fled to Lebanon, according to the Lebanese government and the UNHCR.
