Rebuilding Syria: Thousands of children have spent months hiding in basements

EARLIER this month, the world’s eyes were on Syria.

Shocking footage emerged from the war-torn Middle Eastern nation: children crumpled on the ground, their skin yellow and their mouths foaming, in the wake of an alleged chemical attack.

Britain was quick to condemn the attack - thought to have been carried out by the Assad regime against the rebel-held village of Douma, in the volatile Eastern Ghouta region.

At least 70 people are known to have died, many of them children, and the West responded with force, targeting regime bases with British, American and French coalition air strikes.

Then the dust settled, and the headlines stopped.

But on the ground in Eastern Ghouta, near the Syrian capital of Damascus, the effects of years of war are still being felt.

Eastern Ghouta was a rebel-held zone fighting against Assad, and the whole area, including its civilian population, had been under siege by the regime since 2013.

Bombings had become commonplace and civilians have been pouring out of Eastern Ghouta since the Syrian government allowed the evacuation of some 50,000 people from the region.

Bedraggled, desperate and shell-shocked, these shaken civilians started to pour out from Eastern Ghouta towards Damascus and have relied on aid workers to look after them.

Here, Rana, 33, a Unicef Child Protection Officer from Homs and on the ground in Damascus, reveals what life in Syria has been like in the wake of ongoing atrocities...

AFTER five years under siege, and harrowing recent weeks of fighting and bombardment, an agreement had finally been reached so civilians could leave Eastern Ghouta.

It was early evening, and we were at a collective shelter in the outskirts of Damascus, waiting for the long lines of buses bringing these families to safety.

There was a palpable sense of relief amongst those who were arriving.

Many had spent months living in basements, hiding from constant attacks and only venturing out to get what little water and supplies they could find during lulls in the fighting.

Some of these basements were sheltering up to 200 people in humid, cold conditions with only one toilet to share.

“We can finally see the sky,” a mother told me as she walked with her daughter, husband and elderly mother towards the room they had been assigned at the shelter.

But for many of the 80,000 evacuees, getting here wasn’t straightforward.

Eastern Ghouta is made up of several towns and villages under control of various factions that don’t always agree among themselves.

For some families, this meant walking through areas where they were shot at or caught amidst fighting.

Many only reached me and my colleagues after a journey that took many long hours – if not days.

The rush to safety
Our teams have been here since the displaced families started arriving at the shelters, making sure people have the water, sanitation, health and protection services they need.

Many of these shelters had been identified just days before; they were barely prepared to receive such a large number of people.

The first weeks were very chaotic.

Emergency toilets were being installed, water tanks hoisted on top of roofs, trucks of water and food were ready to be unloaded.

The rush to safety
Our teams have been here since the displaced families started arriving at the shelters, making sure people have the water, sanitation, health and protection services they need.

Many of these shelters had been identified just days before; they were barely prepared to receive such a large number of people.

The first weeks were very chaotic.

Emergency toilets were being installed, water tanks hoisted on top of roofs, trucks of water and food were ready to be unloaded.

Children scarred by war
But as tired and weary parents tried to figure out what to do next, children revelled in their new freedom.

School-age girls and boys ran around the crowded shelters using anything and everything as a playground: bundles of blankets were re-purposed as horses or used as jungle gyms to climb on.

I was deeply relieved to hear happy shouts as they played.

Last time I met children from Eastern Ghouta was in June 2016. Eastern Ghouta was still under siege and the UN was only able to access the area through convoys to bring in supplies.

No child should ever face what those children were going through – violence, loss, deprivation, hunger.

Rather than talking about favourite games and friends they told me about adult concerns: how expensive basic foods like bread had become because of the tightening siege (the years of siege meant that food supplies were hard to come by).

In January this year, basic items like bread or rice cost ten times more in Eastern Ghouta than elsewhere in the country.

But at the shelter, there was no more talk of hunger: “I had a sandwich this morning,” one boy told me, “Back home my mother would make us a soup out of wheat and sugar and that was the one meal we would have in a day.”

Another girl asked me with disbelief whether I had seen the price of biscuits in the little shop in the shelter – five times cheaper than in Eastern Ghouta.

Rebuilding lives
During the siege, medical care was a huge challenge as well.

In one of the shelters I met the mother of 13-year-old Ahmad.

He was lying on a mattress at the corner of the room with his head and arm wrapped in bandages.

Days before the humanitarian exits were opened, the building where Ahmad’s family lived was hit and the walls of their living room collapsed.

Ahmad was under one of these walls. “If his father didn’t see his hand peeking out of the wall, we wouldn’t have found him at all,” says Ahmad’s mother.

“There were no hospitals in East Ghouta,” she adds. “When we heard that we could leave, we carried Ahmad on our backs and he was taken to hospital when we arrived at the shelter.”

We noticed that when children first arrived, they wouldn’t talk to other children if they were from different communities or towns; years of fear and violence made them very weary of other communities.

But now, children now participate in art, music or sports activities – forging new friendships to play, share and learn together.

Amid the suffering that I witnessed, one thing that filled me with hope was that most school-aged children had at least learned some basic reading and writing skills.

Even during the long months of hiding from the fighting in basements in Eastern Ghouta, mothers had set-up community circles for their children to continue learning.

The future of Syria
Twelve-year-old Shaima told me that for a while, before the schools closed completely because of the fighting, they would go to school at five in the morning and come back to the basements at eight – before the fighting would start.

But now they are safe, mothers wanted to know when a school would open in the shelters, eager to ensure their children wouldn’t miss out on their education.

Just last week, a school made up of 16 prefabricated classrooms opened its doors in one of the largest collective shelters.

It can accommodate 6,000 children, but seats are filling up so fast and we are working to find more space for additional classrooms.

As the weeks went by, half of the families in these shelters left to live with relatives in Damascus or Rural Damascus.

But still many remain, either because they don’t have relatives they can live with or they want to wait to return to their own villages in Eastern Ghouta once it is safe to go back.

These collective shelters - makeshift refuges which were never designed to be used as living quarters - are their homes for now and that’s why we need to keep supporting them.

When I tell people that my job is to get children and families access to the essential services they need for their wellbeing, it’s hard for them to imagine what that really means.

But when you’re on the ground with the children, you know that safe play spaces, protection services, good schools and healthcare are lifelines for their very survival.

Children are the future of my country, Syria.

£10 could help provide a Syrian child with a safe space to rest and play.

You can donate to Unicef at http://unicef.uk/sunsyria