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Voice of the Displaced: Farida Beidoun

Farida is married with three children and living in a refugee camp right inside the Syrian border at the Bab al Salam crossing. There are roughly 5,000 people living in the camp. Beidoun’s family fled Aleppo when the fighting intensified there this summer.

Written by Syria Deeply Published on Read time Approx. 1 minutes

They live in a tiny but tidy tent under a concrete shelter and rely on food handouts. Nearby the tents is a standing pool of water and the stench of sewage hangs over the camp. A child defecates on the ground nearby.

SD: Tell us about your situation here.

Beidoun: We don’t have anything. We don’t know what will happen with our children. Someone just helped us by donating blankets, but they’re not good blankets. They’re light, and not warm enough for the winter. And if you don’t have a national ID, they won’t give you anything.

Look, my children don’t have shoes. Look at the situation. It’s not clean. And the winter is coming, and it’s going to be very cold.

There aren’t enough bathrooms. When you want to go to the toilet, it’s very busy. There are only two toilets. And no hot water.

We can’t go back, because our home is destroyed. There is shelling, tanks, and snipers. There’s no life there.

SD: What do you eat every day?

Beidoun: They give us bulgur. It’s not fit even for hens to eat. [Farida shows a pot of cooked, coarse grain.] We can’t clean our dishes because there’s not enough water. Everyone has diarrhea because it’s not clean here.

We don’t have anything. We don’t have money to buy food for the children. We just need to go back home. We need to solve this problem so we can go back.

Journalists come here and take photos, and leave without helping us. You take pictures, and then what? If we don’t die because of the war, we will die because of the filth.

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