Thomson: Canadian aid helps Syrian refugee children at Beirut school

Graham Thomson, Edmonton Journal 



BEIRUT, Lebanon — The children of the Dehaddi elementary school in southern Beirut may have escaped Syria, but they have not escaped the Syrian civil war.

When suicide bombers attacked the Iranian embassy on Nov. 19, the explosions occurred just a few blocks from the little school crammed into one of the city’s sprawling slums. Space is so limited that staff have build a cage-like playground on the roof. It was from there that children could see the after-effects of the suicide attack that, like most of the recent violence in Lebanon, is tied to the Syrian conflict.

“We heard it clearly and saw the smoke and immediately knew it was a bomb,” said Sazan Baban, a social worker at the school where students receive aid from various countries, including Canada. The explosions may have created world headlines, but they did not particularly rattle children who have become numbed by war. “To us it is no longer really a shock,” said Baban.

But in many ways the 140 children at Dehaddi — which fittingly means “The Challenge” — are lucky. They have a school and somewhere to play. Thousands of refugee children haven’t been in a class for two years and have literally nothing to play with other than the rocks littering their impromptu campsites.

And the children at Dehaddi school have food. Every month, each family receives about $70 in vouchers paid in part by the Canadian government through a project run by the relief agency World Renew.

By Canadian standards, the vouchers might not seem like much, but they are usually enough to stave off malnutrition or worse for middle-class and working-class families that, as refugees, have been forced into overcrowded and squalid conditions in the slums of Beirut. Unscrupulous landlords are jacking up rents as more and more desperate refugees flood into the city. It is not unusual for multiple families to share a three-room “apartment” with no water, no toilet and no windows other than holes knocked through cinder-block walls.

But even these refugees are lucky compared to those in tents in the mountains of Lebanon, where snow is already starting to fall on the peaks. It is there that countries such as Canada are scrambling to “winterize” the camps by supplying stoves and blankets through the United Nations.

However, that is not the biggest challenge facing the UN. After almost three years of civil war in Syria, and a steadily worsening refugee crisis in neighbouring countries including Lebanon, the whole region is becoming destabilized, threatening to erupt into an even larger war that will demand more international aid and resources.


Graham Thomson is travelling through Jordan and Lebanon to witness Canadian relief efforts during the Syrian refugee crisis. The trip was partly sponsored by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, which did not approve or review this article. He will be filing more detailed stories in the days and weeks to come, independently exploring Syrian refugee camps and overwhelmed Lebanese villages, to report on this growing humanitarian crisis.

