Then, the weathered, thin 50-year-old had something of an epiphany. “I had no answer when they asked when we would go home. So I thought, I will build our town here.”
Would it really be surprising if Romney pursued a Russia policy more like Obama’s than his rhetoric suggests?
In the purgatory of these camps, engaged young women struggle with shared cellphones to reach fiances fighting in the opposition. War-hardened men with missing limbs shout bitterly about the lack of Western support for dying Syrian civilians. As weeks have turned into months and, for some, months into more than a year, children ages 5 to 16 have enrolled in makeshift schools, learning the native Turkish of their host nation and striving for a sense of normalcy in art and math classes.
The Turkish government still prefers to call them “guests,” not refugees, and granted permission to a reporter for a rare visit inside what appeared to be among the best outfitted of the 14 camps constructed since the Syrian conflict went critical last year. Turkish officials authorized the supervised visit on the condition that the name of the camp and the surnames of refugees interviewed be withheld.
As the violence escalates, more and more refugees are bottlenecking at the border, leading the government in Ankara — which is funding the relief operation with minimal international aid — to sharply limit the number of those allowed in. Aid workers describe the conditions of the precariousencampments on the Syrian side as substantially worse.
Not surprisingly, scores of refugees are crossing the porous frontier illegally every day. The poor rely on hope for a space in the camps as well as Islamic aid groups and personal resourcefulness to find roofs over their heads. Those with wealth and connections are renting private accommodations — local housing prices have spiked in recent months as a result — or finding routes into North Africa, Europe and beyond.
There are strong indications that opposition fighters — and, some complain, an increasing number of extremists — are using the Turkish side of the border as a staging area, particularly escalating tensions with Alawite Turks, who are from the same religious sect as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Now, her fiance is fighting in the resistance, and she has been unable to reach him by phone for the past three weeks. She constantly watches Arabic-language channels — many families have managed to fit their aluminum-walled units with old televisions — for news. But there is no sense of self-absorption about her concern.
“It makes no difference that I am engaged and waiting for my future husband,” she said. “We are all suffering. Syria is suffering. The pain among our people is equal.”
While they wait, the refugees have begun to build a sense of normalcy, of things familiar. Allowed out of the camp from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., some of the men have begun working as olive pickers and day laborers. The children, as they did back in Syria, head to a nearby hillside to catch wild songbirds, keeping them in cages hanging outside their shelters.
Some, like Abdelwahed, the brick mason and model maker, have taken upon themselves the task of boosting morale. It is not easy; he has not heard from his seven siblings since fleeing Syria, and his face darkens as he considers their possible fates.
But just as his building of a replica town out of found stones and old crayons, he finds writing poems and songs of hope cathartic, both for his youngest children and others in the camp who frequently gather to hear him sing.
“We are not losing hope in all this waiting,” he said. “But sometimes, we need to be reminded of it.”
(The Wahington Post)
