"I pour water into my baby’s formula to make it last longer" - The daily struggle of an ordinary refugee family from Iraq
“I put a lot of water into my baby’s formula, to make it last longer. My kids do not get to eat meat anymore. And we have given up on dinner: at night we just have some milk”.
DAMASCUS – “To go back? It’s not an option for us. I would be scared to death for my children. It was hard to leave, but we couldn’t stay there any longer. And surely we do not want to return to Iraq”.
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For Inas A. (her last name is not revealed for security reasons), as for many others, the choices are limited. But instead of facing life in Baghdad again, she’d rather keep her shabby one-room place in Saideh Zeinab, shared with her three children and her invalid husband.
The family arrived in Syria in May 2005. The decision to leave was taken out of desperation: Inas’ two brothers in laws had been killed, and her husband – who had been injured during the Iran-Iraq war - was threatened. “We just couldn’t stay there and wait for him to get murdered, like his brothers”. But where to go? For the family on the run, as for hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled the Iraqi battle ground, the Syrian doors were wide open. “At that time we didn’t have any problem in crossing the border, no visa requirements, nothing. We had no relatives or friends here, but still Syria was the cheapest and easiest solution”.
Three years down the road of displacement, things look somber, with no prospect of improvement. Prices are on the rise: the Syrian Government has recently reduced its subsidies on diesel for heating and on cooking gas, and the price of mazout has increased of 257%, going straight from 7 to 25 Syrian pounds per liter. Rents are also becoming unbearable for people with no income and no assets. “We pay now 100 $ a month for a miserable apartment – continues Inas - with no heating, no cooking stove, no fridge, but plenty of cockroaches. I wonder what we’ll do when we run out of money, very soon…”. Before fleeing Baghdad, she was lucky enough to sell her furniture and her wedding gifts to some neighbors. She collected the family’s savings. In Saideh Zeinab she has been slowly giving up on her jewelry. But not much is left at present. “We got mattresses, and blankets and one stove from this project. I’m here because I need health care for my husband, he has a broken vertebra and needs continued attention…”.
Inas and her children are queuing up at the Bab Tuma premises, in the Old Town, Damascus, where ICMC and Terre des Hommes Syria – thanks to the financial support of the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid department (ECHO) - are providing assistance to the refugees. “We do not share the feeling that an increasing number of people are returning to Iraq– comments Bassima Assassa, the project manager – On the contrary, the pressure on our services is mounting. The refugees are slowly exhausting their own means of survival, and they need more and more support”.
Coping mechanisms are widespread: people give up on their apartment and move together with relatives in order to cut expenses. Heads of family are sent back to Iraq, to collect some money, sometimes a pension from the government: some people try to find a job, others just go to assess the situation and come back.
Inas’ family can not resort to any of these solutions. But she had to make her own adjustments to her shrinking resources, also because next to Ali, 6, and Mustafa, 4, a new baby boy was added last year to the burden of raising children without an income. “I put a lot of water into my baby’s formula, to make it last longer. My kids do not get to eat meat anymore. And we have given up on dinner: at night we just have some milk”.
Indexed under: Child Poverty, Children, Damascus, Poverty, Refugees, Syria