My Name Is Not Refugee
Syrians in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon
Lebanon is home to 1.5 million Syrian refugees and 0.5 million Palestinians refugees -
1/3rd of Lebanon’s 6 million population is home to refugees from it’s neighbours fleeing war, persecution and occupation.
In December 2018, I partnered with LOST.LB, a Lebanese NGO, who focuses on creating a developed and equitable society through reducing poverty, eliminating exclusion and fostering a culture of peace in Lebanon.
We went to a small Syrian refugee camp nestled in-between the mountains of the Bekaa Valley. Our aim to visit the camp was that I had fundraised some money and wanted to distribute food, books, toys and essential goods to the Syrian people living in refugee camps, to play my small part in this global humanitarian crisis.
Whilst meeting the people at the camp, I documented the everyday stories of the Syrians I met. Back home in Europe, whenever I heard about Syrian crisis, you only saw the statistics, figures and numbers and not the human lives behind these numerical accounts.
Therefore, I wanted to capture the portraits of the beautiful Syrians I met and to find out their names and just ask them everyday questions to find out who they truly were and capture a fragment of their personality and characteristic; in the aim to show that we are all the same, we all have something in common despite growing up in completely different parts of the world and that it’s only purely luck and chance that we are where we are and they are where they are and the Syrian refugees could be us.
A photo series of lives in limbo; Syrian refugees caught living in camps across Lebanon, documented in 2018.
The camp I visited had 60 tents housing 70 families. 30 of them had burned down 2 weeks before I arrived at the camp, when one tent caught fire in the middle of the night and the fire had spread to 29 other tents. A father and young child sadly died in that fire. Now, all the 70 families were forced to live in 30 tents creating the space they had even smaller.