Syria’s Displaced Centenarians
While their days are numbered, they all cling passionately to the same hope — that they’ll see their home in Syria one last time
“Young men have strong legs and eyes, but it is the older narrator, with his multilayered perspective who knows how to turn memory into art.”
Syria’s civil war — more than three years of crippling destruction and chronic heartbreak —has mangled a nation, displacing almost half of its population. There are now 3.2 million Syrian refugees registered in the region, with 100,000 more added each month. The number of refugees in bordering Lebanon, more than 1 million, exceeds a quarter of its own population. The country now has the highest per capita concentration of refugees worldwide, many of whom are struggling to build from the rubble of their past.
Many have sought to humanize the most brutal humanitarian crisis in our era through the prematurely dulled eyes of its lost generation — a restless, disempowered youth who, as economist Umair Haque wrote about London’s youth after the United Kingdom riots in 2011, “feel they’re finished before they start.”
But another segment of Syria’s displaced population has gone largely unnoticed — the war’s elderly. Through their eyes, one sees the kaleidoscopic history of a country and region constantly churning itself in and out of the throes of an existential crisis.
Last year, the NGO Caritas and Johns Hopkins University published a report on the crisis’s elderly — a group that often “suffers in silence,” most stepping aside so other family members can access services and aid. In Lebanon, 2.5 percent of refugees are older than 60 and humanitarian organizations say the segment is disproportionately affected by violence and trauma. But they also note the generation shouldn’t be viewed simply as passive victims. They can be powerful change-makers and power brokers in their divided and broken communities.
“The elderly serve as the social glue holding many refugee families
together,” Melissa Fleming, spokesperson for the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees said. “Caring for them is one way to ensure that Syrian refugees fleeing the conflict have a chance to recover at least some of what they have lost and survive in dignity until peace has a chance to return.”
In the midst of a harrowing and dehumanizing crisis, meet six spirited centenarians who have resiliently turned their wrenching memories into art. And while their days are numbered, they all cling passionately to the same single slivering hope: that they’ll see their home in Syria one last time.
103-year-old Khaldiye Mohammed Rostum fled to Lebanon from Homs with her son’s family more than two years ago. Sharp as a whip, she can recite the names of her twelve children, thirty grandchildren, and several great grandchildren. She lives near the Syrian border with her cash-strapped son’s family, and has begged them to sell her gold wedding ring to help make ends meet. They refuse.
Her late husband, ten years her junior (“They all used to make fun of him for having an older wife,” she proudly recalls, “But he loved me”), was a general in the Syrian military (“He drove big, big tanks”) and used to buy her an orange every day. “He would then peel it for me,” she recalls. “Men should always peel oranges for women.”
Khaldiye left all her photographs in Syria. Paging through them used to be her favorite pastime. She’s the only one left in her immediate family, and says she wants few things more than to hold, once more, her favorite photograph: one of her twin-brother and mother standing together, hand-in-hand. “I still see it in my mind every morning,” she says, her bright blue eyes both smiling and aching.
Her twin, Ibrahim, passed away years ago. She remembers and boasts of how Ibrahim was so very tall. And she, at barely five-feet, would vanish next to him. He used to tease her, she says, because he could practically push her over just by tapping her. “I would over-hear my mother lovingly say, ‘Just let her push you once. Just once.’”
But he never did. And she loved that about him.
When they were younger they used to climb fig trees. Ibrahim, she remembers, would climb with the stated intent to drop the figs down to her. She was then to catch them with the cradling of her dress.
“But instead of dropping the figs,” she giggles, “That man would just eat them! So there I was, waiting and waiting to catch figs in my dress.”
And now, some ninety years later, she says, “Here I am waiting and waiting to see those fig trees again.”
From her perch on top of a patchy hill in northern Lebanon, 101 year-old Dagha Dowash Abdullah, can almost see her city, Homs, in the distance.
Almost three years ago, Dagha and her family of ten left Syria for Lebanon. Fighting grew intense in their hometown of Baba Amr and they were given a three-hour ceasefire to leave the area. Eleven of them now live in a barely erect tent on a small patch of land that they don’t pay rent on. That means at any given moment, they could be kicked out.
Over a year ago, Dagha had a stroke in their haphazard tent. Since then, her family says her health has plummeted. She can’t move the right side of her body. She desperately needs a wheelchair, but even procuring bread is a triumph. No one in the family can find steady work and their only income is a monthly UNHCR ATM card and a food-card from the World Food Programme.
“Before the stroke, she was active,” explains her granddaughter, Fatima. “She’d put cream on her skin every night and she’d still wash all our clothes because she didn’t trust us to do it right.”
She was also an avid storyteller. All her granddaughters still laugh over old stories about Dagha’s raucous fights with her husband. Whenever their arguments would drag on past twenty minutes, she told them that she’d leave him alone in the house to argue with himself.
From their little tent on the hill, they hear intense shelling almost daily. Before her stroke, Dagha would sit outside sewing, trying to figure out which part of Syria the shelling was coming from.
Her great-granddaughters say they had to drag Dagha out of the house to bring her to Lebanon. Yasmine, 18, has a 2-year-old daughter with Down’s Syndrome. Another, 19-year-old Silwa, is desperately trying to find schooling in Lebanon. “I fear I’m forgetting everything I learned,” she laments.
Dagha squeezes their hands when they each come up to kiss her cheek. They say news comes in every week of more people who’ve died in their village — many of them relatives. They don’t tell her much anymore, but they say she knows. She often cries in her sleep.
“Her biggest fear is that she’ll die in Lebanon,” says Fatima. “Before her stroke, when she was still able to talk as clearly as a teenager, she’d say, ‘Bury me elsewhere when I die. Bury me in Syria…please promise me you’ll bury me at home.’”
99-year-old Futeima El-Hajj Khalaf arrived in Saida, Lebanon by bus two years ago, fleeing from restive Aleppo with her 66-year-old son Mohammed, his wife, and five children.
When Mohammed starts recounting the harried journey, the small square room that sleeps eight starts shaking with their tears.
“For the person who is sick,” Futeima barely articulates, “The world is narrow…the sickness I have, the doctors can’t cure.”
Back in her village of Hajab, her family says Futeima is a legend. Her husband had three wives, but she was the youngest and his favorite. Every morning, she used to get water from a well two miles away from their house. And before the days of heavy machinery, her son boasts that she was the strongest person in the village, often beating men at various outside chores. Though women would taunt her, she rode camels and horses with the men, who could barely keep up.
Those memories make Futeima light up like a giddy schoolgirl. “Men would only harvest one area and I could do four in the same amount of time!” She laughs, her black Syrian prayer beads bouncing on her swollen ankle. “But look at me now.”
Mohammed looks down, mustering a resigned reply. “Life changes,” he sighs. It’s difficult for them to watch her deteriorate in a small, already lifeless room.
“She was queen of the world,” he says. “And now she’s here without a throne.” She doesn’t even own a chair.
Almost every week, new arrivals move into their small caravan community. The family bombards them with the regular questions: Who is alive? Who has passed? What has been destroyed? What has survived?
Often, they get no answers — just more questions.
Mohammed keeps all their family documents in one small black trash-bag. He often brings out his deceased father’s identification card, letting Futeima hold it in her hands. She kisses his picture whenever she sees it.
As the family sits around in heavy silence, broken only by the chatter of tea glasses, Futeima breaks out in near rapture, eager to tell one final story before she naps.
“I was once in a taxi in Aleppo with two young girls. They wouldn’t stop talking. One girl told the other how much she cooked that day. The other then responded with how much she cleaned. They were both so impressed with themselves,” she recalls.
“And I didn’t turn around to say it, but I often wish I had interrupted them to say: ‘Girls, I do that and more every single day.’”
103-year-old Mofleh Nassar, a Syrian refugee living in Lebanon, still keeps his old identification card, issued 70 years ago, in his shirt pocket. “I am going back to Syria,” he declares to an empty and cold room. “So I can’t lose it.”
The family hosting Mofleh and his daughter is Lebanese. Bilal, the 22-year-old eldest son, is now Mofleh’s main caregiver. During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, Bilal’s neighborhood was targeted. So his family fled to Syria. And there they met Mofleh, who was more than happy to host them for a month.
“He’s like my grandfather,” says Bilal, whose father died when he was younger. “I’m just returning the favor. We are all family now.”
Like clockwork, Mofleh begins to drone on (he can do so for hours, his family says) about a “beautiful, beautiful” woman named Fattoun, his deceased second wife. He says she proposed to him. No one can fully corroborate the story. But they all say he still calls her name in the middle of the night.
He also frequently screams in his sleep.
The details of the Syrian war are not entirely clear to him, but he says with great fervor that the government is slaughtering his family. He lost two young great-grandchildren in shelling, right outside of their house. He refuses to talk about it.
His daughter, Sobha, says he’s tried to run away twice in Lebanon. Once, he tried to escape the apartment by climbing off the balcony. Since then, she’s hidden his official passport for fear he’ll try to venture back into Syria.
Despite it all, Mofleh has big plans. With a youthful breeze of defiance, he says that when he returns to Syria, he will start a new business. “A trading business,” he explains in vaguely coherent segments. “I will trade, and it will be successful.”
He breaks out into song, every so often, singing of lost love and of opportunities — some missed, some taken.
“I feel like I’ve been here for 500 years,” he announces to everyone and no one in particular. “It’s too long.”
He looks up at his guests and lovingly shouts at his daughter, “Serve them tea!”
Ghetwan Hassoun, 100, and Khaduj Al Yussef, 87, are Syrian refugees from Idlib, now living in a makeshift two-room shelter below a mechanic’s garage in Saida, Lebanon. They live with their son and his wife, three grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Their home and nearly all possessions were destroyed in intense shelling.
The couple has been married for 72 years. “She’s always taken care of me,” Ghetwan says, when asked what he loves most about his wife. And what Khaduj loves most about Ghetwan? “When he was younger, he was very poor and had nothing. But he was a very strong man…a real man. He could kick the asses of 50 men.”
The electricity goes out in their room frequently. During one two-hour blackout last February, Ghetwan reached for a cigarette, mumbling about their dire situation.
Khaluj looked on disapprovingly. “I don’t like the smoke,” she said, huffing in disgust. “But if I say something, he will swear at me!”
Ghetwan enjoys the cigarette as he sits wrapped in a Spider-Man blanket while his great grand-children swarm around him in wildly disproportionate speed. Still, the two generations are both bound by the same dim two-room radius.
As Khaduj weeps while remembering her home and her fields of goats — their sustenance for years — her grand-nephews rush into the room shouting.
Their apartment building, just down the road, has been set ablaze. A 22-year-old Palestinian, one of the bombers involved in Lebanon’s February Bir Hassan attack which killed ten, lived in their building with his family. In retaliation for his involvement in the bombing, people struck the building the day after.
The crisis had followed them.
“We left Syria to come here?” Khaduj shouts at his son. “We left Syria to come here, where we have even more of nothing?”
Moments later, the call to prayer broke through their room, sounding achingly familiar to Ghetwan. Sometimes, his son says, he thinks it’s coming from his hometown mosque. As it blares, he grabs Khaduj, struggling to pick her up as if to leave and go home. His son reminds him they’re in Lebanon, far from his goat-fields, far from the life he built for them.
Every few weeks or so, a Lebanese neighbor takes Ghetwan to his own goat-field nearby. There Ghetwan stands among the animals with his eyes closed and, for a few fleeting moments, thinks he’s finally back home.
Read more vignettes on UNHCR’s Tracks
