shelter from the storm


“WE TRY TO FORGET WE ARE REFUGEES.”


a camp, instead finding shelter in a run-down urban building.


“We did


not bring anything with us,” he says. Pointing to the cracked wall of


the


family’s tiny rooms, he explains how water leaks in during the winter. “Its condition is bad but we have no other choice. We have to live with it.”


Rather than distribute basic goods to families like these, UNHCR has been providing monthly cash assistance to


help vulnerable Syrians meet


their basic needs. The program is not only more efficient than building distribution networks and doling out physical goods, it allows families autonomy in choosing where to spend their assistance. Still, 90 per cent of registered Syrian refugees in urban areas live below the national poverty line, with over 67 per cent of them in debt.


“We used the winter assistance and borrowed some money for a stove and a refrigerator,” Ahmad says. “It would have been difficult for me to manage. The house is better than a tent. At least we have a bathroom inside. And the wind is not taking your tent off. This place is bad but it is better than a tent.”


© UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis When a resort becomes


a refugee shelter* In Greece, a country which has been on the front lines of receiving asylum seekers


from Syria, and other countries making


Afghanistan the


dangerous Mediterranean crossing, a creative solution was found to house Syrian refugees. Thousands of asylum seekers are now waiting to be pre-registered to receive their asylum-seeker


cards, which will


allow them to stay legally in Greece for at least a year.


In a two-storey, white-painted apartment


beside a picturesque


beach, Tarek Al-Felou and his wife, Kinda, are making a shish barak, a Middle Eastern dish of meat dumplings.


Their neighbours are


some 320 refugees, most from Syria. Since late March, they have breathed new life into LM Village, a summer resort that closed more than five years ago as a result of Greece’s financial crisis.


Now, each of the 38 neatly painted bungalows


houses two


families.


Their laundry flutters in the breeze. Mothers chat on porches framed by palm trees. Teenagers play basketball on an abandoned court as toddlers chase each other up and down a faded, blue-and-yellow water slide nearby. “Yallah, get down from there!” shouts an older boy. Five times a day, a grandfather’s Islamic call to prayer echoes through the square.


The resort-turned-refugee-shelter


is a village in nearly every sense, a far cry from the fighting, shelling and sieges its residents escaped just months ago. For most, it is the closest approximation to their former, pre-war lives that they have experienced in years.


“In this place we try to forget we are refugees,” says Tarek, 42, who once owned a restaurant outside Damascus and fled to Greece with Kinda and their two children. “We can pretend we’re on holiday.”


UNHCR / 21


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