Medina & the Children of Krnjača

This is Medina. She is 10 years old.

She has been in the Krnjača camp with her sister and mother for a year and a half, but they left their home in the Syrian city of Palmyra more than three years ago, when it became clear that what began as mere pro-democracy protests was now a full-fledged civil war that included more foreign entities than native.

Medina's home town is torn between IS control and the Syrian government, as of March 2017.
Image courtesy of the BBC.

Like many of the other children, Medina spends her free time playing in the camp with other residents and the roller-skates that the Centre and Commissariat of Refugees provided to anyone who wanted. As she and I were racing around the centre, more and more people joined us in skates, some of whom were young women in their late-teens to early-20s.

Medina took me running as she skated through the Krnjača centre, giving me a tour.

As Medina and I were playing, a lot of children were watching us and some eventually joined us.

Medina's best friend in the camp is an 11 year old girl from Iraq, named Farrah. They met when Farrah's family moved in next door in the same barrack:

This is the inside of their hall in the barrack.

Explaining war and hatred to a child is a tough thing for any parent to do, but for people living in an asylum camp with their children, it was an unavoidable conversation. Yet, at the same time, these parents do everything in their power to make the transitions easier and keep the days lighthearted. That is why, of all the things being donated and invested in the camps, the simple roller-skates and bikes provided by the Centre were the most appreciated by them.

A 19 year old girl named Arsala (meaning Lioness in Arabic) hasn't gone to school, apart from language classes, since she left Damascus three years ago with her two brothers. She helps the other women wash and hang the clothing in the morning, plays with the younger children or hangs out in the social café in the afternoon, and loves to read and write in her journal at night.

This is a picture I snapped of Arsala hanging bedding to air-dry before I approached to talk to her.
Despite having a washer and drying provided by Caritas (mentioned in an earlier post) at the camp, the
women all prefer to air-dry laundry and even hand-wash said laundry at times.

It all begs the question, if you were in such a situation, how would you spend your days? As the world's eyes are on the maps and diagrams that show statistics and large-scale patterns, small daily tasks like laundry are disregarded in the world's consideration when it comes to the actual individuals who are affected by decisions, which are ruled by macro-relations.