Life in limbo: Displaced victims in a foreign land

Noel Baker travels to Lebanon, where as many as 1.5m Syrian refugees find themselves in limbo on the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict

SOME winters bite harder than others. On the fringes of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, there is at least one woman who is unlikely ever to forget the cold months just gone.

In the gloom of the rickety, handmade structure in which she lives with her young family, she outlines how the roof fell in, literally, when snow piled on top of it. How the water seeped in from underneath, up through the sand, and how the need for heat became so desperate that, as temperatures plunged to —10°C and no firewood could be found, they resorted to burning old clothes and shoes instead.