In the last two years, over 100 orphans who lost their families in the earthquake in Idlib in February 2023 have been rescued in Syria. These children often lived completely on their own in the rubble for weeks, without shelter or help, looking for food in the garbage and with no roof over their heads. Many of the children were severely traumatized, injured or ill. The project took the children in, had them medically examined and treated. Some of the children had infections that had to be treated with antibiotics, others were so ill that they had to be hospitalized. Almost all of them were severely malnourished and had behavioral problems that indicated trauma. The children also received psychological treatment (some still do today) to enable them to talk about what they had experienced during the night and the loss of their home and family identity.The healing of these children is not yet complete, they and the families who took them in still need support, but they are on the right path. Three of these children are the brothers Esat, Phekda and Aadil, whose story was provided to us by our partner organization and we would like to share.
In this particularly challenging environment, our partner organization has provided impressive assistance, built up structures and opened up sources of funding so that the help alliance financing for this project could also be completed at the end of 2024.

The brothers Esat (10), Phekda and Aadil (twins, both 7) have lost their entire family. Their father died a year ago from rocket fire and they lived with their mother Sama and their one-and-a-half-year-old brother Abdi in the back room of a bakery that had long been abandoned but had a wood-fired oven (which only worked when they could afford wood, which was usually not the case). It was this cold oven that trapped her mother when the quake struck. She held Abdi, the baby, and through his cries they were able to find them both under the rubble. Abdi could be freed, but he had an injury to his back.

Sama was also alive, her upper body could be freed, but the large bakery oven on her legs could not be moved. It took a whole day for his mother to die, Esat tells me. It was already getting dark again and she was so cold the whole time. They tried to talk to her, sometimes she was awake, crying, but sometimes she seemed far away, speaking confused things that the boys couldn’t understand. “That stupid stove that never warmed us is to blame for everything.”

Abdi is stitched up in a medical ward and then the boys are sent home. In the chaos, no one asks if there is a home, if there are adults who are “responsible” for them. I imagine the three boys leaving the hospital with their brother in their arms and having no idea what is going to happen, what they should do now.

They spent the first night with their dead mother, but the next morning they were told that the rescue work was still ongoing and that they could not stay here. Es mag für uns unimaginable for us that there was no office that was responsible, no reception camp where they could be cared for first, but Idlib after the earthquake was like a region after a nuclear disaster, the chaos was indescribable. Even before the earthquake, Idlib was a war zone.

Esat, Phekda, Aadil and Abdi don’t know where to go. Every night they sleep in a different place, during the day they wander through the ruined city looking for something to eat. Esat remembers that little Abdi was constantly crying. “We took it in turns to carry him, but he just wouldn’t stop, and it was so cold and there were constant aftershocks that scared us.”

The three older children don’t know whether it was days or weeks that passed like this, but one morning they woke up behind the workshop where they had gone to sleep and it was quiet. Abdi was silent. They didn’t speak for minutes, Phekda says, as they each tried to comprehend that their little brother was lying dead next to them, 19 months old.

“Did you get help?” is a question I don’t ask, because where should there have been help? They buried Abdi, three primary school children, all alone, buried their little brother. They dug in an open field, always in pairs, while one of them held Abdi in his arms. It took them an afternoon and a whole night, they only had sharp stones to dig with.

“Life goes on” is a phrase we like to say here in Germany when something bad happens to others, which we mean to be comforting (although it is) and that is exactly what Esat, Phekda and Aadil also experienced: life simply went on. Without a mother. Without a brother. Without a home. There were always people who asked if they no longer had a home when they begged or stole food, but when the boys said no, when they said they were completely alone, there was nothing their counterparts could do. A natural disaster in the middle of a war. Chaos in the midst of a massacre. There was no help anywhere.

We had our first contact in May when the boys queued up for a food distribution. It was clear that they needed far more than bread and juice and cheese, but I felt just as helpless as I’m sure many other helpers before me – so I’m all the happier that Esat, Phekda and Aadil are now living in a family again, in a tent in our peacock camp, with two sisters and new parents who don’t feel like parents at the moment, but: life goes on. They wake up every morning in their own tent, they eat together with their new family, they attend our peacock school, their new mother helps with their homework.

Like the three brothers, over 100 other children were empowered by the peacock camp to look to the future with more optimism and to lay the foundations for shaping their own lives in the future.