Since fleeing Syria, Adel and his family have lived at a refugee camp, His Dad was killed by a bomb. Adel is now the man of the house and looks after his sisters and earns money to care for his family. Because of this, he misses out on getting an education.
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Broadcaster Rachel Smalley and photographer Jo Currie visited Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon, to help raise awareness of the millions of children left homeless by war in Syria. In the first of their reports for the Herald, they tell the story of Adel, a 12-year-old boy whose childhood ended theday his father was killed but who still dreams of a better future for himself and his family.
I notice his eyes first. They follow me as I trudge back and forth through the rain and the deep, heavy mud.
In the past year, this field in Lebanon's mineral-rich Bekaa Valley has become a hotch-potch village of Syrian refugee tents.
It is cold and it is miserable. There can be few places on Earth more desperate than a refugee camp on a bleak, wet, winter's day. The young boy's face is classically Syrian. He has dark, almond-shaped eyes and high, wide cheekbones. His teeth are strong and white, and he has a wire-strong crop of thick, auburn-tinged hair.
Eventually, I tell him I am. "Right. Let's go," I say.
He leads me to his family tent at the far end of the camp. The field is lower here, the ground is sodden and the mud is treacherous to walk in. I push back the door flap which, like the walls, is made of hand-stitched plastic sacks. The roof is a heavy tarpaulin nailed to a flimsy wooden frame. The rain is heavy. The roof is leaking. Each drip hits the hard earth floor with a loud splash.
I step inside and I am hit by an overwhelming smell of damp dirt. I have seen many refugee shelters but this, by far, is the most destitute. Even in refugee camps there are varying degrees of poverty.
Foam mattresses are stacked in one corner where the ground is higher and the dirt floor is dry.
A small, threadbare rug lies in the middle of the room. Adel points to it and gestures for me to sit down.
In the centre of the tent the family huddles around a wood stove with a tin chimney. The fire bursts into life when it is stoked with potato sacks and plastic bags. Small, outstretched hands are warmed by a short, toxic blast of heat.
Adel is now the breadwinner for his family, spending his day chopping wood to pay for rent for the land their tent is on. Photo / Jo Currie / World Vision
Adel, at 12, is the oldest child and he shares this room with his mother and five younger sisters. He introduces me to his mother, Wasfa. I ask if her husband is living in the camp too.
He died, she tells me, in a bomb blast. He was at a vegetable market near their home in Deir Al-Zor when a crude bomb fell from the sky. It was a barrel bomb, an indiscriminate, devastating weapon usually packed with explosives, shrapnel and oil. It detonates on impact after being rolled through the open door of a low-flying plane or helicopter.
Wasfa says she was outside her house when she heard a huge explosion. She knew it was a bomb. "I ran to the market. We all ran, the children too."
People were running, screaming from the market as Wasfa and her children ran towards it. There was fire and smoke where the stalls once stood, and bodies lay on the ground or slumped across cars. Some were injured. Others were dead or dying.
She kept searching. She was calling out to her husband, desperate to find him alive. And then, she says, she saw him.
Wasfa's voice breaks. "Tell me, what should I feel? How should I feel? I can't live without him." His lifeless body was lying in front of her. In that instant, her life and the lives of her children changed forever.
"The children ... they were so strong ..." she says. They knelt down beside him for a time, and then together Wasfa and the children lifted his broken body and carried him back to their home. "Adel was so brave," she says. "We carried him back to our home as a family."
He was buried that day, as their Sunni faith dictates, surrounded by his children. "At least we could give him a proper funeral," she says.
Wasfa says within days she knew she couldn't stay in Syria. It was too dangerous and her family now had no source of income. Her brother-in-law gave her money to get herself and the children to the Lebanese border.
"My two youngest children were small enough to fit on one bus seat, so the driver said I only had to pay for five children."
They travelled through the night to Lebanon, then followed a neighbour's directions to the tent settlement. They have been living in the Bekaa Valley for nine months and Wasfa says Adel has become the man of the house.
"I am taking care of my sisters and mother," he says.
He works from 7am until dusk, chopping wood for the owner of the field. One day's work reduces the family's rent by US$2 a day.
"We still owe US$150 [$200] but I am getting there," he says.
The World Food Programme allocates every refugee US$19 a month for rent, food, water and life-sustaining essentials.
It used to be US$31 but with more than 12 million people in need of humanitarian aid, the WFP is running out of cash.
Full of hope: Adel plays with World Vision CEO Chris Clarke. Photo / Jo Currie / World Vision
It is winter and it has been snowing in the Bekaa. Wasfa says they have to make do, but there is never enough food or fuel for the fire.
There is a "Child Friendly Space" at the camp, an area set up by World Vision to assess levels of trauma in refugee children and help them form a daily routine.
Adel says his sisters call it their "school" and they go every day, but his eldest sister is struggling to adjust to life in Lebanon. He thinks she is troubled by what she saw in Syria.
"She wakes up screaming every night. She yells 'he's coming, he's coming!' I wake her but then she goes into a panic. She has a panic attack. It is the same every night."
Rachel Smalley in a refugee camp in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. Photo / Jo Currie / World Vision
I ask Adel what his sisters need. He says "one toy, they would just like one toy".
The girls all giggle and say they would like a piece of cake "and some juice" too. Another says she would like an icecream.
"It is hard for us now, but I will provide for my family one day. I will work for a big company or be a doctor. We will be fine."
I find it hard to leave this family. They have nothing except an overwhelming sense of optimism.
I wonder what will become of Adel. His childhood ended in the market that day when he carried his dead father's body through the streets of Deir Al-Zor.
He is one of a generation of Syrian children who have been robbed of their childhood by a brutal conflict they didn't cause, and can't solve.
Adel: "I don't want anything other than my sisters' safety. It is hard for us now, but I will provide for all of my family one day." Photo / Jo Currie / World Vision
I thank Adel for speaking with me, I wish his family well and hope they can return home to Syria soon.
I get up to leave. Ralph Baydoun, who works for World Vision has been sitting next to me throughout, filming and translating.
