The same but different

Having worked on communicating the Syrian Refugee Crisis for more than year now, I am well aware of the vast needs standing between Syrian refugees and their survival every day.

That said, as I prepared for a recent trip to Lebanon I didn't want to focus on how different the refugees' current living conditions are from the typical middle class family in a developed country. Instead, I wanted to show just how remarkably similar the Syrian refugees are to you and I, and how their lives were just like ours until something outside their control turned their lives upside down.

Middle class no more

During my two and a half weeks in Lebanon about 80 per cent of the people I met were from middle class families; people who had a comfortable family home and a couple of cars before the conflict broke out.

One of the first families I met was a Mum, Dad and four children, including 9-year-old twins: May and Maya.

They lived on an affluent street in an aspirational area of Syria. They had a three storey home surrounded by roses and olive trees, and they had two cars in their driveway. Their dad was an engineer, fluent in Arabic and English. After school, they would go to the pool or play in the street with their friends.

Their story is very similar to many of ours. Or, at least it was until they saw their Grandma shot and then run over – her body sprawled across the street in pieces.

This family, who used to be very comfortable, now relies on NGOs for support with food and other survival items.

Instead of a three story house, they now live in a quasi-apartment, with no door, in a slum area.

As you can imagine, they struggle to understand how and why their lives have been turned upside down, and if they will ever go back to some sort of normality.

There are millions of people caught up in a war that they didn’t choose to be in. Many are wounded physically or psychologically, all have experienced horrors we can only liken to TV. But, it only takes a minute or two of talking to someone to realise that they are pretty much you and I; except that everything they worked for has been taken away.

It’s really not fair. I cannot get my head around why some people are just dealt a better hand of cards than others.  It’s thrown the mantra I live by, "If you don’t like something, change it" into a spin. I now realise that you need to have a pretty good hand of cards to begin with to live by this mantra.

Unfortunately these people cannot instigate change because they can't change the cards they were dealt. That’s why they need our help.

You can make a difference.