Fadi Mohamed Ali

Social worker in Azaz, northern Syria

“Every day I cry inside at what this crisis has done to children. Children now lost, abandoned or orphaned. Children who know nothing but the sounds of shelling. Children who have seen so much slaughter, and now want to fight, because they don’t know what else to do.

I work with a team of 4, and every day we receive children from the camps, all of them displaced, all of them with psychological issues. We try to give them comfort, to rebuild some self-confidence, to make them feel safe.

I’m making progress with a 7-year-old girl who was found in the rubble of a collapsed building. She and her grandmother were the only survivors – parents, siblings, aunts and uncles are all dead. When we met, she was incapacitated with fear and terrified by her memories. She was without expression or emotion. But slowly, slowly, with lots of care, by drawing paintings of what haunts her and what makes her happy, she is smiling again and I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.

But there are so many of these children, and we have the resources to help so few. We have to train, train, train. How else will they get the help they need to recover?”