The house of widows

There's something about the four storey building on Ubayda Ben al Samit Street opposite the ice cream parlour.  In this fairly affluent neighbourhood of wide streets dotted with well-watered trees, a four storey building with peach coloured curtains dangling squint and dirty, with lines of vibrant coloured washing hanging proud on the balconies, stands out from the tidy beige backdrop.

This disused apart-hotel has become the new home for about 24 Syrian families who we've been casually saying hello to since they moved in just after we arrived. But it's only since I've been asked to make some short film portraits of refugees here, that I've felt the excuse to go in and talk to them properly with a translator.

Among the 24 families, there is only one adult male, a young man of 21 with the face of a a 40 year old. The rest are women and children.

All the women are widows.

Um Islam, whose husband, a professor at Homs university was one of the first protestors to be assassinated by Al Asad's regime, is a volunteer helping the women survive in this town with ever fewer places and resources for the Syrian arrivals. She was our point of contact, but when we arrived she was deftly and confidently dealing with two policemen who had recieved complaints from neighbours about noise levels coming from the house.  Then she turned to us, laughed, and shrugged off the incident saying she'd been through worse. Then we laughed as she questioned my surname (the word for lion in Arabic is 'asad' and I assured her I was no relation). Then she introduced us to some of the women who were as warm, dignified and together as she. Someone brought in a tray of strong Arabic coffee in clean, white cups. We stayed for a couple of hours.

One 45 year old lady, Siham, with no children of her own, is now the guardian of her 5 nephews and nieces, who survived a rocket strike on the van they were travelling in, near Dera'a. Their parents and two year old brother, were killed. The chidren were taken to hospital by the Free Syrian Army and after their treatment, she fled to Jordan with them. What haunts her, she said, is she doesn't know whether her brother, his wife, and the little boy, died instantly, or whether they burned to death as the van became a fire ball. Her brother was 32 and her sister-in-law, 27. Her brother used to joke with Siham and her husband, who never managed to have their own children: 'Have my children. Have mine!' They used to laugh about it. She wasn't prepared for what was to come. She gazed down at the five children, aged between 13 and 5, then looked at me, her face brimming with too many emotions to describe. 'They're more important to me than my eyes,' she said.

Then, I came back to our new home, in which we've lived almost the same amount of time as the widows have lived in theirs, to be greeted by my own boys - the Lozenge full of tales of his day and asking why his Rolling Stones t-shirt didn't have 'thtoneth on it'; Rashimi squeaking with excitement, a bar of soap with teeth marks in it in one hand, an un-ravelled loo roll in the other.

And I wondered, what more can we ask from life, than this?