As hope fades for survivors from last week’s quake that devastated northwest Syria, a notebook found in the rubble recalls happier days.
On Monday, the humanitarian organization, The White Helmets, tweeted images that memorialized a time when the region wasn’t ravaged by a decade-long civil war.
In one entry, the author remembers celebrating Eid back home with friends and loved ones. Those moments of joy are fleeting ones.
The author describes the joy of Eid as “if it was never-ending.”
The author writes of longing for what they call moments that have long been lost.
Eid now is no longer a day of laughter, but a day of tears and longing.
Rescuers hope to find the author of the notebook.
“The sight of the notebooks broke my heart,” said Muhammad, a White Helmets volunteer in Jindiris, according to the tweet. “My thoughts turned to my own children. I didn’t pause for a moment as I searched. Our hope was to find a child, woman, or father and reunite them with their family.”
Compounding devastation: For Syrians, the earthquake is just the latest in a decade-long series of tragedies.
CNN reported, most of the casualties were in a region already struggling to rebuild vital infrastructure heavily damaged by aerial bombardment during the country’s civil war, which the UN estimates to have claimed the lives of at least 300,000 civilians since 2011.
Half of northwestern Syria’s 4.6 million population had been forced out of their homes by the conflict, with 1.7 million now living in tents and refugee camps in the region, according to the UN children’s agency, UNICEF. Last year, the agency reported 3.3 million Syrians in the area were food insecure.
“It’s a crisis within a crisis,” says Leena Zahra, a Syrian American humanitarian worker focused on increasing mental health access to globally displaced people. “This tragedy will impact children, entire families, some that have been displaced over 20 times. It’s just going to be adding on to the psychological impact that they’ve already faced.”
