The Washington Post, Yaladagi, Turkey, 22 Dec 2012 — Um Khalid is contemplating selling some of the bare-bones food ration given to Syrian refugees to buy winter clothes for her eight children.
“I was thinking I could buy something every month for one child that way,” she said, explaining her pained calculation as she served instant coffee heated on a hot plate in the tent that has sheltered the family since they fled Syria 18 months ago.

Outside the tent flaps, a heavy rain fell, forming large puddles and transforming dirt into slippery mud. Though it was cold and dank, children ran around wearing just sweatshirts and open-toed sandals.
“I don’t care about myself, I only care about what my children need,” said the 32-year-old mother, who was wearing a thin, floor-length dress she had on when she arrived in Turkey last summer.
The approach of winter is making a harsh life even bleaker for the 500,000 Syrians living in refugee camps in neighboring countries, a number the United Nations said could double by the middle of next year. It is even worse at some camps within Syria, with food in short supply and the major light source mere candles stuck in tin bowls.
The gloomy discontent of winter is palpable even in nicer camps like the one for almost 2,800 Syrians in Yayladagi, where the Turkish government has outfitted the grounds surrounding a former tobacco warehouse with many amenities designed to make refugee existence bearable.
Every one of the 239 tents holding half the refugees is wired with electricity to power a compact florescent bulb and a radiator-style heater on wheels. Many have satellite TV on cheap sets the residents bought, often with wages from painting houses or picking olives in Yayladagi. There are a few washing machines.
At the gate, a metal detector, though largely ignored, helps keep guns out of the camp where fully half the residents are children. Luckier refugees are housed in an empty building in the complex, with whole families squeezed into 276 rooms the size of walk-in closets. Food rations of $45 a month are loaded onto electronic cards accepted in local stores, with the admonition they cannot be used on cigarettes, alcohol or chocolate.
Although their most basic needs are met, many residents are grim as they face a second winter in a refugee camp. The seasonal cold and two solid weeks of rain have taken lives diminished by hardship and shrunken them further.
“I stay inside all the time,” said Hawia Samua, 55, who shares two rooms in the warehouse with her husband, three sons and new daughter-in-law. “I only go out if I have to go to the doctor.”
Two men’s jackets, borrowed from other refugees who have coats to spare, hung on a coat rack. There was none for Samua, who wore no sweater beneath her black abaya.
“At least in here it’s warm,” she said, gesturing toward the space heater draped with drying laundry in a room about 8 feet by 15 feet, furnished with a stack of thin mattresses, one plastic chair and a table with a hot plate.
Temperatures typically dip below freezing during winter nights in Yayladagi, and mountaintops not far away already are capped with snow.
Two women washing dishes at a cold water spigot by a metal fence topped with razor wire said many adults are catching flu and colds from the children.
“We’re always sick, all of us,” said Raida, who is six months pregnant, as she perched on a large plastic yogurt barrel.
Suleiman Qubbai, 18, a construction worker wearing a thin leather jacket, said he dreaded a repeat of last winter, when a heavy snowfall caused several tents to collapse. The power was out for three days, and many refugees stayed in their tents huddled under blankets until power was restored and their heaters worked again.
The Turkish government is working to improve conditions at Yayladagi, said camp manager Mehmet Gunes.
It is renovating another warehouse so residents currently in tents can move indoors, and will dig trenches to channel the standing pools of water, he said. It has passed out extra blankets, so every resident has two. A shipment of new winter clothes purchased by the government is expected soon.
But that will do little to alleviate the heavy sense of loss in the camp, with no end to the war in Syria in sight.
“My children have lost almost two years of their lives in this camp,” said Marwan Salim, 39, a lawyer, lamenting that they are being taught in Turkish, not Arabic.
Um Khalid buries her face in her hands and weeps when she recalls the old stone house she left behind in the town of Jabal al-Zawiya, covered in vines with a water well out back. She returned to Syria this month for the first time, and found her house burned to the ground. She said she saw Syrian warplanes dropping bombs on a neighboring village, and realized she will not be returning home for good anytime soon.
“I’d rather live in a tent in Syria,” she said. “At least it’s my own country. The Turks have done many things for us. But I feel like a stranger here.”
At the edge of camp, Samira Zahluk, 48, pointed to brown stains discoloring her white canvas tent, a result of all the rain. Outside the zippered flaps, a muddy pond of rainwater grew larger by the hour, and the brown wool blanket covering her tent floor was damp to the touch.
“All I want is just to go back,” she said. “This is not a life here.”