You had me at مع السلامة

Malak is aged four. She and her younger brother Rakan and their mother Yasmine live in a tent in Akkar, just across the Lebanese-Syrian border, having escaped after being bombed out of their home in the Homs district of Baba Amar.

Malak has been diagnosed with thalassemia, a rare blood disorder somehow like a super-anaemia. Bloody hell, eh. Frequent blood transplants needed. Any blood transplants, unavailable. Regular treatment, now running into thousands of unavailable dollars. UNHCR guidance? Others need help better.



Every tale's a tragedy, of course. Every journalist ought to remain impassive, bigger picture and everything. This was the second time back in very similar circumstances, back in Lebanon towards Syria, albeit with Assad now exacerbated. And yet, and yet... Everything's dispiriting. Individual things even somehow even more so.


So much of such misery and, well, eye-opening to witness all anxiety  - to be here and there and everywhere. Seeing how some still hope for home, others seem resigned to settling (safely) for life in Lebanon, (a) few yet eye Europe - at the very least for a bit of better-promising medical assistance. Until/even if such an idea gets battered right back. Oof. And ouch, and then some.

So may say the UNHCR, the registering offices over the border from Syria here, no matter what agency efforts are advocated in between by such as tirelessly spreading Save The Children. Who do nevertheless do more than their best in the meantime - winter-proofing, feeding, representing, reassuring. There goes DfiD cash as well: ta muchly to Britain, the third-biggest donor to Syria aid efforts, behind only the US and the EU. Kind of kind. Oh, but only going so far... So far, so sad.

No, no aid goes anywhere near nor far enough. Whether there nor closer here. So many heartaching tales are to be told, and will be and are informed far more finely than these jabs here, while any analysis and geopolitics and realpolitik and all such authoritative opinions will be better done elsewhere. 

And yet, and yet ... admittedly wept all the way awhile, that last flight home from somewhere just so adrift and almost abandoned but for the odd aid agency going so (well-organisedly) beyond the call.

... and yet, for all that this littl'un and her family have found themselves well-meaningly goggled upon by abruptly-arriving Westerners, Press and Press officers and actual advisers and all, it felt encouraging that she should be suddenly summoned by a passing schoolbus.

Whisper it, but this four-year-old ought not to have been allowed into one of Lebanon's few after-noon classes for Syrian refugee kids. And yet her far-sighted doctors secured a special place, purely for her, er, fellow-feeling of friends and camaraderie. 

And then, and then ... she did yet turn back, for one more respectful pose, and also an instinctive wave of the hand. To who? To me? To us all? To a world around, whatever it is, whatever it's doing, just whatever?

Impassive yet instinctive.
Sorrowful yet dutiful.
Accepting (,) everything.