Bint Jbeil, Lebanon — Rufaida, 28, shifts her two-month-old son, Ahmad, from her right arm to the left. She stretches her free shoulder before gathering him back against her chest, soothing him with a gentle sway. The afternoon heat hangs over the courtyard of Saint Joseph Church in central Beirut.
Around her, damp clothes flutter from railings and plastic chairs, while children weave between piles of mattresses and laundry baskets. Their laughter occasionally echoes through the church grounds before being drowned out by the murmur of conversations and the scrape of chairs across stone floors. Ahmad squirms beneath his swaddling blanket, a small tuft of dark hair poking out from under the fabric.
Rufaida barely takes her eyes off him. Dark circles sit beneath her eyes, and she speaks in the weary cadence of someone surviving on only a few hours' sleep. He wakes everyone up, so I leave the dormitory and come walking outside so no one is disturbed,” she says.
But despite all this, "I am very happy," she says, her eyes fixed on Ahmad. "Every time I am stressed, I look at the baby and he gives me some relief. I can forget about the war for a second.” Rufaida, who fled to Lebanon from Sudan one year ago, sits alongside her husband, Mohammad, 39, in an exterior gallery of St Joseph's.
Soft-spoken and reserved, he listens carefully as she speaks, his hands clasped together on his lap. They share the makeshift shelter with about 250 other displaced migrant workers, the majority of whom are Sudanese, alongside a smaller number of men, women and children from Bangladesh, Pakistan and other parts of South Asia. Since the renewed conflict between Hezbollah and Israel began on March 2, 1.5 million people have been internally displaced in Lebanon, including members of the country’s large migrant worker community.
For Rufaida, this is not the first war to uproot her life.
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