By Jeremy Weber is CT senior news editor.

Faysal stands amid the rolling fields of the Bekaa
Valley. Just down the road are award-winning, decadent vineyards—a
product of the fertile agricultural region’s 5,000-year head start on
Napa Valley. The Romans even chose to build their temple to Bacchus
here. Above loom the snow-covered slopes of Mt. Hermon, where many today
place Jesus’ transfiguration. Surveying the sea of green plants
rustling in a pleasant breeze, the 43-year-old describes what he feels:
“A knife in my heart.”

For Faysal, a Syrian refugee, the scene is not one of
grandeur but of guilt; in the field before him are three of his
children—his 15-year-old son and 13- and 11-year-old daughters—bent in
half as they weed potatoes instead of attending school.

“I have no choice,” says the father of six. In Aleppo,
one of Syria’s most war-torn cities, his job as a truck driver once
provided a four-room house and a middle-class, urban life. Now, having
injured his back in his own efforts at day labor, he can’t pay the rent
for their cobbled-together shelter on a farmer’s property. So he just
stands and watches his children. And cries.

“As a father, what is the purpose of my life if I
can’t provide for my children?” he says. “I’m ashamed of the present and
the future.”

On the shores of the Mediterranean Sea just north of
Israel, Lebanon once enjoyed a reputation as the Switzerland of the
Middle East, a land of milk and honey. On the eve of Ramadan,
Christianity Today visited with World Vision to witness how the Bekaa
Valley now recalls John Steinbeck’s Great Depression–era description of
the Dust Bowl and California. In the Bekaa, many refugees struggle to
survive as tenant farmers, as did the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath. But unlike the Joads, many used to be urban, middle-class families.

While Americans agonize over plans to resettle 10,000
Syrian refugees this year, Lebanon is straining under the weight of 1.5
million. And it’s a nation of only 4.5 million, smaller than Connecticut
and with fewer people than Kentucky. Today, 1 in 3 people in Lebanon is
a refugee. As a Beirut taxi driver put it: “Now you fear that when you
go home, you will find a refugee sleeping in your bed.”

On the Corniche, Beirut’s famed boardwalk perfect for
watching the sun set over the Mediterranean, most of the evening crowd
are not Lebanese or tourists, but Syrian refugees. Families fill the
mosaic-covered benches while men fish for dinner from the algae-covered
rocks at the seawall’s base. Stretching along the coast is the long
ridge of Mount Lebanon. Its dense clusters of terraced white houses
evoke snow-covered slopes even in the summer heat.

These days, most of the street vendors on bustling
Hamra Street, one of Beirut’s main tourist strips for shopping, are
refugees. At Cafe Younes, open since 1935 and famous for its specialty
coffee roasts and the cigar-smoking communists always on hand to drink
it, a dirt-streaked boy navigates the sidewalk tables in the leafy
shade. About six years old, he is raggedly dressed in the colors of the
Syrian flag: a red polo shirt, black pants that stop well above his
ankles, and white-striped sneakers.

He repeatedly gestures to his mouth, saying “C’mon
please” as he peddles green and yellow packs of Chiclets gum. Three
sidewalk tables decline before two shoppers in a black Audi across the
street finally say yes. A few minutes later, a girl around age eight
with her hair in a frazzled braid starts retracing the boy’s path with
just a bare, outstretched hand.

Lebanon does not permit official refugee camps—a vestige of its refusal
to accept its many Palestinian refugees from Israel as permanently
displaced. So, many Syrians settle in what aid workers call “informal
tent settlements” (ITS). Most hold one or two dozen families; the
largest has about 100 families. Landowners in the Bekaa charge about
$200 per month; most families reluctantly have their children work the
farm as payment.

The Bekaa was the main feature of the in-flight
magazine of Lebanon’s national airline when CT visited. Indeed, its
sprawling vineyards and fields surrounded by dusty mountains evoke the
scenic Napa Valley. But it’s a Napa dotted with military checkpoints,
mosques, and tent cities. Open-air trucks can be seen taking day
laborers to the fields; they ferry more workers than usual because the
truck beds are packed with children.

The farmer supervising Faysal’s children explains that
before Syria’s civil war, the field hands in the Bekaa were only 20
percent Syrians, and all were 15 or older. Today, 100 percent are
Syrians, and even six-year-olds can be found in the fields. The children
work a five-hour shift for $3. They do two shifts a day.

“It wounds me deep in my heart to see the child
labor,” says the farmer, himself a father of three. It’s also
inefficient: “A 6-year-old cannot carry as many potatoes as a
15-year-old.” But he says offering them work is better than their
parents having no way to pay rent.

Hours later, Faysal and the children host World Vision
guests in their tent, No. 11 in an oval of 26 jury-rigged shelters the
size of American mobile homes. The mother, Hivin, explains how the
family was displaced from Aleppo when life became too hard. First they
could not get bread or other food due to blockades. Then their house was
bombed. They’ve been displaced in Lebanon for three years now.

Hivin, 34, rests her 18-month-old daughter, Elva, on
her knee while her youngest, 4-month-old Youssef, is asleep in the next
room. Both were born in the tent.

“Many people ask, ‘Why get pregnant during such
troubles?’ ” she says. “I wanted a brother for my oldest boy. We don’t
want to stop our lives.”

Yet much has stopped. She recalls how her teenage son,
Abdo, loved school so much, he would fall asleep holding a textbook in
his hands. The family paid for a private driver to take their children
to school. Now the siblings are years behind. They crowd with a dozen
other children between their World Vision–built latrine and front door
around a small board donated by a church, and give each other impromptu
lessons learned from World Vision. They snack on the leftover peas that
their mother shells in order to earn $1 a day.

“Every time I send them to work in the fields, I cry,”
says Hivin. “But I don’t cry in front of them. I act strong.” She tells
them that working in the fields is a better fate. If they had stayed in
Syria, her son would have been kidnapped and the girls would have been
abused, she says.

Their 11-year-old daughter, Nisreen, the second oldest
of the four sisters, comes into the room wearing rose sunglasses and
gold bangles. One would have no idea that hours before, she was weeding
potatoes. “It’s tough, and I get exhausted and dirty,” she says. “But I
want to help my father pay for food. It’s okay that I get exhausted,
because he is exhausted too.”

In a nearby ITS lives another Syrian family that also
fled Aleppo nearly four years ago. A 25-year-old mother of three, Leila
tearfully explains how she lies to her parents, saying that they live in
a house like their old one, with multiple rooms and a kitchen. In
reality, she, her husband, and their children (ages eight, six, and
three) live in a tent city with cockroaches and mice, accessible only
through the field where she harvests zucchini.

“When my parents ask for photos of the kids playing in
our house, I find 100 reasons not to send the photo,” she says,
grabbing tissues from a black and red box that matches her jacket and
headscarf and evokes Syria’s flag.

While CT interviews her, word comes that her
eight-year-old son, Hasan, has been beaten up while playing soccer. “See
what I mean?” she says. “Such situations make me say I won’t stay in
this tent one extra minute. But when you think about other options, you
just shut your mouth and sit back down.”

Leila and her husband, who paints cars for income,
have agreed that risking their lives on the journey by boat across the
Mediterranean to Europe is not worth the risk.

Yostinos Boulos Safar, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop
of the Bekaa, estimates that one-third of the hundreds of families who
have passed through his diocese since 2011 have chosen to try the
illegal sea route. He knows of at least a dozen who drowned.

“It’s a difficult decision, but it’s coming from their
suffering,” says Safar. “If you want to stay, we will do our best to
help you. If you want to leave, we can’t stop you.” His church helps
hundreds of families with housing and education. “But it is not enough.”

One example: On a busy street corner, up two flights
of stairs lined with potted plants, lives Budur, a 27-year-old Syrian
mother of five. Her family fled Homs after neighbors were kidnapped and
bombs hit their street. She also has given birth while displaced—to
twins, now two. “It is true that we are refugees, and that we are still
displaced,” she says. “But we need to continue in any way possible.”

However, the births were difficult and the family
incurred a lot of medical debt. So months later, Budur decided to have
her husband, Johny, cross the sea to Europe. He finally made it to
Germany, but only after he “saw death” four times. Johny’s been gone
nearly two years, waiting for legal status, so still no remittance for
Budur—or means to join him.

“A large part of my life is missing. I am doing
everything I can, but I’m exhausted, dividing myself into too many
parts: working, raising the children, taking care of the house,” she
says. “What I put in front of my eyes when I feel sad is the image of
him safe and secure. And the idea that he may take us with him one day.”

Safar says many refugees in tents think the ones in
houses are living well, while many refugees in houses think the ones in
tents are receiving more aid from NGOs. “Both groups have needs and
challenges in their own way.”

And don’t overlook the Lebanese, he says. With about
300,000 Lebanese in the Bekaa now competing with about 400,000 Syrian
refugees for work, Safar says many Lebanese are also struggling because
they can’t compete with Syrians who work for lower wages or whose
businesses don’t pay taxes.

“Some aid groups think of the refugees as the only
ones with problems,” he says. “It is our duty as a church and as
Christians; Jesus said you have to help everybody who comes to you. But
both of us are suffering. We have to find a solution for both of us.”

The crisis has deeply impacted Lebanon’s churches.
“Every church that has shown compassion for Syrian refugees has been
overwhelmed with their presence,” says Martin Accad, director of the
Institute of Middle East Studies (IMES) at Arab Baptist Theological
Seminary in Beirut. Most have added more services, where
headscarves—previously unseen on Sundays—now dot the crowd. “It’s become
like the Lebanese version of America’s ‘seeker-friendly’ movement,” he
says. “You’re not required to be committed to Christianity to be part of
the church.”

Accad believes that most churches are communicating
that receiving charity is not a reward for church attendance. His bigger
concern: that in the “whirlwind of relief work,” Lebanese churches will
lose their spiritual focus.

“It’s important for churches to not forget that they
are a church,” says Accad. “We can objectify refugees when we try to
function like an NGO. The church should remain the church.”

This summer, IMES gathered 230 experts in its
largest-ever consultation of Middle Eastern churches on how to balance
the needs of refugees with building the body of Christ. One takeaway for
Western churches: Welcome the refugees in limbo in Europe or North
America. “Waiting for papers, they are very lonely, out of their
element, with a deep need for community,” says Accad. “If left alone,
they risk radicalization.”

“The most important thing churches can do is to be
hospitable,” he says. “This fear of ISIS infiltration is rubbish. The
church is called to be hospitable, regardless of consequences. And when
churches are the church to refugees, they are actually preventing the
greatest fear we have of refugees: radicalization.”

Among the many NGOs working to address such concerns
in the Middle East is World Vision, a leader in offering Child-Friendly
Spaces (CFS). There, refugee children can get an education and
psychological support.

At one CFS in the Bekaa, about two dozen Syrian
children sport handmade paper hats—bumblebees for the boys and
butterflies for the girls—as they sing a song about the winged insects.
Taped on the wall by the door is a cardboard spinning wheel of cartoon
faces showing different emotions. Each day, when the children come from
their shift in the fields, they select the face that corresponds with
how they feel. They repeat the exercise when they leave the CFS.

The teacher, Mohammed, a 33-year-old Syrian refugee,
says most pick “sad,” “angry,” or “anxious” faces. He hopes they will
pick “happy” by the time they leave.

Children attend the CFS for three months, then are
rotated out for a new batch due to the large number of at-risk youth.
During class they color, sing, and play—all to help them process their
feelings and develop resilience.

“Even though they are working in the fields, this
center can make them remember that they are children,” says Mohammed.
“At first, some don’t talk. Some only fight with others. Over time, they
become kids again.”

These children are halfway through the cycle. When
they arrived, their drawings were of bombs destroying houses; today they
are drawing the CFS in lots of happy hues. They switch from the silly
song about bees and butterflies to an earnest song that is equal parts
patriotism and plea. A rough translation:

You children of the world, look at us.
We are the children of Syria.
Our future is in your hands.
We call for you to help us and protect us,
So we can grow like the grass.

As the Syrian conflict stretches from year to year,
such sentiment becomes harder to muster. But with the aid of World
Vision and Lebanese churches, Syrian refugees are clinging to hope.

Back in Budur’s sparse apartment, above her head on
the wall is one of the few objects she brought from Syria: a black cross
made of seven pieces of wood connected by small chains. It is a
metaphor for her family of seven: separated, yet still hanging together.

Inscribed on the cross is the Lord’s Prayer. Its
familiar words of “daily bread” and “thy will be done” have become
poignant. “Despite passing through such hard moments, our faith remains
strong,” she says. “We live day by day. But we know that Jesus is next
to us.”

Jeremy Weber is CT senior news editor.