BEIRUT, Lebanon — At first glance, evening on Beirut’s neon-lit, bustling Hamra Street looks much like it did a few years ago. But slow down and look around.
That 13-year-old delivering groceries is Syrian. So are the shoeshine boys, and the spindly girls hawking roses. Down side streets, not far from shiny new towers, Syrian families share single rooms in dark, dilapidated buildings, unrenovated since Lebanon’s civil war a generation ago.
Even inside Mezian, a humming bar and restaurant, a Syrian bartender serves Syrian poets, activists and doctors, and at the mike are musicians from the now-scattered Damascus alternative-rock band Pressure Pot.
This is life in Lebanon, the country that has, as a percentage of its population, the most refugees in the world. Child refugees, who make up more than half of those displaced in Lebanon, are the subject of a New York Times virtual reality film about resilience and survival.
The European Union, with more than 500 million inhabitants, regards the recent arrival of a million or so asylum seekers as a major emergency. But over the past four years, well over one million Syrians fleeing war have sought refuge in Lebanon, a country of barely four million people.
Somehow, Lebanon has absorbed them, a remarkable feat for an unstable country with dysfunctional infrastructure. Still, the ensuing strains on the Lebanese and Syrians alike have passed what anyone envisioned as the breaking point.
In recent months, Lebanon has cracked down on border and residency controls, leaving many refugees in legal limbo and in fear of jail or harassment. Many face long-term poverty, as United Nations benefits shrink or disappear, competition for jobs mounts and aid agencies estimate that 80 percent of Syrian children are unable to attend school. All those factors are pushing more to contemplate the dangerous sea journey to Europe.
On Hamra Street recently, Hala Jassem, 15, walking home from her job at a hair salon, strode, businesslike, right past two of her younger siblings, giving only the slightest wink. She did not interrupt their chirping banter with cafe customers, which might lead to the sale of a $1 rose.
Back home, in the windowless room that the family of 10 shares, the smaller children snuggled under a velour blanket, and Hala explained that she and the others would rather be in school, having already missed three years.
But, she said matter-of-factly, “If we don’t work, no one will eat.”
Lebanon’s refugee crisis is deceptively invisible, but it affects nearly every aspect of life. It is in the Bekaa Valley, where Syrian children labor in muddy fields, and informal clusters of shacks and tents look something like the world’s image of refugee camps.
But most refugees in this country are not in camps; they are mixed into the jumble of Lebanon. They squeeze into dank, crowded, cinder-block alleyways built by earlier waves of displaced Palestinians and Lebanese. And they can be found fading into the crowds along the storied streets of East and West Beirut where the city throbs as a regional center of culture, politics and, for the wealthiest, consumerism.
Working in a busy parking lot in West Beirut is Ibrahim Abu Raed, who cannot go home to northern Syria because the Islamic State would kill him for having a son in the army. Stocking groceries nearby is a boy whose hometown, Dara’a, in southern Syria, suffers government bombings because it is the birthplace of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
A short drive south of Beirut, in Bir Hassan, the Sobhi Saleh Mixed Intermediate School stands between the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and rows of new apartment towers facing the Mediterranean. Nearly half the children in blue smock uniforms and plaid jumpers on a recent morning are Syrian.
Under government policy, Syrians cannot make up more than half of the student body in the morning shift. A new second shift, in the evening, is all Syrian.
Nationwide, Syrians make up 41 percent of public school students, according to Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, citing state education figures. But just a fifth of Syrian refugee children are in school.
Many Syrian children struggle, said the principal at Sobhi Saleh, Najwa Tohme. Most subjects are taught in Arabic in Syria, but in English or French here. Children have missed years of classes; Ms. Tohme said she recently admitted a third grader with a mustache and beard, and a 9-year-old girl in the first grade.
Recently, the principal said, a Syrian child cut a classmate with a broken bottle. The child’s mother, she said, implored: “What can I do? The kids were seeing bodies on the ground.”
But with few resources for psychological trauma, teachers cope alone. “We try to use sweet words,” Ms. Tohme said.
Poor Lebanese frequently complain that Syrian refugees receive more benefits than they do. In response, aid programs have been revamped, allowing the Sobhi Saleh school to waive annual fees for Lebanese and Syrian families alike. But even bus fees are prohibitive for many families.
Instead of school, Hala, the 15-year-old salon worker, paints makeup on brides and partygoers. Her younger siblings and cousins roam the Hamra district trying to charm cafe and bar patrons into buying roses. They have been mugged, chased, beaten and arrested, but they keep on going.
On Hamra’s streets, the children have their own rules and hierarchies.
“Those who sell chewing gum — they are liars and thieves,” Hala’s sister Rimaz, 10, declared one night, with a mischievous glance at an older boy who was doing just that. (The next night, he came back with gardenias.)
The children talk a lot about learning. They remember which grade they last attended and compete over who has picked up the most letters and numbers, crucial for doing business.
“I can count to 100 in English,” Rimaz boasted. And she can.
“It’s better here, because we’re not being bombed,” said her cousin, Khalid Ibo, 11, an aspiring photographer. But his sister Maram, 9, said she did not like working and wanted to study.
Their cousin Alaa Jassem, 14, wants to be an architect. Now, though, he describes himself as “a specialist” in fixing generators.
Khalid’s father, Abdelwahhid Ibo, 40, a laborer, and his sister Salha, 47, a bank janitor, said they worried about the children’s safety — but their own earnings could not feed the family.
They are among the lucky few to pass several stages of a lengthy process to win resettlement in the West.
They fantasize about Australia, but they have little choice: In a standardized process run by international aid agencies, where they end up depends on which country, if any, volunteers to take them.
But down the coast, near the Sobhi Saleh school, the Hamdi family is not so fortunate.
They rent a drafty cinder-block room beside a garbage-strewn beach. Once a fancier district called the Riviera, the neighborhood grew crowded in the 1970s with Lebanese displaced by war. Some have since emigrated to Germany and rent their crooked houses to Syrian refugees.
Ibrahim Hamdi, 55, worked for decades in Lebanon, traveling back to Syria every few months to see his family. That tradition — along with shared language and history — has helped many Syrians find their way here. But as more arrive, supporting them gets harder.
United Nations cuts have ended refugee benefits for Mr. Hamdi and his older sons. And newly restrictive Lebanese policies mean that his wife and younger children, who arrived more recently, cannot register for refugee status — meaning that unlike the Jassems, they have no path to resettlement.
Mr. Hamdi forbids his sons to try their luck in the smugglers’ boats. Instead, the older children look for work and plan to invest everything in school for the youngest: Ahmed, 5, is not yet too far behind the Lebanese in English.
“The crisis might not be solved for 20 years,” Mr. Hamdi said. “Both Lebanon and we are bearing the burden.”
