ML-Implode News - Notes on the great Syrian exodus: â€˜Epic in scale, inconceivable until you witness it'

We are a few kilometres from the Syrian border, high up in Lebanon's Bekaa valley. In mid-winter the Bekaa is a bleak world of muddy, littered flatlands bounded by vast snowy ranges. The dreary soot of snow clouds briefly part for a hard red sun that rolls like a severed head over Syria. The ploughed winter earth is fallow save for one crop that sprouts like weeds: the plastic-clad hovels that run in colourful ribbons everywhere.
Only when you come close are you able to see this bitter harvest for what it is: endless shantytowns -- camps seem too orderly a word for their broken disorder -- in which survive perhaps half a million Syrian refugees. Perhaps more.

Depending on the wealth they bring with them or their lack of it, another million Syrian refugees can be found living in culverts, ruins, slums and better quality apartments throughout Lebanon -- a nation itself of only 4.5 million. No one knows the exact number any more as the authorities stopped registering refugees a year ago and closed the borders a few months later. But still they come.

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Notes on the great Syrian exodus: â€˜Epic in scale, inconceivable until you witness it'