When you live in a tent, the door of your home becomes very valuable.

Rami al Sayed is a photojournalist from the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in Southern Damascus. He currently lives in Deir al Ballout, a camp for internally displaced people in northwestern Syria.

When you live in a tent, the door of your home becomes very valuable.

You start to dream of having a door again — to put the key inside it, to open it and close it, to hear the sound of the door open and close. This thing that many take for granted is very precious for someone like me who has lost everything and now lives in a tent whose walls and doors are fabric. Only those who lived in the tent know the feeling.

I am from Yarmouk camp. For years we lived there under Syrian and Russian bombs. My house was hit by a barrel bomb and was completely destroyed. We moved to a second house and soon it was hit by an air strike and destroyed. We did not give up. We moved to a third house, but this time the shelling was heavy and the siege was more severe and the regime finally managed to force us to leave.

We are now living in a tent. Every time we got bombed before we tried to escape, to find a safe haven for us and for our children. But today where do we flee to?

It is very difficult to flee all the time from place to place. We are psychologically devastated. We have been expelled from our homes and our land while the whole world was watching. When we were living in Yarmouk there was a chance that the roof over our heads would protect us from bombs. Yes we would get injuries but at least there was a barrier between us and the bombs. Now that our home is a tent there is nothing to protect us.

We live in constant terror. We feel that the whole world has let us down and abandoned us as a Syrian people. All the values ​​and principles, human rights, the right to life, the right to education, the right to health and all these rights are only ink on paper.

I have lost hope. But the only thing that keeps me going is my belief that I joined this revolution for a reason. To live in freedom, dignity and citizenship. To live in a society where everyone is equal and have rights like everyone else. In a society with no dictatorship or corruption. I believe we will reach this day, even if it is our children’s generation.