Syria: The Future of Fadi and Amir

Amir hadn’t had time to understand what was happening. A dull roar, the ground shaking violently, then silence—broken only by the crashing of collapsing buildings and screams.

In February 2023, he was ten years old when, in an instant, Karm-Dodo—the Aleppo neighborhood that had been his whole world since birth—turned into a nightmare. After the earthquake, their home was nearly gone: uninhabitable, just a pile of stones and rubble.

His family is large: five siblings, with Amir the second youngest and Fadi the youngest, only four at the time. They were welcomed into the small home of a neighboring family, where seven people now lived in a single room. Their father, disabled from a past heart attack, is not fully self-sufficient—his needs made the emergency situation even harder to bear.

Amir now spends most of his time on the street: partly to escape, partly to find a sense of play and freedom so vital for a child his age. His little brother Fadi follows him everywhere, imitating everything he does. The street becomes their home—and with it, all its dangers: drugs, child labor, the harsh realities of a Syria devastated by war and earthquake. Even the older siblings start working, trying to earn a salary to help lift the family out of this crisis.

One day, the children’s mother hears about the Franciscan Care Center of Pro Terra Sancta in Aleppo: a center supporting struggling families by offering practical and psychological help, along with school and therapeutic activities for children at risk of child labor. Seeing how vulnerable her children had become, she makes a decision: she goes to the Franciscan Care Center and asks for help—to rebuild their home and reclaim their life.

When the Pro Terra Sancta volunteers inspect the house, they find it uninhabitable and completely emptied by thieves who had taken advantage of its temporary abandonment. No furniture, no electrical wires, no water pipes—the house had been stripped bare and left exposed to the approaching winter cold. The team immediately gets to work: they rebuild the walls, reinforce what remains, restore the wiring and plumbing, and install new windows to protect from the freezing weather. Every day of work is a step out of the emergency.

The home comes back to life, becoming a place of warmth and comfort. Amir and Fadi are once again sleeping in their own beds, looking through closed windows at the destroyed city beneath the winter wind. And instead of wandering the rubble-strewn streets, Amir now goes back to school, full of new hope—thanks to the certainty that someone stands behind him and his family in facing this emergency.