Story
March 28, 2016
Reporter's Notebook: A Child's Trauma—Being Buried in Your Own Home
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The Healing
One of the under-reported stories of Syria's Civil War is the deliberate targeting of hospitals by...
ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan—Omar was only 3 years old when his family's house in Daraa was struck by a bomb.
His mother, pregnant at the time, grabbed one child; his father grabbed another. When they arrived outside, coated in dust and debris, they realized Omar was still inside. They found him under some rubble, alive and scared.
It is a story doctors hear too often at a medical clinic run by the Syrian American Medical Society inside the Zaatari refugee camp. And it brings a unique kind of trauma.
An unseen enemy buries you in your own house.
"He suffered a lot," Omar's mother said of the child who is now 6.
His shelter, the place that was once protection, collapsed on him and almost took his life.
