Feature: Syrians escaping hellish life receive hospitality in shelters

After having lived in a rebel-held area for almost two years, the 11-year-old Samira thought she had arrived to heaven, when her family was moved to a shelter in the capital Damascus.

During their time in the rebel-held town of Beit Sawa on the eastern outskirts of Damascus, Samira was dreaming of candies, a fantasy she couldn't afford in a place, where hunger, illness and battles left no space for sweet dreams, let alone actual sweets.

"We have been hungry for a very long time, and my father had eventually sold almost everything we had to provide a little bit for us," Amina told Xinhua, at a school which has been turned into a shelter in northwestern Damascus.

Sitting cross-legged on a thin rug at a corner in the school yard, Amina described their current life in the shelter as living in a heaven, comparing to the hellish life in Beit Sawa.

Her father, Omar, said "the situation here (in the shelter) couldn't be any better. We thank everyone who has exerted efforts here in this place. They have received us with great hospitality and provided us with the best services and treatment and food."

"I swear that if the roads out of Ghouta were opened, none of the people would stay there. They would all run out of there. A lot of people want to leave but the rebels would not allow them to do so," he said, voicing the agony of many who have become fed up with the woes of war.

Samira, or her parents, may have never thought that despair could push them to see a shelter-turned school and a bedroom-turned classroom as a heaven for them, but Syria's four-year-old conflict has made the impossible possible with stories like this repeated over and over again with millions of people, not only Samira.

For the vast majority of Syrians, buying a house is one of their lifetime dreams due to the high prices of houses and real-estates, and when one of them loses what he had worked most of his life to get, it's really devastating.

"The crisis has stripped me of every beautiful memory I have ever had. I had a big house in Ghouta of four rooms and big saloon, but it all gone now, Bashira, a 45-year-old women, said, her eyes gazing up in the sky, apparently trying to follow the fading image of what her life had used to be.

The 50-year-old Talal had lost his keychain while he was fleeing his house in the Kabbas neighborhood east of Damascus, after the rebels attacked the nearby neighborhood of Dukhaniyeh.

The Syrian troops quickly dislodged the rebels from Dukhaniyeh, and it didn't take Talal long before he returned to his home, but this time he didn't need his keychain, because he found no door to use the keys for.

"I returned home but I could hardly recognize it due to the damage it has sustained as a result of the nearby shelling. I felt strange in my own home and I had to move temporarily to my relative's house until I can repair my home," he said.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said in a report issued Thursday said that Syria has become the "world's single largest driver of displacement."

It added that Syria is the world's biggest producer of both internally displaced people (7.6 million) and refugees (3.88 million at the end of 2014). Endit