But i was. Born of it and. They came over this Mountain Range on the other side is their country syria. They are needed here in the bekaa valley. To. The harvest to last until december until then there is work for everyone. Tens of thousands of refugees from the Syrian Civil War are laboring in the fields near the Syrian Lebanese border. Children like we on have to work to provide for their Families Together with her friend fatma she works an eight hour shift like the others here sometimes even longer. More than half the farm laborers our children who should be going to school but have been drafted to work as wage slaves. The farmer who owns the potato field hires the young field workers via the camp supervisor or shall we should he ensures that the harvest is carried out without a hitch and that his workers get what they need to subsist on. With. My parents get for packages of bread every day for all of us there is a deduction for electricity. And for the space where my family has our tent up to follow some simple. Weve come to lebanon to find out how this system of child labor functions the young generation will be needed to help rebuild syria what will it mean for them and the country if half of these children grow up unable to read or write. We dont get any money i do this for my family when i work my wages are credited to me once a month they settle the accounts if i need something for myself i have to ask my parents will. The men with sticks keep the field workers under control well that is the out of the thirty if anyone who is too slow faces the prospect of a beating. The farmer who the workers have been contracted to has to be kept happy there is no shortage of syrian farm laborers to choose from. Nabbous i can only go to school when it rains have occurred. When theres nothing to do in the field we can go if we have permission. I dont go to school but some of the other kids do. What was. Wrong with the out the door and. Once the field has been harvested the Young Workers are trucked off to the next room. Two more fields are waiting for them the they come valley is covered in potato farms and. The shell we should recruits the children in the refugee camp. His Business Model depends on the dependency of others the syrian families owed him money as soon as they arrived in lebanon. Was the. Will to go to. The refugees are brought directly to me homes if i have to pay the traffickers five hundred to six hundred dollars i take on the costs and over time they pay me back. To shall we she is not only a job recruit or his businesses housing refugees who have no valid documents whoever ends up in his custody has to obey his roots. Or but the. I sense of the ten of the residents i pay for their electricity and water. I even fetch bread for them. In return they work for me and i take part of their wages naturally. Im not running a Charitable Organization here. But i was the vehicle watching over me. Throughout lebanon there are thousands of unofficial camps like this one the shall we she is the boss here. The people who live in the camps have no residence permits they are in lebanon illegally and they are forced to lead a marginal existence. And i think will. Happen after my family im going to have. The grown ups mostly earn money as hired hands on construction sites they send their children out to do the less strenuous far more. Fucked me and her family came here four years ago but my younger siblings are still too young to work she helps them with their school work. With all the. Fun it would like to go to school but she doesnt have the time its her friend we um brings her the exercises from the lessons. Flatmate was out working in the field early this morning. Or. I get a pass except for a day and go to work last i come home around two oclock in the afternoon then i help my mother with the housework and do homework with the little ones were going to call my office again when the main meal. To be sure that there are half a million syrian children in lebanon who should be going to school but more than half of them are obliged to earn money as Illegal Migrants the adults have a hard time making a regular income thats why they send their children to work. I cannot promise to send this i only went to school for a short time then i couldnt go any more than one that is also for the past two years ive been working to earn money. That. I have. That mean then he didnt did. Jemez. Said well. The man is. About i had that rough. But well. That said what happens when i let dad do what kamal says that. Id like to be a pediatrician thats my dream. And like to learn a lot and fulfill my dream but unfortunately that cant be my house. Right next to the Syrian Border is the town of right here the extent of child labor is plain to see. Precious few School Age Children attend classes. Most of them came here after their homes in syria were destroyed they came to lebanon seeking a life in peace. Here in right they make bricks for the building industry. Seventy Factories Press cement to produce thousands of blocks every day. Factory owner ziad cousin runs one of the Biggest Companies in the town syrians have been coming over the border for decades to work here when the civil war broke out they brought their families to and settled next to the cement factory. While you want to get the goods and everything and the syrians have one child after another as if they didnt have any other problems. That lebanon is straining under their press its a big it was a lot minimum but there are some areas that wouldnt function without the serious its going to set workers for the cement press and for the drilling machines and for stacking the bricks when it syrians for that let me that i thought about one of if we can stop now. Everyone has to pitch in including the girls the youngest workers are ten years old. The family fled here from homes four years ago after their house was hit by a missile their new home is directly next to one of the smaller brick factories in raw eat. The two sisters watch and draw god usually work five days a week. Lebanons Construction Industry is booming and demand for bricks is high. The children are likely to have work for some time to come. I thirteen year old drug god helps her brother fill the cement into the moment the workers are paid by the brick the faster they are the more they earn. I. A quarter of a million of these children go to work instead of school the lebanese economy would grind to a halt without them. Ive been bad taking my brothers sometimes bets with allie about who can make more breaks i help my brother so he doesnt hurt himself. With that yesterday a brick that failed his fate is that i felt so bad for him that it. Girls like drug od are being robbed of their childhood she would normally be in seventh grade but she has never seen a school classroom. Where im allowed to go to school but the teacher didnt want me here why not well i dont know what did he send you away that he said i was too old. They dont take such big pupils who have eleven in a School System is overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Syrian Refugees many children are turned away theyre not enough resources to accommodate all of them that means youngsters like alene have virtually no chance of getting an education instead the thirteen year olds daily routine is toiling away in a brick factory. I can you imagine your future i have to let them work. I have no chance making breaks i have to until we can go back to syria was the. Deal like doing this. Was it not really. I hate it. Will i laughed ive i was. In the evening the air is still full of the dust from the factories. The families gather outside their tents. Most of the syrians see lebanon as a temporary home if you want to stay here any longer than they have to. Go to that but i think that. One will be a match up in homes for the alsa lay family ran a Transportation Company made money they lived in a large house all that remains of it now are memories well i was the one and the man is that our situation is not very good. And syria we had a normal life and that the kids could go to school with. Many of the families that came to lebanon with us have moved on and that some of them went as far as canada or australia. And ive never been them and we dont want to go any further to be honest be havent even tried how in the middle we want to return to syria we want to go back as i would have thought in that alice who lives in that. Inshallah they say god willing they will soon be able to return to our regular void in syria. Beirut the capital of lebanon. The city has undergone many changes since the refugees arrived lebanon has taken in one and a half million syrians relative to the population thats more than any other country. Today every fourth resident here comes from syria most of them eke out a living on the fringes of society they are merely tolerated and get little in the way of support from the state. Eighty percent of the around one and a half million syrians here do not any longer have legal status to be in love but on this raises an enormous range of barriers for the right means they can move freely for fear of arrest at checkpoints which means they cant work and when they cant work they have very few resources to support their families to pay for rent and to pay for basic things like transportation to send their kids to school. Human rights expert. Is the author of a study on the barriers to education that the refugee children face its a massive problem. We found that lebanon had opened up two hundred thousand spots for chill for syrian children here and only about one hundred fifty thousand of those were filled so aside from the fact that this is way lower than the five hundred thousand children that are actually in need of an education and even the squats that the governor is opening are not being filled because people cant actually get to them and so thats really the root problem here that neither the lebanese government or the International Donors have addressed so far. The poor Living Conditions forced many to try to move on as is evident every day at the German Embassy in beirut for example. The syrians lining up at the entrance want to join their families in germany theyve waited six months for their appointments theyre here with high hopes but most of them dont have the necessary documents which are hard to obtain its a nerve wracking situation. That interview with. My husband is trying to get the papers i need from germany when i was hes been trying for years oh well. I will not keep sending me away because some documents are missing. It drives me crazy to always have to travel here hasnt it causes me a lot of trouble im suffering every day. In germany family reunification for refugees continues to be a contentious and highly charged issue its currently suspended for most syrians. This family has been hoping for two years to get permission to travel to germany in the summer of twenty fifteen the alkhateeb sent three of their daughters on a long and arduous journey to europe. The parents remained in lebanon hoping that their daughters would be able to secure the family visas to enter germany one of the daughters left behind her two children five year old. And his six year old sister iowa. Shes been hard of hearing since a bombardment back in syria. The alkhateeb had a plan their adult daughter would apply to have her two children join her and an underage daughter would apply to get her parents and other siblings permission to come. Up. And im a few things all they need are identification documents but getting new ones is very expensive it would cost us eleven thousand dollars and we couldnt be sure if they were real or fake. That wed have to send someone to syria to get us our passports we cant go there are selfs. Twenty three year old tinas is making her daily video call shes four thousand kilometers away since leaving lebanon she talks with her children twice a day. Like santa. Claus. He knows his currently living in eastern germany close to the polish border. She only has a temporary right to stay in germany like most of the syrians there. But they cant really ask her if she speaks german. Will she be able to bring her family to germany. Why not. There are several hundred thousand people like this family eager to join their relatives in germany most attempts have failed. Them the food and we need help to get to our Daughters School it would be better for the childrens future. There they could all go to school in a month and. If you meant that it can and we cant send them to school here we cant afford it two children would have to take the bus every day. That costs are too much in germany they could all get an education and. He could contribute to the. Nosy and i as mother tina try to return to lebanon. But she was denied entry on the grounds that there were already anough syrians in the country so they remain separated. We are back in the bekaa valley near the Syrian Border. Of the old the residence of the camp are using the last days before the onset of winter to find a new place to live for those who can afford to move on harvest time is coming to an end soon the first snow will start to fall. For. We on is getting ready for school. Today is a rainy day as forecast. And a rainy day means she can go to school. With world war two. The days spent out on the fields are getting fewer and fewer now she has time until spring to attend school instead of working for we arm it means making up the lessons she has missed over the past months. Until this is not a Public School someone is one of a range of private organizations in lebanon that offer an education to children who cant attend regular schools. They may not receive a diploma but they are at least getting lessons. All the pupils here are Syrian Refugees. Some of the mix here you know the side of the fence or organization understands the familys dilemma we realize that our pupils also have to work but we always welcome them whenever they have time to attend class how it happened and how we talk with the parents and try to persuade them to let the children come to us when it might be about other than it that it was eat the week we im is older than the other pupils shes missed so much schooling that she has trouble keeping up its unclear whether she will ever be able to transfer to a regular school refugees especially those without legal residence are unlikely to be enrolled. At end of the been full of it that she no doubt the regular schools usually demand identification papers and a residence permit but most of the refugees have neither and what was the main problem is that the state schools have too few spaces for all the refugee children to me and i had a meeting this as it was as my mother had many schools still only accept people who are officially registered entering the others away on the margins but i did not love. This school tries to follow the official curriculum as closely as possible for all those omitted from the formal education system. Was how. Two hundred fifty thousand syrian children in lebanon have never seen a classroom even though International Conventions recognize the right to an education as a basic human right. Was. Brian would much rather go to school than work but i can only come here when it rains or when there is no work on the field thats the only time i can come to school. Ration. Chicken shit on my desk. These children belong to the lucky group who have managed to get into the public School System. All the. Time for yourself welcomes them to her living room she fled from syria herself and she started up this class three years ago back when none of these children were enrolled at a school. Today theyre here for some extra tutoring. The Education Sector when it comes to into truth and situational support or even programmatic support is one of the sectors that receives the biggest portion of funding weve had to do massive campaigns in order to explain to refugee parents the importance of and warning that children in a formal Educational Program or at least. One are facing difficulties in accessing lebanese Public Schools they can join nonform Education Programs that will allow them to register in school the following year. Were going to have. Time for yourself worked in a bank in aleppo before she came to lebanon seeing the desperate plight of these children prompted her to take up teaching. Here. So she started off with four pupils now there are thirteen. She gets funding from International Groups organized by a french teacher the classroom materials are likewise paid for by donations. For the up though. Unfortunately International Conversation has already moved on and so were now seeing a lot of talk of whats going to happen with the rebuilding of syria on the return of refugees. And correspondingly a decrease in the mount of money thats coming into lebanon to support this crisis i mean this is really the generation thats supposed to be rebuilding syria if this war stops and theyre able to go home and if kids dont have an education if you have literally hundreds of thousands of children who grow up without an education that will have enormous ramifications in the future. Ramifications for their native syria and also their lebanese hosts and the wider world. And leave the bare bones. Says. They are a lost generation. By generation rant of their use and facing the burden and hope of making syria once again a land was an optimistic future. The fast pace of life in the digital. Shift has the lowdown on the web showing new developments and providing useful information on the witness fines and interviews with makers and users the first next on d. W. P. They make a commitment. They find solutions. They inspire. Africa among. Stories of those people making a difference shaping their nation lives and their continent explain w. s new multimedia series for africa pls dot com africa on the move. Living in the digital age. Coming up twenty seven teams most google names shining on instagram. And lots of every day annoyances. But first computer Game Developers and egyptologists are teaming up to decipher hieroglyphs using artificial intelligence. They were inspired by a game where players transport