Maysoun and her kids were watching TV when their house exploded. It was 2012 in Damascus, Syria, and a plane had just bombed their section of town. The stones of their home had crumbled, hitting Maysoun in the head. In excruciating pain, she looked at the blood on her body and was sure she was dead. Then, she looked at her husband, and she saw what death really looked like. Most of the stones had crushed him, his head was badly bleeding, and parts of his body were all over the ground.
But Maysoun's four kids were still alive. So she took them and ran. For a year straight, they slept wherever they could—on the floors of schools and hospitals, sometimes outside—as the Syrian civil war ravaged on. With little else to lose, Maysoun found a way out in 2013: she could head to neighboring Lebanon. With her one-year-old in arms, and three other children by her side, she travelled by foot to cross the border.
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