Syria volunteers helping the displaced
September 6, 2012 -- Updated 0024 GMT (0824 HKT)
Demolished houses in Mezzah, a suburb of Damascus that has sided with the rebels.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Residents in Mezzah say they are being punished for supporting the Syrian rebels
- But the flipside is a community coming together to help each other
- Volunteers help people bombed from their homes or with food runs or teaching
- Along the way, they say, they feel they are getting their country back
Editor's note: CNN has
obtained this account of life in a suburb of Damascus, Syria from local
activists. For safety reasons, we are not naming the journalist.
(CNN) -- The streets are eerily quiet with hardly a
living person on them. Damaged buildings hang over the roads where once
people would have been living and working.
Those that do brave the
streets of Mezzah, a suburb of Damascus, move in pairs or small groups
but not alone. In the tiny side streets children used to play, but not
anymore.
In a series of interviews
with activists, they described how the city has deteriorated during the
Syrian civil war. They said on the night before Eid al-Fitr -- the
festival that ends the Ramadan fasting period -- and the streets were in
darkness instead of a party mood.
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By 8:00 p.m. few people
were in the shop-lined streets and 90 minutes later only those who have
to be on the streets were out of their homes.
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But as locals stay
inside, security patrols -- both official Syrian security forces and the
thuggish Shabiha militia loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad -- are
common.
When tension is high, a police patrol could pass the same spot more than 30 times, local activists in Mezzah told CNN.
They said Mezzah is one
of the suburbs that showed sympathy to the uprising and the Free Syrian
Army -- and now they are being punished by the regime.
Residents say public
services like gas, electricity and street cleaning have been either
reduced or stopped. In recent days, they say, rather than cleaning walls
of anti-Assad graffiti, security forces have simply knocked down the
offending wall.
Activists say they are now organizing and taking on some of those duties previously administered by the government.
Lana, a married
31-year-old, said "This uprising showed us the best in ourselves. You
see young men and women taking care of their neighborhood by cleaning it
and providing for those whose houses were destroyed."
She added: "We are
calculating the number of houses destroyed, families displaced and the
amount of damage inflicted by the regime. We have a lot of work after
the regime falls!"
Before the war, local civic action or voluntary work was rare.
Public services like cleaning the streets or supplying basic gas were mostly carried out by the government.
Religious and charitable organizations were also mostly supervised by various government departments.
In such a suffocating
environment, anti-Assad activists say, there was little that people
could do voluntarily for their communities -- and over time the
motivation to do anything was also lost.
Dina, an opposition
activist who has left Syria, explained: "When you don't feel that the
country is yours, why bother changing it?"
But now the cry to rebuild, enhance and provide for the country is increasingly being heard in Mezzah.
Early in the uprising,
the activitists helped out the displaced on an ad hoc basis, but as the
crisis dragged on and the damage increased they got more organized.
Some initiatives were launched though social networking websites like Facebook.
One of these is a
voluntary group called "I want to help." On its Facebook page they say:
"We work apart from politics ... The idea of this initiative is to
create a network to spread awareness and provide humanitarian aid."
And smaller initiatives
have branched from this group across suburbs. Today, there is "I want to
help Mezzah" and "I want to help Midan" -- both neighborhoods in
Damascus -- and other sites.
These groups' activities
include preparing schools for refugees, cooking for displaced families,
teaching first aid and providing for poor communities who were severely
hit by the economic difficulty the country is witnessing.
Now, some in Mezzah feel they are getting their country back.
Raya, a former school
teacher, said: "When we heard that the Shabiha were coming to our
neighbourhood, the young men in our building organized themselves in one
committee. They closed the door of the building and assign each one of
them a specific task to secure the area.
"When the security
forces chase young men after a protest, most housed in the neighborhood
would open their doors to hide these young men although it was extremely
dangerous if the security attacked any of these houses."
Lana, who lives in
Mezzah, said: "For a couple of days we could not leave our houses. Food
supplies started to run out. A young man then took his car and went
under the shelling and bought vegetables and food supplies for everybody
in the neighbourhood.
"There are many things
we used to do to go about our lives that we can't do today. Nowadays, I
would never take a taxi alone. I would never send my children to the
closeby shop alone. The 15-minute walk I used to make from my house to
my family's suddenly needs to be at a specific time and with somebody's
company"
She added: "I've lived
here for my whole life, but I've never felt that attached to the
place... We now feel that this is our Mezzah, it is our Damascus and we
will take care of it."
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