Beirut – Georges Chahine
Mohammed Muwaffaq Melsi, a Syrian refugee, had had enough on Tuesday evening. He went out of the house, hoping to return with a square meal for his family. But he did not come back. Melsi was late. His family began to search for him, only to find him hanging with a rope around his neck. Mohammed had committed suicide upstairs, just one floor up from where his wife and their four daughters were waiting for him to come home. Mohammed’s relatives tell Arabstoday he was 35 when he died. He hailed from Idlib but was staying with his Palestinian wife in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus. They fled to Lebanon with their four daughters about a month and a half ago. From there the family moved to Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Sidon, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the country, where Mohammed started renting a house in the Titaba neighbourhood, looking for jobs whenever he could. Melsi was known for his pride, a neighbour informs Arabstoday. He never went to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees [UNRWA] or humanitarian organisations -- which aim to help displaced Syrians -- despite the difficult circumstances he found himself in. \"We will not accept humiliation,” Mohammed was known to say. “We have lost everything but we will not lose our dignity.\" There are plenty of stories doing the rounds about his suicide. His wife Rima Bakar confirmed that Mohammed was bitterly disappointed by the poor conditions inside the camp. He tried to look for a job to support his family, but to no avail. She added that Muhammad\'s psychological state only got worse after he could not hold down rent, or pay for the milk and medicines for his eight-month-old child. But residents in Titaba are telling another story. Apparently, Melsi had discovered, two days before he killed himself, that his mother had been severely injured inside Yarmouk after a shell landed on her house. Mohammed felt unable to help her, just like he felt unable to support his family and feed his children. People in Ain al-Hilweh even say that the night before he killed himself, Melsi was looking for work on the edges of the camp when Lebanese soldiers stopped him, asking to see his ID. It might be a routine procedure in refugee camps, but not for Mohammed. Most of all, people believe the economic and humanitarian crises suffered by Syrian refugees on a daily basis ultimately pushed Mohammed Melsi to tragically end his life.