Sariah Tufail is a 17-year-old from the city of Baalbek in North Lebanon. She is bright-eyed, intelligent and speaks some English.  

Before the bombs dropped on her city, she was just another teenager in her second baccalaureate year. When I asked her what she wanted to study eventually, she quickly answered: “I want to study judgment” and I politely corrected her “You mean you want to read law?”  

She smiles as our eyes meet and I know that even in the hour we spent together, I had won her trust. 

Sariah and the many thousands of Lebanese females now live in empty school buildings like the one in Nazareh village of Qusayr close to the Syrian-Lebanese border. 

While there is a palpable sense of strength and pride among them, when you look deep into their eyes, they are far away, perhaps somewhere in the hills of beautiful Baalbek where the ancient Phonecian ruins lie.

HELPING OUT: Dr Jemilah holding a Lebanese child at the Nazareth refugee centre in Quasir, Syria, recently.

Maybe they are wondering about the friends and family they have left behind or who did not make it through the assaults. 

The five of us in the Mercy Malaysia team agreed on one thing that afternoon. Almost every adult in the camps we visited had started smoking, a sure sign of stress. 

They crowded around us as we asked them about their needs – how they were coping – and continuously gathering data so that we could plan our relief efforts in a clear and consistent way. 

It was obvious that while they had been treated well as “guests” by the Syrian authorities (who did not like to refer to them as refugees and had made remarkable effort to take care of them), there were obvious needs among women folk that had been taken for granted. 

As I mingled with the female refugees, slowly they would come up to me to whisper that they really needed clean underwear and sanitary towels, Sariah being among the first to say so. 

Over the past weeks, many had resorted to cutting up their clothes to make emergency sanitary cloths and they were obviously unhappy about the situation. 

We had anticipated that need, so smiles and giggles broke out as we unloaded the huge bags of sanitary towels and other hygiene kits that we had purchased and also received from UN Population Fund.  

Children had their fair share of diapers, too, and our team became popular with them very quickly.