In 2013, I worked for Save the Children Lebanon as a communications and media coordinator. That’s when I met Turki, who was a child at the time, with a heavy burden that no child should carry.

I met him in a tented settlement in the Bekaa Valley on a rainy April day, exceptionally cold and windy for Lebanon. I was accompanying a media crew from ABC Australia to meet new arrivals from Idlib and Aleppo in Syria – refugees who were living in tough conditions with irregular access to water, electricity and food.

On our way back, I noticed that more land on both sides of the road was busy with refugee tents and children running around.

Turki and his family were living there. They arrived from Syria two months ago, after Turki’s father had an accident, falling off the roof where he would sit watching the shelling and explosions. He was still depressed. Turki was in fact the breadwinner for the whole family: five younger brothers and sisters and his mother and father. He was 10 years old.

When I spoke to him, Turki was standing next to an old carriage piled with scrap metal he had been gathering from nearby streets. He was sorting out which pieces he could sell.

“I work every day from 7am until 1pm, gathering scrap metal here and there,” Turki told me. “Then I try to sell the pieces to adults, who scare me sometimes because they beat me”. He made around 15,000 Lebanese Pounds (approx 10 EUR) a day. “Life is not nice here,” he said. “I am sad because my father cannot work, but we need money and I have to bring food for my family.”

Huge responsibilities

A small boy, Turki had responsibilities that would daunt a grown man. His worried look was that of an adult, not a child. After his working day, he finally got to go home to his tent and played marbles with his friends and cousins. This was the only time I saw him smile.

His sisters and brothers were very shy and clung to their mother as if they were scared to leave her. None of them had been to school for the past two years.

Most Syrian children I met were excited to go back to school, make new friends and study for a better future, but not Turki. “I don’t like to go to school,” he told me. “Schools were shelled in Syria. They weren’t safe for us.” If the school were safe, though, he would be prepared to return – except that he had to work. “I don’t want to go back to school,” he said, “but I do hope we can return to Syria, to our home.”

In the meantime, Save the Children was providing help with shelter, education and child protection – necessities then and for the foreseeable future because as Turki said, with the wisdom of the maturity that was being forced on him too soon: “From what I see, it will be a long time before that can happen.”

Today on World Refugee Day, I can’t help but think that Turki is now 15, and still waiting for the deadly conflict to end in his country so he could go back.