Syria: The season for survival for millions of refugees

By Geraint Vincent: Middle East Correspondent

When the snow falls on the people who have fled from Syria, it's the season for survival.

At the Fayda refugee camp in Eastern Lebanon, the children don't take the opportunity to have snow ball fights or go sledging.

For them, the winter is only ever cold and miserable, and besides, it's difficult to have fun in the snow when all you have to wear on your feet is a pair of plastic sandals.

Their parents have put stoves in the centre of their tents. They burn throughout the day to offer warmth as well as food.

The temperature in the daytime here hovers above freezing, and at night it can get down to -10C or below.

Then there is the worry of collapse.

The snow arrives in such speed and weight that people fear that the roves of their tents will fall in during the night.

A quarter of the population in Lebanon is now made up of Syrian refugees.

Well over a million people in desperate need after nearly four years away from their homes.

Winter is always the hardest time and the UNHCR - the agency which delivers most of the aid to the refugees - does its best to provide what help it can.

This winter though, the UN says it's operating with a 50 per cent funding shortfall here. So they have been forced to prioritise their decisions on where to send the blankets and the tarpaulins, and they say the snowstorm has put the lives of the most vulnerable at risk.

Among the residents of the camp I visited, it was the loss of dignity which some find more difficult to bear than the cold.

One man told me that he used to be a building site foreman, in charge of 20 men. His home, he told me, had a kitchen, a bathroom, and central heating.

This is a place where people boast about the bare essentials, they used to have.