Barriers to Empathy/Home

Author(s): Tamim Mobayed

Type: Photograph

Department: Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science

Exhibit no: 4


Captured in April 2018 at a refugee camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Known as “The Widow’s Camp”, most of its inhabitants arrived over the preceding years from the bombarded suburbs of Damascus. As is self-evident, many wouldn’t have remembered this perilous journey.

While it might be romantic to think the children are looking out from the barbed fence towards the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, beyond which would be Damascus and home, in reality, they’re looking into a sewage laden ditch surrounding the camp physically, and enveloping it olfactorily. The barriers facing the children are more obvious than the barriers my research targets.

Acknowledgements: The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) for allowing me to take part in that medical/psychosocial mission, Dr Jet Sanders for supervising my thesis, and the school of PBS for allowing me to study Behavioural Science.