Take off your shoes before entering… This bus is completely different

To enter this abandoned bus in Syria is a ritual, and after obtaining the permission of its residents,

you must take off your shoes.

It’s only a few seconds to get around, and Um Ahmed has turned the off-duty bus into a modest residence for her and her four children

This bus may have been a day of “excellent” transportation as its owner wrote it, but it certainly isn’t today.

All his seats were removed and mattresses were placed in place.

At the end of the 12-metre-long, 2.5-metre-wide bus,

a red blanket was hung hiding the belongings of the people of the house.

Umm Ahmed and her children fled the village of Al-Sharia in The Sahl Elghab in Hama countryside for fear of shelling that destroyed her home and killed her husband. She didn’t take anything with her.

All she cares about is to survive with her family.

I arrived in the village of Armanaz in the northern countryside of Idlib, and here you did not find a tent to shelter and did not have the material means to rent.

“Here we feel deprived of everything, the seats eaten by rats that only pass a day and about five rats swoop down on us,” she says.

and she put curtains on the windows of the bus,

They are not curtains in every sense of the word, but blankets to relieve the sun and protect them from the winter winds.

By sitting in the front window of the bus, her children find themselves so lucky that it is an opportunity for a child not to sit and walk around a bus with all that freedom, they say.