Lugging a plastic bag carrying the clothes and the few food scraps she could salvage, Umm Samir set out from her ruined home and crawled through the pre-dawn gloom on her second journey into exile in 68 years.
In the difficult days since, she has made her way from the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp on the southern edge of Damascus to Beirut, where she now confronts the bitter reality of again becoming a refugee, the lifelong dream of returning to her birthplace now further away than ever.
"I always thought that the only time I would move from Yarmouk would be back to Palestine," she said from a tiny, airless basement in the Sabra-Shatila Palestinian camp in the heart of the Lebanese capital, where the family sought sanctuary three days ago. "Now I find myself here."