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In Aleppo, we were eating from cans. Imagine four months without any vegetables. There, everybody is afraid of the future, so they have to store for it, for bad days. Two years after the war started, they used all their storage. Afterwards, it was worse.

My own clinic was hit. We used to close the clinic and the lab at 2 p.m. In Syria, there is another system of working. We have a break for two, three hours and afterwards we work once again from 5 to 8 p.m. We like to eat with the children, spend time with them, and after that we come back to work once again.

So for the first time, my wife calls me, asking me to close. It was half past one. I have plenty of patients I need to see. She said, tell them to go and close the clinic. That was her instinct.

I had six employees, we dismissed all of them. At half past one, we closed. At exactly 2 p.m., the rockets came. A man must believe in a woman’s instinct, in the war, especially.

When they told me, “Your clinic was hit,” three minutes from my home, I was happy because I was away from the clinic with my loved ones.

The last time I was in Aleppo, I saw three buildings destroyed in front of me. One rocket — stone buildings, strong buildings, four-storey buildings.

So at that very moment, I said let’s go quickly. I took some of our things. I thought the second rocket would be on our home. We went to our car, it was almost all under the stones. We walked to her parents’ house. And afterwards, we went to Beirut.

We were in Lebanon for almost a year. A friend and the Armenian Community Centre sponsored us.