MARCIA BIGGS:

It's dawn in the Bekaa Valley, near Lebanon's border with Syria.

Like children all over the world, 12-year-old Iman (ph) and 14-year-old Bushra are waiting for their morning ride. But this truck won't take them to school. It will take them to a long day of backbreaking work.

Iman and Bushra are from Raqqa, a town in Northern Syria now controlled by ISIS. They fled their homes two years ago when their village was destroyed. Here in Lebanon, they tell us their families have struggled to make ends meet, that their parents are too old to work. Local landowners often prefer to hire children, who are cheaper and have more energy, and the girls say they choose to work to save their parents the humiliation of having to ask for money.

"I went to work," Iman says, "so we could pay the rent."

"If they borrow money," Bushra says, "and somebody comes and talks about them the next day, we can't bear that."

The U.N. estimates there are almost 300,000 Syrian refugee children living in Lebanon today not currently enrolled in school, having to work instead to support their families. These children in the potato fields today are the sole breadwinners in their families, earning as little as $4 a day.

Yet Iman and Bushra are some of the lucky ones. A local organization has set up a school with afternoon shifts for working children.

TATIANA KREIDY, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Beyond Association: The parents came to us and said, we cannot survive if our children don't go to work, so we need this work, we need this money, but we also need the education.