Syrian refugee Aya al-Souqi, left, smiles after receiving her first hearing test by Zaineb Abdulla, right, the Vice President of 'Deaf Planet Soul' Chicago hearing charity at Joub Jannine village in the Bekaa valley, east Lebanon, on Sunday, March 12, 2017. (AP Photo)
Bar Elias, Lebanon: Six-year-old Aya al-Souqi, a Syrian refugee, held the camera phone up to her gaze and listened to hear her mother.
"I hear you!" she exclaimed.
It was only the second time she'd spoken to her mother in Beeskow, Germany since getting fitted with a hearing aid by a Chicago-based charity to treat some of the invisible wounds of the Syrian war.
Aya, timid and diminutive, was a little over a year old in 2012 when a rocket struck her family's house in the Eastern Ghouta countryside, outside the Syrian capital, Damascus.
The strike killed her father and, the family believes, damaged Aya's right ear. Shortly afterward, the family moved to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands of other Syrians now live as refugees, to wait out a war whose conclusion is still a speck on the horizon.
"She used to respond to her name and play with other children," said her grandmother, Hayan Hashmeh. "When we came to Lebanon, we noticed that her hearing was very limited."