Rasha never seems to rest. The energetic, smart young Palestinian refugee starts each day in her one-room temporary shelter figuring out how she will find food for her family, earn some money to pay for it and keep her children from spending their day crying and longing for their home back in Syria. She also has to contend with her bad-tempered husband, still frustrated and humiliated over not being able to provide for his family.

Rasha and her family arrived in Lebanon half a year ago and headed for the already overcrowded Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. Rasha now admits they might never have come if they had known what awaited them: a maze of narrow, dirty alleyways under a tangle of electric wires with water dripping down the crumbling walls. Rasha has to pay $300 a month for a room with no running water and often no electricity, either.

“At night, I spend hours counting how much I have to get for food and for the rent,” she told me. “It has become an obsession.”

More than 90,000 Palestinians from Syria have sought shelter in Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps. The camps, set up more than 60 years ago, can barely accommodate its longtime residents, let alone the flood of new refugee families. According to a survey conducted earlier in the year by American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), three out of four refugees from Syria regularly lack food. Women and children account for 74% of the refugees. Six out of 10 families have to share one room and end up hanging blankets or pieces of cloth to mark off space for privacy.