Several of Um Yumna’s children got married, and some of them lived in the area around Tarik Al Jadidah. They were unfamiliar with Barja. except by name. One of the sons married a girl from the family, who was from Barja. She did not want to live in Beirut, so there was nothing to do but to live in a house in Barja. Next to it was a house that was still just a skeletal frame. Its Syrian owners were offering it for sale for an attractive price because they were in urgent need of money, so the son tried to convince his family to buy it. The year was 2000 or 2001, i.e. during the period when the building in Tarik Al Jadidah had deteriorated. Even so, the family was reluctant to buy it because they never imagined that they would one day live in Barja. But in the end, the house represented a good investment opportunity, especially since three of Um Yumna’s sons were still unmarried. It contained four unfinished residential apartments and three shops at the street level. Um Yumna seized the opportunity and went to the house’s owners with an offer to buy it from them. They did not accept at first, because their relationship with her son next door had not been good. So she resorted to an intermediary, a contractor well-known among the people of Barja, and she succeeded in buying the house. Um Yumna sold an incomplete house in Beqaa that she had built when she returned to her family’s village during the war, and used the money to buy the house in Barja. She would not finish building it, and it would stay in its unfinished state for the next 10 years. This is where Um Yumna lives today with two of her children.