Refugee Camps

Hey Everyone,

As mentioned before, Jordan has a lot of refugees. The majority of them don't live in refugee camps, but still, a very large number of them do. In newspaper articles around the world, we read about the humanitarian crisis happening in these camps, but it's hard to imagine what these camps are. In the past few weeks I've had the opportunity to go to both a Palestinian and a Syrian refugee camp. I went to each camp for very different reasons, and consequently, came away feeling very differently. I want to share some of my thoughts and stories with you.

I went to a Syrian camp today to participate in a volunteer day planned by SIT. Although these camps are not theme parks, all semester, we had been asking to have a chance to visit a refugee camp. This volunteer day gave us the opportunity to see a camp. I'm going to do a lot of reflections about refugee care in this section.

I went to the Palestinian refugee camp last week to conduct some interviews for my ISP and distribute surveys. My initial plan was to interview two families and interact with people living in the camp, but last minute changes (don't forget--it's Jordan) meant that I only had the chance to drive around the camp and look in from the outside and then interview a man in a house on a hillside right outside of the camp.

The Syrian Camp: A Two Way Petting Zoo

With the stress of having six days to finish our research projects, SIT had a volunteer day in a Syrian refugee camp outside the northern city of Mufrak. We didn’t know what we would be doing other than bringing them blankets, socks, scarves, and a soccer ball. We loaded onto a massive yellow coach bus, and drove for an hour up to the north.

As we pulled into the camp, I realized we are in a sad place. We looked out the window and saw a few scattered white tents with UNHCR stamped on the sides. The wind was blowing hard, and children were starting to assemble outside the tents near the bus. They were jumping up and down excitedly, cheering our arrival. I later learned that they thought we were a group from the UN dropping off food. Sorry kids…We sat on the bus for a while, watching them watching us. And then we got out. A group of 20 American students stood in a clump in front of about 30 Syrian children, none of whom could have been older than age 10. It was 10 AM on a Monday—why weren’t they in school?

First about the camp. This camp was not particularly structured, but rather, tents were placed in clusters in areas surrounding already existing Jordanian Bedouin houses. I can only imagine the feeling of siting in a tent freezing my ass off while looking at a concrete house 50 meters away. And it was cold.

 

Soon, they told us that we would be dividing into three stations. Of course, there were only two. Some people were to “train” the children in making friendship bracelets (the wording was awesome), some were to build a tent for a family, and the third group was told to think of ideas and play with the kids.

The group that made friendship bracelets sat inside a tent for a while with maybe 10 kids that were really cute. The group that made a tent assembled a tent that had been taken down so we could reassemble it (not a joke).

 I obviously went to play.

I grabbed the soccer ball that we had brought with us on the bus, and within a few minutes, I was playing soccer with a group that fluctuated between 5 and  20 young kids. When I say soccer, I say that in the loosest of senses. I would throw the ball to a kid (I’m a goalie afterall), and he would throw it back to me. Unless another kid came and stole the ball from him. Or slapped him and then stole the ball from him. Or took it and kicked it randomly in another direction. I threw it around to different kids, trying to get them all a chance to play. I had a lot of fun heading the ball around and proving that I could do chest traps. They were shocked. 

Kids were tripping all over the place, and popping right back up. I knew why they were tripping. It’s not as if there was a grass field, or even a concrete area to play on. The ground was hard packed dirt with rocks and shrubs everywhere. The kids were mostly wearing flimsy shoes—crocs or flip-flops. One girl was barefoot (and I found out that she is Jordanian, not Syrian). Multiple boys were wearing jeans that kept falling down. One very young boy boy was wearing nothing under his jeans, and they wouldn’t stay up. Another had a pair on with holes all over.

While we were playing, some strange moments happened. At one point, a boy ran up to another carrying a wooden two by four with nails sticking out of it. He attempted to start hitting another kid. He hit me a little bit as I tried to stop him, but eventually another kid took it from him. It was terrifying to see a seven year old run at a crowd trying to whack them with a piece of the door on the Chokie from Matilda. In another, one of SIT’s staff members that had previously played with the Jordanian women’s national team, punted the ball straight upward only for it to hit the hood of a car. When the ball went under the bus, I had no choice but to take the following picture:

Almost every kid asked me if they could have the ball. At a few points, I would disappear for 5 minutes and come back to a swarm of kids asking me where the ball is. I would learn that a kid took it to his tent, and all the kids would go and yell at him until we got the ball back. I decided that it was cute.

As I talked to the people around the camp and made more observations about the environment, I realized just how bleak the situation for Syrian refugees is.

At one point, after I was playing with kids for a few minutes, an older woman spoke to me in very fast Arabic, and all I heard was the word Haram. Was I not allowed to play with the kids? No. It turns out that the word harem means blanket, and it is not the same as the word that means not OK. Another woman came up to me and explained that her baby needed a jacket. I wish I could have helped her.

Eventually, one of the women decided that us kicking the ball around threatened the tents, because one of us easily could have made a tent fall down. We moved to their soccer field. I wish it resembled a field. It was more a large amount of space. It was slightly flatter and less rocky than the area we had been in previously, but not by much. At one point, we had to move our game because a group of shepherds came through with about 50 sheep. I died of laughter. We were in the badia…

A bit later, we were all hanging around in the main area, and our program director hands us boxes of wafers to pass out to the kids—one for each kid. It was so uncomfortable: “Hey starving brown children who probably all have post traumatic stress from what you have experienced in Syria and as a refugee in the last few years. I am a mysterious white person, and I come bearing sweets. Remember, white people are here to take care of you, oh poor, helpless Arabs. I took a box and begun distributing the packaged wafers. I’ve never felt more popular in my life. Granted, I sort of got attacked, but it was too funny not to appreciate.

 

We stayed at the camp for roughly two hours, and I decided that we had went that time in a petting zoo. The question, though, is who was petting whom.

Our group, as self-righteous Americans, went to a refugee camp to volunteer, to say we helped out, to say we made a difference. We built a tent! We trained them to make bracelets! But really, we as global Americans just wanted to see what people living in a crappy situation look like.

Their community, a group of displaced families from Syria that has nothing, does not have a lot of variety in their lives. They spend all day surviving, the mothers stay with the kids (who don’t go to school); the fathers often don’t have work. We provided entertainment. We were toys to play with. They took as many pictures of us as we took of them. We were equally intrigued by the other, for totally different reasons. A young girl asked me if America was pretty. Had she never heard anything about America that wasn’t political? A young girl tried to share some of her wafers from earlier with me. How long has it been since she had the chance to offer something to someone else and not just take?

We were all taking pictures of ourselves with the other group. Primarily, they asked to take pictures with me, or to have me take pictures of them. Here are some of those:

This boy could not believe I could do a chest trap. 

Physically, we gave this small community 20 blankets, a lot of pairs of socks, hijabs, and some sweatshirts. But we couldn’t give this community what they really need. I wish I knew what they really need.

They need shoes, and sweatshirts, and blankets, and hijabs, and pants. They need diapers, and band aids, and tissues, and hand sanitizer, and polio vaccines (not measles). They more protection from the snow than a canvas tent, more protection from flooding than some rocks along the bottom of the tent, and homes that allow for them to live and maintain dignity. How can a person keep their head high and feel proud of themselves, their ability to take care of their family, and their contribution to society when living in a white tent that says UNHCR on the side? They need the opportunity to have dignity, the opportunity to not feel like someone else’s burden. They need to have ways to return to a sense of normalcy and stop being refugees. But how the hell does anyone make that happen? The war in Syria is still going on, the UN doesn’t have the budget to do any more than they’re already doing, and a million NGOs are doing whatever they can.

But how can we give them any of those things without just being the white people from the west, coming in to save the starving children? We can’t. Refugee care is incredibly self-righteous. Every tent had a large sign saying which agency built it (these were mostly UNHCR, but there were some exceptions. The water tanks were all donated from Saudi Arabia, and had the word Saudi spray-painted on them in both English and Arabic. Some Saudi volunteers had come and built a tent out of goat hair with a concrete floor—and in a two minute description of it, they said the word Saudi about 500 times. I know that it’s good that different countries/groups are helping refugees, but there has to be some limit. I would not be surprised if I saw a refugee camp built by Coca Cola, with red tents instead of white ones. Our group was as guilty as the other ones.

To return to the ideas of the petting zoo, I think that this two-way petting zoo isn’t as bad of a thing as it sounds. We are in no position to help these refugees in any substantial way, so if nothing else, we can distract them for a few hours, give them some new people to gawk at, and show them that people care. We can play with some kids and let them see some new faces, give them a chance to laugh at our poor Arabic skills, and show them compassion, which every child can use more of.

We did not make a lasting impression on the refugees living in this camp, nor did we make a substantial difference in the lives of these kids or these families. But we provided a few hours of entertainment. The kids looked really happy. 

 

As we said goodbye, all the kids came up to the bus to shake our hands. They wanted hugs from all of us. My last kinesthetic experience in the camp involved me rubbing a young boy's head. His hair felt as though it was filled with dirt and hadn't been washed in a very long time. Good luck kid...I wish I could do anything to improve your situation.  

So what’s the alternative? Interestingly, at lunch, I got the answer—one I never expected.

Talking to our homestay coordinator who will hopefully be getting a PhD in human rights soon, we learned that there is nothing we can do to help Syrians. There are a million aid organizations receiving millions of dollars in donations, tons of food, clothing, blankets, etc. Distribution is not effective or easy, but giving an extra pair of shoes to one of these NGOs is not the way to make a real difference.

The way to make a difference with that pair of shoes is to donate it to Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Iraqis started coming into Jordan during the second gulf war. The stereotypical Iraqi had money—meaning Jordanians weren’t as automatically inclined to help them, as they could help themselves. It’s been 10 years since that war started, and funds have dried up. The media is constantly talking about Syria, so people are helping the Syrians; no one is helping the Iraqis anymore. They have nothing.

The Palestinian Camp

I'm currently working on a research paper all about the Palestinian right of return, so I can talk about this topic forever, but I'm going to (try to) be brief. Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan were initially founded in 1948 in the Arab Israeli war. In 1967 more refugees joined them. International Law grants refugees the right to return, but Israel has not granted them this right. Further complicating the matter, UNRWA refugee status is inherited by children from their parents.

This means that these camps have been standing for as long as 65 years. Initially, people lived in tents (like the Syrians do now). In the 1980s, the camps got more sturdy houses, with concrete floors and canvas roofs. Only in the mid 1990s, after Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty, did concrete apartments get built in these camps.

I always knew that life in Palestinian refugee camps involved children being born as refugees, being told that they are from somewhere else and will someday go back to somewhere else, but I never realized what that meant really before coming to the camp. As we turned off the highway and drove along the outside, I looked into the narrow streets of the camp itself, and saw litter everywhere with small kids running around. I saw people pushing carts on the main streets, walking to stores, and sitting on their front stoops. I opened the window and smelled a stench that was not welcoming or inviting.

The camp was not a tent camp, nor was it a city. It was a slum.

I know that the Right of Return is important to Palestinians, who have had an injustice happen to them. However, in Jordan, people have the legitimate opportunity to move on. Unlike Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (who are kept in tiny camps with barbed wire fences and not given citizenship or the opportunity to work), Refugees in Jordan were given citizenship. Consequently, these Jordanians of Palestinian origins (JPs) have the opportunity to leave the camps and do better for themselves and their families.

How do you set up a shop in the place in which you and all of your siblings were born while considering a foreign place in which you’ve never stepped foot home? How do you live in a cement house and grow up thinking of it as temporary? How do you live in this dirty, smelly, slum while knowing that other places in Jordan will provide you more opportunities for you and your family?

In Jordan, only 18% of registered Palestinian refugees live in refugee camps. I only talked to two of them, but both were bitter, angry, and resentful of their lives. They would also never consider leaving the camp to go to anywhere but Palestine, because leaving the camp is turning your back on Palestine.

Here are some pictures of the downtown area of the Camp.

Conclusion

Palestinian and Syrian (and Iraqi) refugees are in completely different different situations. One people is encouraged by their homicidal president to return to their country; one people is denied their right to return in order to give me a right to move to a land in which I have no immediate family. But Syrians haven't yet had the chance to recover and move on, and Palestinians in Jordan "do."

I just wish them all the best. What else can I do?