Green
In Syrian refugee camp, missing even the smallest reminders of home
The dirt is too dry in northern Jordan, Abu Salmiah could tell right away. When he arrived, he started looking for something to redeem the soil, but there were no blades of grass, no shrubs or bushes, and certainly no trees.
Instead there are mice and there are snakes. They can crawl under the walls of the metal homes, because there are no floors. Water seeps in too. When it rains, the outer perimeter of the home gets musty and wet. Outside, the sun bakes the color out so that everything, even the buildings and the people, are just brown.
Abu Salmiah and his friends — there are a dozen or so nearby— paid their life savings to get here. Now, they are among the first few thousand arrivals to Azraq Refugee Camp, which Jordan expects someday soon could host up to 130,000 inhabitants.
Traffickers are running the border on Syria’s side. One man paid 15,000 Syrian pounds (about $100) each for all eight members of his family. Having already fled three time within Syria—from Homs to Raqaa, then Abu Kamel—they finally reached the Jordanian border terrified and thirsty, pockets empty. “Some people are really making a lot of money off this war,” he observes.
When Abu Salmiah arrived, he wanted to feel relieved. But there was the brown soil, getting under his clothes and into his ears and nose. He had once seen a report on TV saying that the refugee camps had showers—warm showers! That’s what he needed when he got through the illegal border, past the Jordanian military post, off the transfer bus, through the processing center, and into his UN allocated shelter in Azraq. There are no showers here.
Back in Syria, nothing was certain except that life wasn’t. Still, if he had known the water would be yellow, cold, and in buckets not taps … If he had only known that there was nothing here to remind him of what he had left behind, perhaps then he could have been prepared.
“Everywhere we go in Syria, there is green,” he says. “But here, we are in the middle of the desert.”
