Rough God Part 1: The War Was The Fire
It burned me and fascinated me all at once and I couldn’t tear my gaze away.
Zaatari Refugee Camp — February 2018
Freezing cold: winter in the desert camp.
I am standing in a tin trailer in the drafty wet drippings of winter. Rain slides down off the edges of the roof. The staff meeting is about to begin and people are milling about, coming in and out of the trailer that serves as the trainings room. My colleague Tareq, a twenty-something-year-old refugee from southern Syria, is queuing up something on the speakers, and now, the first guitar notes of Rough God Goes Riding by Van Morrison fill the cavernous trailer, rooting me to the spot.
The opening guitar riff immediately transports me to home. Then, drums and harmonica. It is a late spring day in Wisconsin and unseasonably warm. My dad is driving the van around Wauwatosa, my parents’ suburb of Milwaukee. Rough God is playing and Fleetwood Mac will come on next. It is inevitable: it is the way things are. I’m frozen in time and space.
Then after what can only have been a few moments, reality returns to me and I check back in to where I really am: Zaatari Refugee Camp, northern Jordan, the youth center where I work, 5,000 miles from home. Other pieces of context begin to present themselves to me, such as that Tareq must have this song in the first place from a video I uploaded to my Facebook page a year ago.
Oh the mud splattered victims
Have to pray out all along the ancient highway
Torn between half truths and victimization
Fighting back with counterattacks
It occurs to me as the song plays, Van’s growly voice starts up, and I stand still while staff continue to gather, that Tareq must have somehow saved Rough God from my video and added it to his small collection of songs on the center’s laptop. He must have started using it as background music for other things, like promo videos he’s in charge of making for the youth center.
How funny this strikes me! Van Morrison, iconic, the soundtrack of my childhood, being queued up by Tareq for no particular reason (I’m quite sure, looking over at him fiddling with the dials on the big speaker, that he has no idea who Van Morrison is).
He is probably, I think to myself now, about to play a slideshow of pictures for our staff meeting, wanted background music, and randomly picked this one from his collection. But the chance selection whips me suddenly home, a place I dearly miss, while I’m here in the middle of a long Tuesday
in a long week
in a long February
in a long period of my life
when I’m working halfway across the world from Wisconsin.
I came to know Zaatari well after many years of working there. Zaatari in the mud and rain, Zaatari in the blazing heat of August. This was a point of pride for me. It wouldn’t have been, except that the cycle of “expat staff” — mostly white humanitarian aid workers cycling in and out of all these conflict front lines, refugee camps — churns so rapidly that to stay multiple years in one place is unusual. A three- or six-month contract in Somalia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, is the norm. Then on to the next.
There’ll be no more heroes
They’ll be reduced to zero
When that rough God goes riding
Riding on in
Why did I stay so long? Perhaps a part of me wanted to prove something, whether to the refugees living there, many of whom over the years became my friends, or to myself, I could never be sure. Something about “not all expats…”
Another reason I stayed, I am sure, is the adrenaline that came from “helping” and from being in close proximity to war. The war was the fire, and I stood up close staring into it. It burned me and fascinated me all at once, and I couldn’t tear my gaze away.
And how many of us humanitarians have fallen into this same trap, willingly and consciously burning ourselves out, feet planted, unable to move?
I couldn’t turn my back and walk, instead, one foot in front of the other, cool air now splashing onto my face, towards home. Towards my fire-free home where rain and snow always fall and no one is burning. (At least not in that way. In America, we are burning in so many other ways.)
Another part of it, of course, was that the job was traumatic and I was too young and inexperienced to absorb all that hurt. So much I didn’t know on that Tuesday. It would be a few years before I even heard the term secondary trauma, let alone understood its effects on me.
To work in the camp was to come into contact with a horrifying volume and intensity of pain every day. A tough environment for the most seasoned aid worker, perhaps, who has an arsenal of knowledge and skills built up from years of working in similar environments, who knows how to take care of herself well at the end of the day, week, year.
An impossible environment, then, for me, coming out of college and newly moved to the Middle East. I became stuck in a fog of burnout that I could not break out of for a few years.
Oh, and I also genuinely loved my job and my colleagues. Though ego and adrenaline certainly played a role, it is also true that I loved my team (more on them later); I felt really connected to my work (more on that later); and I loved speaking Arabic every day. I belonged in some way to the youth center that I loved dearly and helped grow over the years. For all of these reasons, and probably more, I stayed.
And so, I grew used to Zaatari in all its changing moods and seasons. I came to feel at home there in the way you feel at home in your friend’s or father’s or sister’s house which you visit three times a week. You know where everything is, you help yourself to coffee, but you are still a guest in someone else’s space; it is not your own home. In that same way, I was a guest, and even after years of working there, Zaatari always looked and felt foreign to me.
Read Part 2:
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Originally published at georgienink.com.
