Rough God Part 2: Longing To Be Home
As an American working in the world’s largest Syrian refugee camp, I felt both at home and sorely out of place.
Zaatari Refugee Camp — February 2018
There was the look of it: an ugly desert plain with tin trailers crowded on top of each other, clotheslines strung up between them, and people walking heads bowed along the dusty paths which count as roads. There was the sound of it: the call to prayer warbling up into the dusty air, seeming to be distorted by it, or perhaps by the trauma which swirls around the homes and the little shops. The shouts of kids playing soccer, the creaky sound of a bicycle whooshing past, bouncing along the dirt road as a father rides home at midday to his children, plastic grocery bags swinging from both handle bars.
Catch up on Rough God Part 1: The War Was The Fire.
I was flabbergasted by the headlines
People in glass houses throwing stones
When that rough God goes riding
Rough God goes riding
Riding on in
Most of all there was the feel of it: the feeling of hopelessness, stagnancy. Zaatari is the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world, home to around 79,000 people. The majority of them came to the camp between 2012 and 2014, so they’ve been there for close to 10 years and are staring down the barrel of many, many more years. (The average length one refugee stays in displacement is debated, but most refugees in the world have been displaced for more than five years and some as long as 35–40 years.) Most people in Zaatari stay in Zaatari because Syria is still not safe to return to.
The feel of the camp for me went hand-in-hand with the feeling of standing slightly apart from all those around me. A guest — but an honored one. I held power as a white person and as NGO staff. The most obvious example of this is that I had access to base camp: a fenced-in area inside Zaatari, which refugees are not allowed to enter, where meetings take place among UN and NGO staff. Driving up to the gate in my NGO’s Ford Escape and flashing my staff badge to the guard gained me access to this camp-within-a-camp, this strangest of strange worlds.
Base camp is where many of the decisions about life in the camp are made. Because refugees, lacking Ford Escapes and staff badges, are not allowed in, base camp embodies the opposite of the sentiment common to chants in political protests: nothing about us, without us.
And it’s a matter of survival
When you’re born with your back against the wall
My having more power and access than the refugees living in the camp was one of many layers that shaped my relationship with them. I was young — 22 when I started the job — and a woman. I was an ajnabiyya, a foreigner. And, though fluent in Arabic, I was still a non-native speaker and my Arabic failed me often.
I was absorbed into the youth center, the physical space and the community of it, for several years, and I felt at home there.
But somehow, I was also always a little on the outside.
The gulf between me and them was evidenced first and foremost by the fact that I left: I’m not a refugee. I have the privilege of holding a US passport. I chose to work in the camp, and later, I chose to quit my job there and leave it.
Each layer posed its own challenge to me over the years. Sometimes my age got in my way. I was young and inexperienced and made plenty of mistakes in the minefield of our team’s dynamics. Sometimes it was simply that I was the only American staff member on a 40-person team of Syrians and Jordanians.
Sometimes it was being a woman in a conservative space that caused the feeling of otherness. I worked for two years to help my colleague, Kamal, a refugee working at the youth center, get the ID documents he needed because he fled Syria without the proper paperwork. He couldn’t access any of the camp’s facilities because he didn’t have papers. His case was so complicated, and our efforts to regularize his status with the authorities went on for so long, that I must have spent a hundred hours pacing up and down the tiled courtyard of the center with him, talking through every twist and turn in his case.
Thus was born the rumor that I was his “girlfriend.” In such a conservative place as Zaatari, you cannot discuss a work issue in plain sight with someone of the opposite sex for so many collective hours without the observers reading into it something suspect.
Sometimes my Arabic failed me to mortifying effect. When I asked my colleague what was upsetting him one day, he replied that his wife had had a miscarriage, and I responded with a beaming smile and enthusiastic “Congratulations!” because I had confused the Arabic term “she miscarried” with “she had the baby.”
Sometimes it was simply the foreignness of me. I could not understand their jokes. They would talk about cartoons that used to play on Syrian TV channels back in the 90s and laugh uproariously while I looked on in confusion.
My otherness showed itself when I did not opt to eat lunch with my team when they were eating fuul — fava bean dip — for the third day in a row, because I hate fuul, or in my desire for a strongly brewed cup of American coffee when there was only Turkish.
With these many layers between us, that I became close friends with some of my Syrian colleagues (or that they became friends with me; let’s not give all the agency to the white people) seems a bit miraculous. Still, it is tiring to be always an other. Sometimes you just want to go home. I longed, a bit at first and increasingly over the years, to be home among my people where no one would notice the length of my shirt (was it hanging down far enough to cover the butt of my jeans?) or whether my ankle bones were peeping out between my jeans and the tops of my boots.
It was the only time in my life I felt so othered and so held by the same community at the same time.
That’s why when Rough God Goes Riding came on that Tuesday morning, transporting me immediately home, I went tumbling. It was one of those moments that brought my life into sharper focus. Sometimes you are handed a moment that says, “Here. This is your life. Take a good, long look at it.”
It was perhaps neither good nor bad, my reaction to this moment, to this song. I was still in the throes of adrenaline at the time, and it would be another year or more before I quit my job, left that community, and started on my winding path back home.
It simply showed me where I was along the way on the glinting road under the beaded sunlight. I snapped out of my reverie and the staff meeting began.
For more on my time working in Zaatari Camp, check out my day in the life series:
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Originally published at http://georgienink.com.
