A refugee camp that barely existed over a year ago is not the fourth largest city in Jordan. About 150,000 people live in Zaatari, making it the second largest refugee camp in the world. This video, from World Food Program, shows the lives of three people struggling with their new lives as refugees.
A 5-year-old boy on his first day at school; a mother embracing a new way of feeding her family; an ex-teacher trying to organize sport for the camp’s children. Forced to adapt to new lives as refugees in Jordan’s Zaatari camp, these three Syrians are making the best of things and staying positive. Their individual accounts and personal insights provide an inside view of life in Jordan’s biggest refugee camp.
In all, the World Food Program is providing assistance to 1.1 million refugees in Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey. “We deal with the consequences of failed politics,” WFP executive director Ertharin Cousin recently told a group of journalists assembled in New York by the United Nations Foundation. As complex as the relief operation is for refugees, inside Syria the task of delivering humanitarian assistance is even more challenging. She says the WFP is currently feeding 3 million people inside Syria, and is scaling up to 4 million people this month. In all, the WFP needs about $30 million per week to meet current needs. So far, it has received only about 70% of the funding required to meet the food needs of Syrians displaced by conflict. We can do better.