“For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” Ecclesiastes 1:18
I’m in Mafraq right now. It’s a town in Northern Jordan by the Syrian border. It’s also quite famous for being the town that Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees have fled to. Before yesterday the conflict in Syria and the refugee crisis in Jordan, felt more like a terrible distant dream. But now even after one day of working up here, I feel like I’m wide awake, and this reality is harder to process than I could have imagined.
As I sit across from these women in their homes, they tell me about their lives in Syria, and each story is like an alarm going off inside my head –waking me up further to the reality and horror of just how really broken this world is. Though its hard to listen to the horrors of what they are telling me, it’s so good for them to be able to talk about it, to process it with someone, to simply have someone listen to them and care. Almost everyone here is suffering from PTSD, and have developed major anxiety and nervous disorders. Many children still wet themselves whenever they hear a loud sudden noise.
It’s hard to know what to say when someone tells you that they lost their youngest 4 year old son in a bombing. Or when they try to convey the fear of leaving their homes for months because even by poking your head out your front door you could be picked off by a sniper like the pregnant niece and mother of 5 children one woman here told me about. They said the bodies would lay there in the streets for months because everyone was too afraid to try to collect them for burial. One story really tore at my heart. One of the team members here sat down with a man who told him that he had fled Syria with his little daughter and upon getting close to the Jordanian border he was fired upon by the Syrian Government but he kept running all through the night with his daughter in his arms, and it wasn’t until daybreak that he realized his daughter had been shot and killed. How is this real life?
Right outside the town of Mafraq is the main Zaatari refugee camp that houses over 135,000 Syrian refugees. The conditions there are really rough, they live in tents and are allotted a small ration of food per day which may or may not be given to them because the UN has put the first arrivals of Syrian refugees in charge of food distribution and they’ve created for themselves a mafia system where they either steal a majority of the food or they try to sell it to the newly arriving refugees. It just keeps getting worse.
Those who pay the high extortion rate to get out of the camp are allowed to come only to Mafraq and rent an apartment here. They are taken advantage of by Jordanian landlords and are forced to pay unreasonable high rents for shanty one room “apartments”. Often the conditions that they live under are worse than the camps because they have to scrounge to find money to pay rent every month and because of that aren’t able to afford food, a stove, even beds or blankets. Yesterday night I went on a distribution of aid, and one of the homes we went to was a dingy small room and there were 13 people living there. They were only a few blankets and a few mattresses on the floor –nothing to cook with, and no food. We gave them 13 mattresses, 13 blankets, 13 pillows, a portable cooking stove, and a propane tank to cook with. My cheeks have never been kissed so many times before in my life. They invited me back there this morning for coffee, and I feel extremely honored to go because what they don’t realize is that they are helping me more than I could ever help them.
To be honest, it’s really hard to be here. It’s hard because this feels more real than anything else I’ve experienced. And it makes me wonder…what do I even know?
“I will remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Psalm 27:13
There’s a lot to do, and a lot of needs here. If you would like to help in anyway e-mail me and I will let you know how you can do that.
P.S. I wish I had pictures to include with post –we have to be really sensitive with cameras here…
