Two of the greatest things about working freelance are that no day is ever the same; and you have the excuse to go and meet anyone you think might have something interesting to tell you. We've been in this country for three months now, and the small professional lobster pots I've been tentatively putting out since we arrived, are starting to come back up with offerings in them, which is exciting, and a little butterfly inducing, all at once.
One such offering was a call from an inspiring British woman I met a while back. She used to live in Syria, and now lives here in Jordan with her husband and three children. When the first refugees started to arrive here a couple of years ago, in her spare time she started collecting second hand clothes and money to help them buy essentials like nappies and food. She became steadily better known as 'the person to go to' if you wanted to help the cause in some way, and since December last year, she has provided £100,000 worth of money and goods in-kind, for these people who are arriving with only the dusty clothes on their backs, and if they're lucky, their families. She stores all the stuff she's given in her garage, has co-ordinated a vast network of Jordanian and expat men, women and children to collect, wash and sort; has established a network of local producers and suppliers downtown that allow her to buy stuff - from nappies and milk powder, to crutches, wheelchairs and clothing, at cost price. She knows everyone, and everyone knows her, and so many of the NGOs use her as a kind of gap filler for anything they haven't got. She uses the Mercycorps trucks to take the stuff to the camps and border towns from her house, and the NGOs distribute everything on her behalf - as it's a skilled job not to allow distribution to turn into a desperate bun fight.
On Saturday, she invited to me to go along with her to photograph the distribution of children's packages she'd put together, with a boy scout from Kuwait who'd made nearly 2,000 sock puppets with his team, to give to the children.
I explained to the Lozenge what I was doing, and that he was going to have a boys day with J and Rashimi, and he seemed to understand exactly why I needed to miss a day of the weekend. We went into Rashimi's room at 7.30 to wake him up as he was still curled up sleeping soundly on his side and I wanted to say goodbye. The Lozenge and I looked at him through the bars of his cot, and L said: 'Oh Mummy, look at Rashimi. Ithn't he thooo beautiful. Can I touch him?' and poked a chubby digit towards his cheek. Could it be that brotherly love is beginning? I left the nest and set off in a 4 x 4 with the woman, the scout and his friend, and hundreds of bags of toys for children. It was a good chance to interview her about how she does it all, and I hope a British magazine or paper might be interested in her story. It would certainly help dispel the myth of the sloth-like, gin-quaffing expat wives…
As we drew closer to the Syrian border, she said: 'I always worry I've over shot the turning to Mafraq, as from here you need to be in an armoured vehicle because of the missiles.' But the empty road and desert town to the north west still seemed far from the terror we are reading about every day. And when we met with some of the families in the host communities, coordinated by the head of the Christian community, Father Nour, literally 'Father Light' (whose flock is currently 98% Islamic), that's what struck me most. You can meet these people, and see where they are scraping a life, and shake their hands and sit on their floor and talk all day, but you still feel so far from the terror we read about, because it's all hidden behind the facade of a human face. How do you ever get to understand what that terror is like?
This morning, radio 4 broadcast a very good programme made by Edward Sturton all about the aid agencies struggling to meet demands in this crisis, here in Jordan, with camps getting ever more crowded and violent. One of the children said to him: 'If you could only imagine what I've seen.'
How can we, until we've seen it ourselves? Yet our imaginations are key to keeping the help coming.
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