I spent all of last Sunday with a 10 year old Syrian girl in the town of Mafraq, near the border. She lives in a room on a roof with her two parents, who are mute. I just made a short film about her for Unicef. She's an only child, and extraordinarily resilient as she takes responsibility for all communication in her family. Yet the conditions she lives in would challenge even the most robust of humans, and there is a certain vulnerability and honesty about her, which made the process of interviewing and photographing her and her parents, a lovely one. They are extraordinary people and you can see how the three of them take care of each other.
Fatima was yawning all the way through the interview and losing her train of thought. I realised she must be hungry and there wasn't a sign of food in the tiny room. Luckily the Egyptian girl, who was translating for me, had a chocolate bar in her bag, so we gave her that, and then I took Fatima to the supermarket for a mega shop after we'd finished. Her father let her go with us, and she ran about filling the trolley. When we returned he took the bags, put them down on the ground, then raised his hands heavenwards. And this is one, small, family among the estimated three million Syrians who will be scraping a living in Jordan by the end of the year. The food prices here make J and I balk, so I can't imagine how the new arrivals cope. I've just met a great American woman, fluent in Arabic, who just set up her own website called Syria Direct, full of the real news from Syria, via Syrian reporters she trains and works with here. The coverage of the crisis always seems so incomplete when I read about it, and we're here witnessing story after story the likes of which you rarely see in the Western press. I think I'll be doing some work with her as she needs writers to put the reports from the Syrians to paper, plus video and photographs.
I edited Fatima's film this week, and the Glammy helped me translate the interview at my computer while the dwarves had their siesta. I don't think she's seen that side of Jordan before, and she was moved to tears when she heard Fatima's story. The Lozenge wanted to be with us as we worked but we told him not to speak as we deciphered Fatima's Syrian accent, so he sat opposite us at my desk, drawing and letting out the occasional loud, bored, sigh.
We're down to the last sausage from the huge pack I brought back from Macdonald's butchers in Pitlochry. I've been carving them off one by one from the frozen chunk, snapping off the sharp ends of all the knives as I do it, so it must be time to go home for a re-stock. The Lozenge is already on his way…
After an intense week of work, I realised that the 'tootoo' as Rashimi says, or turtles in our water tank on the balcony had not been fed for a week and the landlord keeps asking after them, so the boys and I trudged to the posh supermarket on Thursday, which is the only place you can get pet supplies. We went, for the first time, to a toddler group after that. Never again. Whenever either of our dwarves sniffs a group activity they run in the other direction, so as all the other Mums and cherubs were happily singing and clapping in a circle in a cool air conditioned room of toys, I was outside wrangling an exhausted Lozenge and Rashimi on melting plastic slides in the blazing sun. So we escaped back to our landlord's shady garden downstairs, which has a lawn the colour and consistency of the plastic grass in the butcher's window which has the lamb chops nestling in it. I hate to think of the amount of water required to keep it like that - but I was beyond caring by that stage. Rashimi roared with delight and hurled himself face down, and lay there with legs flapping, as the Lozenge kicked off his crocs and said: 'Ithn't it nithe to be in the thunshine in the cold wet grath.'
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