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Child refugee crisis: I hope their dreams don’t come true

A home in Za'atari, that has been personalised with an image representing how much they want education.
A home in Za’atari camp that has been personalised with an image representing how much people living in the camp want education.

I’ve just visited Za’atari – a huge refugee camp in Jordan that’s home to 80,000 people.

We provide a number of services there, from support for new mums to activity centres for teenagers and emergency help for children who are malnourished.

At one of our kindergartens there, children play a game where they pretend to have a different job every day. It’s part of the teachers’ attempts to remind them that one day we hope they’ll have a normal grown-up life – outside the camp.

Despite those best efforts, many children in Za’atari can only imagine having the futures that they’ve seen adults around them have.

One mum said her little boy wants to grow up to be ‘the truck man who brings water to the refugee camp’. I hope his dream doesn’t come true and that Za’atari doesn’t exist when he’s old enough to drive.

Child refugees in Za'atari camp
Children play at baking as part of a game about different jobs they might have in the future.

Harrowing nightmares

Other children’s dreams wake them up because they’re so frightening. Children who have seen family members killed or injured can’t forget it, even with the patient care of our workers.

One boy, Mohammed, keeps having nightmares that his father is dead, even though his father, who is in hospital, rings him regularly.

Another girl broke down in tears when her classmate sang a song about a mother mourning her son, because she is still grieving the loss of her own brother.

These children have had their lives and families torn apart by Syria’s brutal civil war, but they’re determined to return to their home country.

I asked a group of 30 boys how many wanted to go to Europe – only one hand went up. Everybody else wants to go back to Syria as soon as they can.

I asked them what they remembered about life before the camp. They described playing outside, big family parties and going on plenty of school trips. Then the bombing, and the need to hide.

Child refugee boys in Za'atari camp
Out of these boys, only one said he wanted to be in Europe. The rest wanted to go back to Syria.

Waiting for life to begin

Za’atari camp is in the Jordanian desert – impossibly hot right now, and ferociously cold in the winter. But what I hadn’t realised is that you can see Syria from here.

While the bombs have destroyed the neighbourhoods they used to know, the country they love so much is the last thing they see when they go in to their huts at night.

Every morning they wait for news of what is happening over the border, hoping to hear those still trapped inside are safe.

Last year I visited refugees in Lesvos in Greece and the same thing struck me then, about how the life of a refugee is just waiting, waiting, waiting.

You wait at a border to escape, wait to be registered in a camp, wait in line for food, wait for water to arrive, wait for war to end.

Za'atari refugee camp
Za’atari refugee camp – in the middle of the Jordanian desert.

Education is vital

Here at Save the Children we’re determined that child refugees will not live their lives on pause.

We want every single refugee child to be back in education within one month, so that the wars that have blighted their past do not derail their futures.

Next week, at a global meeting called the World Humanitarian Summit, world leaders have the chance to support that goal and back it with money for the new education in emergencies fund, called ‘Education Cannot Wait’.

You can help ensure they get every refugee child back where they belong – in school. Please take action now.

The girls and boys I met in Za’atari have dreams no child should have. While my colleagues in the camp are some of the most inspiring people I have ever met, no child in kindergarten should know what an aid worker is, never mind want to grow up to be one.

Education will help these children’s horizons stretch beyond camp life. If world leaders back the education in emergencies fund these children’s dreams will change – and their lives will too.

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