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Moving mountains for Syrian refugees

“At five in the morning, you should see this place,” says Laure Chadraoui, spokesperson for the World Food Programme in Jordan. “It’s a mountain of bread.”

By “this place”, she means Zaatari camp, the shelter in North Jordan that houses a hundred and twenty thousand Syrian refugees. These refugees, having walked long hours that merge into days, arrive mostly at night, “guided by the light of the moon,” as one said. They get a ready-to-eat ‘welcome meal’ on arrival and are allotted accommodation – tents/caravans – the next day and soon fall into routine at the camp.

Part of the routine is to line up from dawn onwards every single morning at the sloping high tent, run by the World Food Programme with partner Save the Children, that distributes industrial quantities of fresh bread to all the refugees on camp.

At the distribution site, men and women hold and wave yellow bits of paper and have to shout to make themselves heard over the din of the distribution. The acoustics of the sloped-roof shed – the mobile storage units – magnifies their voice and makes it resemble a social gathering. With distorted vision, and a changed context, it could even be a live rock concert—if the yellow bits of paper were cell phones or lighters. But at Zaatari, the camp for refugees fled from Syria, these yellow bits of paper are their tickets to a full stomach. It’s their ration card valid for two weeks, against which they will get bread, nothing more, nothing less, nothing musical about the task.

There isn’t an age cut off to collect bread. It isn’t regulated like that. Children collect packets of khobz on behalf of their families, and queue up on either side of the tent – men on one side and women on the other, with the queue extending far out of the tent. In the middle row of the tent, on the ground lies something of a horizontal ladder, with wood flanks on which the bread rests – like train sleepers. And on either side of this, men deal with the men’s queue and head-scarved women check paper coupons of the women and, after crossing out the day’s date, hand over bread packets to them. Bread packets are piled up everywhere. Crates are brought down from a Maersk truck parked outside and stacked high with hundreds of plastic crates that contain white plastic polythene bags, each that further contain 18 pieces of flat bread. Since the refugees often have to walk a fair distance back to their accommodation, it is common to see refugees with knotted packets of bread slung over their shoulders.

A 10-year-old boy called Mazin is collecting bread for a family of five, so he has five packets of bread, each with 18 pieces of bread. It can become a cumbersome weight. So Mazin, like many others, improvises. He interlinks the knotted bows of two white plastic bags, so the weight evens out. The inter-knotted bows of two plastic packets will rest beside his neck, on his shoulder, while one packet will fall on his back, and one in front, leaning against his chest. Same with the other shoulder, and one packet he’ll twine between his fingers. It’s a daily chore. Some rip open the bread packets immediately and it’s not unusual to spot – mostly children – toying with bread, folding and nibbling at it while embarking on the long saunter along the dusty track towards their home-tents. The reason Mazin is collecting bread instead of sitting in a classroom brushing up his Maths and Arabic, his mother says, is because the path to the school is swampy and his shoes get ruined. She worries he might fall into bad company, so she’d rather put him to better use.

Mazin’s family, like most on camp, thanks to the bread-distribution programme, receives a 25-kilogram bag of flour (flour donated mostly by the United States) in addition to their monthly food ration, which includes vegetable oil, pasta, bulgar wheat, canned pulses and sugar.

The flour that goes into these large-scale ovens at two contracted bakeries - ‘Jawad’ and ‘Luminus’ – in Amman produces up to 27 tonnes of flat bread. These 27 tonnes of khobz is baked fresh from midnight to first light and dispatched every morning from Amman. And it takes about an hour to get from Amman to Zaatari. Distribution time is from 5.30 am to 9 am. If you stack the pieces of bread WFP and Save The Children tirelessly distribute every morning, they would pile up three times the height of the 828 m-tall Burj Khalifa. And at Zaatari, this is an everyday operation.

nivriti@khaleejtimes.com