Since March 2011, Jordan has witnessed a massive influx of Syrian refugees, who left their homeland, leaving behind all their possessions, to search for a better life away from war, destruction and bloodshed.
Since then, the Jordanian government has provided many human and material resources to support and contain the refugee influx crisis with support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Jordan is working hard to secure a decent life for our refugee families, so it has established several camps, including the Zaatari camp in the Mafraq desert region, which - according to sources Official Jordanian - there are more than 70 thousand Syrian refugees living in it in harsh natural and psychological conditions, they suffer from the severity of the cold in the winter and the heat and the dust of the desert in the summer.
With all the efforts made, we find that many Syrian families decided to leave the camp in order to search for an opportunity for a better life than that available inside the camps, to end up in one of the lands to form random camps to live harsher conditions and a more difficult life.
In this blog, I will talk about these camps and the story of Hajj Ali Muhammad Al-Ahmad, or what is known as “the shawish of the camp,” he is a Syrian refugee from the peaceful city of Hama and has lived in Jordan with his family since the beginning of the war in Syria.
He is married to three women and has many children and grandchildren. Hajj Ali, who used to reside in Syria and has a cheese and milk factory, a poultry farm and many lands, decided to move to Jordan temporarily in September of 2011, fearing for his family from any potential dangers that might occur to them. We thought that he would return after several months to the city of Salamiyah to complete his work. Normally.
He left behind his eldest sons to run the factories. Hajj Ali moved to Jordan via the Nassib border post and went directly to the Jordanian city of Mafraq, to stay there for the desired period.
But after 3 months, an unexpected event occurred, including factories, cars, and homes were stolen, so his son left for Jordan to stay with his family.
Then the Hajj realized that his life in Syria had ended and that if he returned, he had to start from scratch. So he decided to establish a new life for himself and his family in Jordan, so he immediately started looking for work for himself and his family, so he moved with his family members from the city of Mafraq to Aqaba, hoping to find a job opportunity, but he had no luck. He returned to the city of Mafraq to reside there for 4 years after God prepared for him to find a landowner on the outskirts of the city of Mafraq, who needed someone to take care of his land and cultivate it, to agree with him that he and his family would work the land and guard it from any potential aggression.
He accepted the Hajj and searched for a place to live until he found another land adjacent to his place of work, and decided to establish a camp for him and his family after the approval of its owner Haji Ibrahim Al-Mughaibi, who found it an opportunity to provide aid to the Syrian families in the area and told him, “You can stay on my land, no matter how long your crisis lasts.
Thus, Hajj Ali was nicknamed “The Shawish” and a new story began in his life, which is his family.
The random camp life is far from all aspects of civilization and normal life, the camp that lacks any periodic or emergency health care, the nearest health center is more than 20 km away from the camp, which makes visiting a doctor a difficult task and may be impossible for some camp residents who do not have any means Mwasalat is only one car, which Haj Ali supervises for very urgent cases.
I met Hajj Ali as part of the Medical Week organized by Atlantic Humanitarian Relief, AHR, and with the generous support of the Arab American Medical Association (NAAMA) to provide free medical advice and medication to deserving people in the region.
Through mobile clinics that included more than 10 regions in the Kingdom, in which the American Zakat Foundation played the organizational role by securing a volunteer team consisting of more than 30 volunteers from Jordanian university students from various medical and engineering specialties, with the aim of making the process of reviewing doctors as smooth and fast as possible for the brothers Reviewers.
Random camps are a phenomenon in which some Syrians have found their way. By retiring from large cities, they are able to work and produce on agricultural lands without fear of any legal prosecution, as the Jordanian Labor Law at the present time prevents employers from employing Syrian workers without obtaining work permits, which many Syrians find Difficulty getting it. For several reasons, including the high cost and the presence of some weak souls merchants who take advantage of the refugee crisis to defraud the labor law and obtain cheap labor.
As a humanitarian organization operating inside the Jordanian territories, we always try to cooperate with many parties in order to secure the basic needs of our refugee families in the country.
At the end of the session, which lasted nearly an hour, I thanked the Shawish for his hospitality and went for a tour around the camp.
