Refugees

London- ready to go!

On Thanksgiving day, the BYU students and the senior missionary couples went to a Syrian refugee camp. There are three camps in Jordan: two camps with fifty thousand refugees each, where everyone lives in tents, and one camp with one thousand people, where each family lives in one room of a tall, cement building. This smaller camp, only a few minutes from the Syrian border, is where we were finally given government clearance to enter. The camp is rather unique in that all of the refugees are of Palestinian descent. What this means is they (or their parents) likely fled from the West Bank when Israeli forces occupied Palestine, and built a life, illegally, in Damascus. Once the fighting broke out in Syria, they were again forced to leave their homes, jobs, schools, and sometimes families (many of the people have had their brothers or fathers killed by the Assad regime during the fighting.) So now they are stuck in a refugee camp with literally nowhere to go--they can't go back to Syria because they are not citizens. They can't go back to Palestine because it does not exist. They can't stay in Jordan either because the local government doesn't want them to take the few available jobs away from the Jordanians. They have no citizenship, no real identity. So this is the situation that the refugees have lived in for an entire year, watched by armed guards and forbidden to leave. Of course, this is much better than returning to war-torn Syria, but I can't help but think there must be a more appropriate solution. 

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Falling asleep on the bus.

We pulled up to the camp early in the morning, before any of the people were actually awake! We waited for nearly an hour, and then one by one, they emerged from the building. Most of the families have only one parent: A mom and her two daughters and the baby she had in the camp. A father with his toddler and teenage boy. They slowly made their way into the UNICEF tent where a puppet show was waiting to cheer them up. 









The Mormon church has a script and accompanying puppet show for several scenarios that they perform as a service in developing countries. The shows include topics like hygiene, not smoking, preventing the spread of diseases, and other related topics. This time, the Arabic students performed a show about hygiene, complete with hot pink and florescent orange "germ" puppets. The kids laughed and laughed. Their eyes lit up the way kids' eyes are meant to. It was beautiful to watch.

After the show, we visited with the people. I spoke what little Arabic I know, mostly saying hello, asking the children what their names are, and telling the parents that God had blessed them with beautiful families. One of the BYU students spun the children in the air. As we boarded the bus back to Amman, leaving those people there, it was a somber scene. We were quiet most of the way home.

On a lighter note, our American friends, the McConnells, wanted a real Thanksgiving feast. There isn't anything I love more than spending an entire day cooking and baking, except for London, of course! 

Kiya and I shopped all morning Saturday, and spent the rest of the day and night in the kitchen. We were a little ambitious, to say the least. Everything was from scratch and everything was to die for. 

The most fabulous thing on the menu..... triple chocolate pumpkin pie. It will most definitely be a staple at EVERY Thanksgiving for the rest of my life. Kyle said that he felt like a legitimate adult after we made our own Thanksgiving feast... I'm not sure what he's talking about though, all he did was wash the dishes! :)The last pie came out of the oven just before midnight, and the thought of finding a taxi at that hour made me want to cry-- so we slept on their living room floor instead. I closed my eyes, feeling seriously accomplished, and wishing that my mother could've been there to watch me. 

London got to the pie first!

It's been a while since I gave an update on our sweet baby. Her vocabulary list now includes: wow, uh-oh, purple, yes, hi, bye, cat, doll, and rock. She loves doing the crazy shake with her favorite show, Team Umizoomi. Two days ago, she started putting every toy and object she can find down her shirt. During the day, everything falls right out---but at night, when she's wearing footie pajamas, all of her toys end up trapped in her legs. As I'm writing this, she is trying unsuccessfully to put my entire bottle of lotion down her shirt. In other big news, she is officially off her pacifier. We used the "cut off the end" method that moms online swear by, and she handed that sucker (you see what I did there?) right to mom. It was a miracle.