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| Picture from the same article: a Syrian refugee stands on top of a water tank at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Photograph: Mohammad Hannon/AP |
The old man does not give his name. He does
not say anything at all. Lying under a blanket on a thin mattress in the corner
of a dark, prefabricated metal container that these days serves as home, he
greets a visitor with a baleful stare. Then, slowly, he turns his face to the
wall and pulls his red and black checked keffiyeh over his head.
His misery, shame, anger and isolation seem
complete: he is beyond reach. But his tacit statement is both unmistakable and
painfully eloquent. Once, not long ago in Syria, he, like so many others, had a
family, a house, job, friends, a neighbourhood, a purpose. He was a man in his
own right. Life made sense.
Now, inside the confines of the sprawling
Zaatari refugee camp a few miles away from the Syrian border in north-west
Jordan, he appears as a number, a statistic, his life a shadow of what it was.
He seems to be wholly displaced – physically, geographically, socially and
psychologically.
