Or: My Crash Course in Having a Poker Face

Zaatari Camp and Amman, Jordan – 2018

Rafat and I are sitting on the bench outside the kitchen trailer. It’s sunny and warm – April. Zaatari is just a massive trailer city on an otherwise empty stretch of desert flat land, so the afternoon sun always beats down and makes it warmer than Amman.

We’re going over a printout of his personal essay that is part of his application to a Canadian scholarship program. I knew of a lot of scholarship programs for Syrian refugees during the time I worked in Zaatari, but this one was the best one I knew because its people worked hard, with and for, each of their students.

Winning one not only granted you a scholarship to study in Canada but, critically, permanent residency upon arriving. This meant you were eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship a few years down the line. It also meant the few spots available were extremely coveted.

We’re talking in Arabic about his essay in English. His essay is about film. Rafat wants desperately to be a filmmaker. He already teaches film and photography classes to kids from the camp at the youth center. His smile is huge, stretching across his whole face, and frequent. He’s one of the most smiley, cheerful people I work with in the camp. I know it will be a sad day for us, and a happy and sad day for him, the day he leaves for Canada if he gets the scholarship.

He lives and breathes film, and this is what his personal essay is about. His English is so-so. He’s brought me draft number four hundred twenty-seven and asked me to review it.

I read it through – the English is not great, but also not as bad as I had expected it would be – and make small edits for him in pen. I don’t want to edit too much, because I don’t want it to look like someone else has written the essay for him. A light touch.

Rafat writes about how the world does not understand refugees, and he wants to change, through film, how refugees are perceived. He wants to debunk myths; tear down the good refugee/bad refugee complex; explain to people how life really is in the camp.

We work our way through each paragraph until we get to the final few sentences which read, “In sum, that is why I want to be a filmmaker and travel to Canada on this scholarship. It is so I can, through film, change the ways that refugees are seen and perceived, and share my anti-Semitic message with the world.”

My eyes widen briefly but, keeping my tone calm and my face neutral, I ask Rafat, “What do you mean by this last part here?”

He launches back into the thread of what we’ve been discussing the past half hour: a new way of seeing refugees, the complex, the myths.

“Yes, but what about this word here?” I press him.

He takes the paper from me and peers at the last paragraph. “I don’t know what this word means,” he says.

“This word means that you are, um, that you are against Jewish people,” I tell him.

His eyes grow very, very wide. “WHAT?” he shouts, practically leaping off the bench. “No, no no no! This is from Google translate! I didn’t know that is what it meant! I swear. This is not what I mean!” And on and on until I’m laughing so hard that he also starts laughing, and others start looking over at the ruckus we’re causing.

When we’re done laughing, we remove anti-Semitism from the final sentence and talk about how lucky it is that we caught this before he sends it to the Canadians.

He thanks me and trudges back to the tiny office trailer to make the edits on a computer, while I head, as usual, towards the kitchen for more Turkish coffee.

And I understand that this is somehow at the core of what my job is about: having a poker face.

Six months later and one hour south of the camp, Rafat and I sit in an Amman café with our colleague Manar. It’s 6pm, and in a few short hours, Rafat will board a flight to Canada and embark on his adventure.

He got the scholarship.

We can’t think of what to say. Rafat has said his camp goodbyes, which boggle my mind to think about, earlier in the day. Then he came to Amman, to our NGO’s office to say goodbye to some of our colleagues there. The workday was ending, so Manar and I decided to take him for dinner at Kepi, a no-frills café near our office, before he spends one night at a hotel and then catches the airport shuttle early tomorrow morning.

I order some pasta, Manar orders salad, Rafat orders a sandwich. We wait for the food to arrive. I still can’t think of any words big enough, true enough, to match the moment. I’ve never spoken with someone who has just left a refugee camp where he’s been living for five years – saying goodbye to all his friends and family there – and is about to travel halfway across the globe to Ontario, where he knows only two people: another Syrian guy who’d lived in Zaatari who moved to Ontario last year on the same scholarship, and the scholarship program’s director, who he met when she visited Jordan.

We say some things of course, I’m just not sure if they are the right ones.

It’s going to be good, we say. It’s going to be great!

How long is the flight again? we say. Why don’t you order some food from here to take with you? Who knows what they will feed you on the plane?

I can’t believe this is finally happening, we say, we’re so excited for you.

We will miss you.

He is excited, he is nervous, he is tired, he is sad, he is heartbroken, he is thrilled, he is relieved, he is afraid. And I don’t know what to feel, watching someone flash through all these things at a tired Amman café in the twilight.

He says, “This morning when I woke up, before I rolled over in bed, I could feel these eyes on me. Just watching me.”

Manar says, “Your mom?”

Rafat says, “Of course. Just staring while I was sleeping.”

I picture his mother, that same morning, leaning against the doorframe in their small trailer in the camp. A woman in her sixties, face worn but soft and kind, watching her sleeping son before he wakes, before he leaves, before he flies. She wants to be brave, so he can go.

And the unspoken words rain down on our salads and pastas and sandwiches: Manar and I don’t know when he will see his family again, and he doesn’t know either.

He knows he will have to stay for months, years, in Canada to become a citizen. Then he should be able to visit, later on. If he has enough money and the right papers.

And the bravery that this step must take. And how he couldn’t have stayed in the stagnancy of the camp. And how he needed to do what he’s doing, and how it is really hard to do what he’s doing. And how he hopes it will work out, but doesn’t know, and none of us ever do.

And how he reminds me of myself when I’ve made certain leaps in my life: moving to Jordan. Marrying my husband. Taking this Zaatari Camp job in the first place. And yet, how he’s not like me, since I’ve never been a refugee, and my leaps were less by necessity and more by choice.

It is everything all rolled up into one, and I understand that that is at the core of what my job is about. And eventually we pay the bill and walk with him to the hotel where he’ll sleep for the night before a van picks him up, along with other students-to-be, and drives him away towards his new life.

***

Today, Rafat lives in Canada as a Canadian citizen and has turned his dream of five years ago into a reality. It has been incredible to witness him make this journey and I am still lucky to call him my friend. This piece was posted with permission.