Medford, MA – April 2020

It is hard to watch COVID-19 unfold everywhere because you know it will get worse, and there is nothing you can do. I feel helpless watching the case numbers go up and up.

The tree outside my window is blooming with tiny white flowers. It’s beautiful. I wish I knew what kind of tree it is. I miss my husband.

I am so worried about Zaatari in the era of coronavirus. If it reaches them, so many people will die. Is it not enough they had to come from Syria to this godforsaken rectangle of hard-caked desert earth?

Not enough that, before then, they had to see their homes burn and their animals flee and their cities fall and their families die at the hands of so many masked soldiers?

Not enough that they not only came (and you should hear the stories of how they came, slipping through the night across empty desert acres between border checkpoints or folding themselves up in the back of sheep trucks to sneak across the border into Jordan) but had to stay? Living there in the camp for seven years and counting?

If just a war was the only thing you needed to worry about! But it is the war, and then your father gets cancer. (For some reason, people who live through war are not precluded from getting cancer.) You can’t afford the treatment; he dies.

It is the war, and a miscarriage; it is the war, and a young girl having her heart broken by some stupid guy on top of that. It seems unbelievable. It is the war, and then coronavirus – will the waves and tides of fear ever release us from their grip?

I call Yusef in Zaatari from my tiny apartment in the suburbs of Boston. He is one of a handful of my former colleagues, refugees still living in the camp, with whom I keep in touch. I ask him how it feels where he is, on that little square of land so far from me, and I notice how, now that I am a safe distance in time and space away from the secondary trauma of Zaatari, I can call Yusef and the others again.

I actually want to call them and check in, unlike in my final months of working in the camp week in and week out, exhausted and burned out, when I was hardly able to pick up the phone when they would call me.

My thumb always felt so heavy as it pressed the green button.

I would lift the phone rigidly to my ear and wince in anticipation of more problems, more trauma stories, more exhausting workload.

Now I am suddenly willing to call them again. Does this mean my burnout is healing, has healed, after all this time away from the camp?

“Everything feels normal here,” Yusef tells me now. “People are moving around, shops are open. Nothing yet.”

Thank goodness for that, for now, I think. There are not enough hospitals and qualified doctors in the camp; not enough medical supplies. Some people don’t have running water; they bring it in tanks and buckets to the tin boxes they call homes. They live on top of one another, especially in the oldest parts of the camp. When one case reaches Zaatari, thousands will follow.

Zaatari is not the only place to worry about. It feels like the whole world needs a reset button – if we could only turn it off and then on again, see if it starts working better.

***

A note from the other side

By 2021, the most recent update I could find, Zaatari had seen around 4,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, meaning around 5% of its overall population had confirmed cases, and less than 100 COVID deaths. These are the official UN numbers, which may be a bit lower than the actual rates – assuming some people have had COVID without being tested, like everywhere else. So one fear of mine came to pass (when one case reaches Zaatari, thousands will follow) and another did not (so many people will die). The positivity rate in the camp was actually lower than the positivity rate throughout all of Jordan, and refugees living there, like all of us, have adjusted to life in the pandemic.

I see this now as a particular moment in time. (See my two recent posts about the early days of COVID: Uncertainty: The Most Certain Thing Now and When I’m in America, I Miss My Husband.) But I still think, over two years later, that the whole world feels like it needs a reset button. If we could only turn it off and then on again, see if it starts working better.