Za'atari

Za'atari. It wasn't a city before, but now it is. A city with communal bathrooms. Where pretty much everyone is poor.

But its a Syrian city so the smells of Damascus and Dara'a fill the main street. Sweet shops with knafe, shwarma, a coffee shop with men packed in to watch a soccer game. Vegetables, gas, clothes. You can buy it all. Electricity stolen from the camp infrastructure will cost you 75 Dinar a month (over $100). Its a street teeming with life and with people.

And the numbers are staggering. As of today, 131,000 in the camp - approximately doubling in the past month or so. With the situation in Syria likely to get worse before it gets better, refugees will keep streaming out of the country.

So life goes on in the camp. Instead of distributing tents, there are now some small sheds. One family came to the admin building while we were getting permission to enter the camp. They arrived 10 days ago, but were hoping to get a second shed for "guests". Guests are important. And culture finds a way to survive even in conditions of deprivation.

A midwife told me pregnancies are common, though there is only one c-section place for all of the camp, at the Moroccan hospital. Why have kids here, I asked? Who knows when the crisis will end. In the meantime, one must be human.

And humans get sick. Just walking around we saw one kid with Hepatitis A (AST and ALT >3k each). Heard about a lot of diarrhea secondary to poor sanitation. Water is distributed in the camp (still trying to find out the quantity) but there's not enough. So people reuse it, making themselves sick by cleaning themselves with dirty water.

We stopped by the four "hospitals" in the camp. French, Moroccan, Italian and Saudi, usually a collection of tents, maybe trailers, or an RV for a makeshift lab. The first two are run by the military, so everything from people to medicines are brought from their home country. The French hospital does measles and polio vaccines, leaving the rest to the Jordanian Ministry of Health (didn't get a chance to visit). They have two hours of general medicine daily. But they focus on surgery, stabilizing those injured in the war and sending them on to hospitals in Amman. The Moroccan hospital is more comprehensive with an ICU, surgical tent and tents for primary care. Medicines brought from Morocco.

Italian hospital was closed, but we spent most of our time at the Saudi hospital which focuses on primary care and has their own pharmacy. But medicine access seems to be a huge issue. The French hospital's pharmacy provides meds only to those patients that saw docs there. Same at the Moroccan hospital and Saudi hospital. But this means that, from what I could tell from a few hours there, there are 2 general pharmacies for 130k people. And these are limited pharmacies. For skin problems you have two choices of medicine at the Saudi hospital - anti-fungals or moisturizing cream.

All of this was preliminary, unverified info. If all works out, I should be able to volunteer with Dr. B at the Saudi hospital and will have a chance to get to know things a bit better.