Syrian refugee Ahmad, his wife Eman and their four children were invited by the UN refugee agency for an interview as part of the Canadian resettlement program at Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.Annie Sakkab
Ahmad Lakash was already a famous man in Zaatari. His falafel restaurant is the first thing you see when you enter the sprawling refugee camp. It sits right at the top of the dusty market road that residents refer to deadpan as the "Champs Élysées."
Now Mr. Lakash is envied for another reason. His family of six are the only ones among Zaatari's 79,120 residents known to have received a text message from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees inviting them for an interview that could put them on track for resettlement to Canada. The family, who arrived in Jordan in early 2012 after fleeing the fighting in Syria, have no idea why they made the list while their neighbours in Zaatari didn't.
"Maybe we'll be making falafels in Canada," the 48-year-old says with a grin, leading a tour of the family's modest home in refuge – two sparsely furnished caravans connected by a tarp that creates a chilly sitting area between them. "We won't need to take anything with us from here. We'd be ready to leave within a week."
Mr. Lakash's wife, Eman, looks far less sure than her husband at the possibility that her family could soon be on the move again.
But a neighbour, having heard that there's a Canadian reporter visiting, has no such qualms – she bursts into the Lakash home clutching identification documents for her and her six children. "I want to be very clear that I am willing to go to Canada!" she interrupts.
The neighbour's case is unlikely to be selected though; her husband has already gone to Germany, travelling with the tide of refugees that flowed over the borders of the European Union this year.
Few in Zaatari are likely to make the cut for resettlement to Canada. The Liberal government's plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees from around the Middle East – including as many as 10,000 from Jordan – is expected to barely dent the population of the region's largest refugee camp.
While Immigration Minister John McCallum, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Health Minister Jane Philpott made a show of visiting Zaatari during a whistle-stop visit to Jordan on Sunday, the UN refugee agency says that none of the several hundred names it has forwarded thus far to the Canadian government are Zaatari residents. (Mr. Lakash has only been invited for a preliminary interview with the UNHCR. If approved by the refugee agency, the family will be given an appointment with Canadian officials who have arrived in Jordan to do additional health and security screening before refugees are invited to Canada.)
The system the UNHCR uses to recommend refugees for resettlement is based on need and vulnerability. And while conditions in Zaatari are grim – residents complain that the $28 (U.S.) a month they receive to buy food only lasts them about 10 days – those inside the camp have at least the basic necessities, including access to education and health care, that many Syrian refugees living outside the camp can't afford.
For the more than 500,000 Syrian refugees living in Jordanian cities outside the camp, a large chunk of that same $28 a family member goes to pay for rent and other utilities. Meanwhile, legal work is scarce and parents point out that the $28 stipend covers just the price of a single monthly bus pass to send a child to school.
Despite its high-profile effort to take in refugees, Canada is among the many culprits in underfunding the agencies that run camps such as Zaatari. With four million Syrian refugees scattered around the Middle East, UN agencies have only been able to raise $2-billion of the $4.5-billion in funding sought to fund Syrian refugee programs for in 2015.
The UN lists Canada as the fifth-biggest donor to the funding appeal, having contributed $107.7-million – or 2.4 per cent of the target – so far in 2015. The Liberal government last week announced the equivalent of another $75-million in funding for the UNHCR.
"It's a failure of the international community when you only fund [45 per cent] of humanitarian needs," Hovig Etyemezian, the manager of the Zaatari camp, said in an interview Monday. The $4.5-billion target was needed to provide just the basic minimum to Syrian refugees, he said. "Humanitarian assistance is not enough. You need to be able to provide a dignified life to these people."
The shortfall has hit such basics as the amount of food aid each refugee receives, as well as the number of schools Unicef can run in Zaatari. Just 18,000 of the camp's 25,0000 school-age children were enrolled in school last year, and only 11,000 were still attending classes by the end of the school year. Many dropped out to take menial jobs – such as construction, or picking tomatoes and olives at nearby farms – to help their cash-strapped parents.
Mr. Etyemezian said that in addition to the growing child-labour problem, the financial crunch has pushed some families to marry off their daughters as early as possible, seeing marriage as a way of reducing the number of mouths they have to feed.
This year has also seen a sharp rise in the number of refugees who left Zaatari to go back to Syria. Some simply chose to return to their homes, Mr. Etyemezian said, while many others were trying to cross the war-torn country to Turkey, where they hoped to join this year's massive exodus to Europe.
"There has been a sharp decline of assistance for refugees, which, of course, pushed refugees to making very difficult decisions. Like pulling their sons out of school to send them to beg, like marrying [off] their younger daughters as a means of economic subsistence. And making the very difficult decision to return to Syria because they cannot make ends meet here."
Mr. Etyemezian is a big fan of the Canadian resettlement program – which he said is the talk of the camp – and he hopes other countries will imitate it. But Zaatari and its problems will still remain after the last of the 25,000 refugees reaches Canadian soil.
Which is why Mr. Lakash and his family are so anxious to leave. He wants his oldest son, 17-year-old Ayub, to finish school rather than working alongside him in the falafel shop. He dreams of his 15-year-old son, Mohammed – the wrestling champion of Zaatari for his age group – reuniting with his coach, who went to Canada last year as a refugee under a different program.
Most importantly, he wants his nine-year-old boy, Amran – who lost a kidney as a toddler and is susceptible to long bouts of illness – to get better medical care. (The boy's medical condition may be one factor that bumped the family up the UNHCR's list for resettlement.)
His wife, Eman, fights back tears when discussing the future of the family. But her tears stop when she's asked what it is she'll miss about life in Zaatari.
"There's nothing good about here," she says.
Mark MacKinnon