Last month Dunedin communications director and freelance journalist SteveAddison teamed with New York-based photographer Tim Eastman to highlight the plight of Syrian refugees living in Jordan. Over a week they visited the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) refugee processing centre in Amman, a family of ''urban'' refugees and families living in the Azraq and Zaatari refugee camps.
- Harrowing journey for refugees
- Fleeing the bombs
- Acid poured on handcuff wounds
- Shelter offers relative comfort
- Winter journey to safety
- 'Please, photos and write . . . anything'
- Existence in exile severe
- Purpose-built, orderly and secure
- 2000 asylum seekers interviewed daily
- Night-time crawl under fire to escape
- Young scholar pleads for help
- Travel diary
Zaatari refugee camp sits in the Jordanian desert, not far from the Syrian border. The makeshift camp is home to nearly 85,000 people, many of whom have set about turning it into what resembles a permanent town.
The refugees live in 12 districts. The homes in these districts range from often dilapidated UNHCR tents through to ''caravans'' which are relocatable structures, some of which have been made elaborate and comfortable.
A thriving market exists in the camp. From grocery items to wedding dresses, there are a wide range of shops and food outlets in the market, which stretches for more than a kilometre.
The camp features schools, a hospital and a store, where aid vouchers can be exchanged for food.
In the land around the border of the camp, refugees can be seen digging for rocks to help build homes. Elsewhere concrete toilet blocks have been demolished by refugees collecting building materials.
The camp is a vibrant and exciting place. There are mobs of children everywhere. The market is bustling and full of life and hope.
Shop owners have worked hard, often arriving in the camp with just the clothes they are wearing, and quickly working to better the lives and comfort of their families.
They have spliced into the camp's electricity network for their stores and homes, and the UNHCR now worries about the ever-climbing electricity bill.
We are repeatedly told that this is a special camp where the people are taking care of their own futures and getting on with their lives.
It is a popular theme in media reports from camp visits.
On the surface this appears true.
People are running thriving businesses, living in elaborate relocatable buildings turned into homes - some with air-conditioning and satellite television.
However, elsewhere in the camp others are clearly struggling.
The most vulnerable refugees - women without husbands, the elderly and those without sons - appear to be living on the margins.
They struggle by in tents, with little hope of working the system to open a business or buy a caravan.
The tents we visit are stifling hot. We are told they are cold at night, bitterly cold in winter, leak and drainage problems leave floors soaked when it rains.
Away from the bustling marketplace and the caravan settlements, many people are depressed, desperate and don't share in the hope of the others.
They sit and worry about the approaching winter. Will their children get sick again?
Will snakes looking for warmth come into the tents and bite them in their sleep?
Will the makeshift drains they have dug be enough to stop groundwater running through their homes?
Will they have enough to eat?Zaatari is a place of extremes.
With winter approaching, it is important that the story of the camp not just be the popular one of displaced Syrians taking control of their own destiny, but that it also be the story of the most vulnerable eeking out a living on the margins of the camp.
Key facts
• Location: Mafraq Governorate, Northern Jordan
• Opened: July 29, 2012
• Demographics (as at June 10, 2014)
• 84,938 persons of concern
• 42% of households are headed by women
• 25% of Syrian refugees are women
• An average of six persons per household
• 57% of population is youth; 19.9% are under 5
• Average of 61 births per week.
• Place of origin: Dara'a 53.4%, Homs 14.9%, Damascus 7.5%, Hama: 4.4%.
• General information:
• About 400,000 refugees have passed through the camp. Of those, an average of 110,000 returned to Syria
• 50,000 received bail-outs from Jordanian nationals
• 150,000 left the camp without bail-out authorisation
• fewer than 90,000 remain in Zaatari.
