Cholera always sounds like an epidemic of the past, yet we hinted about the rise of cholera and climate change more than 10 years ago. Now, we are seeing the effects of climate change and drought in Syria and Lebanon. Cholera is becoming a public health emergency in Lebanon and Syria as the bacteria spreads.  

UNICEF on the ground in Lebanon and Syria estimate about 35,000 cases of cholera there, with Lebanon’s Ministry of Health estimating over 3,000 cases. Poor hygiene and water services in Syria has created the outbreak. Cholera hasn’t been seen in Syria in 14 years and was believed to be eradicated, much like polio which still rears its head in sewage systems in the Middle East.

According to the EU, the outbreak in Syria started from a pile of factors including drought, economic poverty, and a battered water infrastructure. Almost 50% of Syrians now rely on unsafe sources of water for their daily needs.

Cholera is transmitted and then contracted through contaminated food or drinking water. Dehydration can be fatal unless treated quickly. Like Covid, good hygiene is key but also clean water, which may be scarce in some parts of Syria.  Cholera outbreaks now threaten the entire Levant region with the bacteria appearing downstream in Israel.

It is believed that the cholera bacteria has spread through contamination of the Euphrates River, the Nile of the Levant region, extending to Iraq with sewage water. It continued to spread through irrigating farmland. 

Some infected mistakenly think they have Covid. And they might have Covid as well. 

Calling about cholera in Lebanon

The Lebanese Ministry of Public Health stated that the Lebanese Red Cross (LRC) has opened a new hotline to ease the cholera outbreak. Locals in Lebanon can call the hotline 1760, 24/7, to get medical advice for confirmed and potential cholera patients. The emergency number 140 is for taking cholera patients to centers and hospitals, and it’s still available for use.

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With a special interest in the Middle East, after studying Arabic and also teaching dance to underprivileged children in Jordan, I was touched when I learned about Joudeh. Then around this time last year, in rehearsals for a modern dance show, I found out that one of the pieces I would perform centered around him. An excerpt from the documentary that introduced Joudeh to the world would play on the screen at the back of the stage. This good fortune moved me; I felt so lucky and eager to embrace his “Dance or die” spirit, to embody his movement, to give his story the spotlight it deserves – this time on a New York City stage.

In his documentary, there was one scene in which Joudeh dances on a barren concrete rooftop. It’s a beautiful day, a minaret and dome of a mosque visible beyond the roof’s border, but one inevitably fears that there isn’t much time before all of the structures pictured will crumble, the dust will block out the sun…

Joudeh ushers in a sense of hope to that roof, though, as he sweeps his leg around, tumbles to the floor but then reaches an outstretched hand to the sky. His movement is big; you can tell that he needs this art as much as it sustains him.

I, too, like to move big, and I know I dance better when I am emotionally charged. In this piece by the company Born Dancing, Inc., called Grey 5 because it was the fifth of a set of pieces dedicated to Syria, collectively called Grey, I started mimicking Joudeh’s movement pattern, dancing with him as I faced the back, looking at him on the screen. Three dancers joined and we danced in canon, and then it was complete accumulation: all six of us were flying and reaching alongside Ahmad Joudeh.

View the video on Facebook here.

The piece ended with pictures of Syrian children affected by the war flashing over the screen, and the dancers reacting to it. I remember that the director, Melissa van Wijk, did not choreograph our reactions; she let us feel the way we felt, and manifest that through movement, whatever it was. I appreciated that freedom awarded us, when usually dance is so exacting.

On the subject of freedom, I would like to give an update on Joudeh’s whereabouts. He is now dancing with the Dutch National Ballet. No doubt his technique and artistry have soared, and his future dance students will be all the more lucky to have him. Last month his first book, an autobiography, called Danza o Muori, Italian for Dance or Die, was published by DeA Planeta Libri. I have to brush up on my Italian, and then I’ll pick up a copy.

Tonight is opening night of Born Dancing, Inc.’s fourth production. Although we will not be showing all of Grey, and that means no Grey 5, there is a duet, Grey 2, that we have pulled to show, and I have the honor of dancing in it. I assume the role of a mother figure as I dance with an 11-year-old named Emily, who represents Syrian refugee children at large. We play, I support her, she supports me, and love is palpable.

This weekend, I bet Ahmad Joudeh is performing, too. Although we won’t be sharing the stage in person or thanks to digital technology, we will still be close: I plan to carry his love of dance in my heart, and that’s as close at it gets.

First photo courtesy of Born Dancing, Inc. Photo of Danza o Muori taken off Ahmad Joudeh’s Instagram page.

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A major Jordanian artwork showcased at the 2016 Amman Design Week was recently repurposed to provide basic human shelter for people in need. This afterlife was intentionally designed into the piece, an artistic application of “cradle-to-cradle” practices. The project raises awareness about conscious design and the positive impact of handcrafts within local communities.

“Entrelac” was a major installation in last September’s weeklong exhibition of Jordanian and regional art and design. Collaboratively created by local fashion designer Raya Kassisieh and NADAAA, a Boston-based design firm led by MIT professor Nader Tehrani, the artwork consisted of 28 gigantic strands of woolen rope, suspended from the cavernous ceiling of The Hangar exhibition space, an architectural enclosure that spiraled downward and across the concrete floor. Computer modeling determined its structural design, but the composition was handmade by 20 local craftswomen. The artwork reflected the dynamic between traditional handcraft and digital design.

After the exhibition closed, the artist worked with the same women who created the piece to repurpose its 770 pounds of wool fiber into blankets. The material was sufficient to create 38 full-size knitted blankets, which were then distributed to Syrian refugees and Jordanians in need.

It was a sustainable finale to Amman’s first Design Week, which shared its focus across art, social issues, and environmental responsibility. Most of the materials used in the exhibition’s installations and advertising have been reused and recycled to benefit local communities.

The old showbiz saw “the show must go on” supposedly emerged from 19th Century circuses. It referred to the determined antics of the ringmaster and his musicians aimed at pumping up the spirits of performers and audiences when things went terribly awry. The phrase takes a sustainable turn in this story, but the thrust remains on salvaging.

Image of craftswoman and recycled wool blankets by Hareth Tabbalat

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Soup for Syria is a beautiful new cookbook of delicious and easy-to-make recipes guaranteed to fill your belly and feed your mind with heightened humanitarian awareness. But at its heart it is a cookbook, a perfect primer for any cook seeking healthy and flavorful food made with no-fuss ingredients (mostly vegetarian) found in supermarkets everywhere.

Lebanese food writer Barbara Abdeni Massaad (pictured below) volunteered at a Syrian refugee camp near the Bekaa Valley, one of many that sprouted in Lebanon, doing what came naturally to her: she cooked soup. She hauled in ingredients and tools on her frequent trips to the camp, serving up warm food to families in desperate need of sustenance and support. The experience stirred up her thinking on how to take it larger.

Massaad reached out to the star chefs and foodies in her Rolodex, asking each to create a soup recipe for a cookbook to raise funds for refugee food aid. The project went global, with dozens of cooks around the world clamoring to be included. Others volunteered resources to make the book a reality; publisher Pavilion Books and several bookshops covered production and distribution costs so that most of the profits could be given directly to food relief efforts managed by UNHCR.

Said contributor Anthony Bourdain, “Soup is elemental, and it always makes sense, even when the world around us fails to.” Other participants include Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi, Mark Bittman, Alice Waters, Paula Wolfert, Claudia Roden, Sally Butcher, Ana Sortun, Greg Malouf, Aglaia Kremenzi, Joe Barza, Carolyn Kumpe, Wendy Rahamut, and many others. This is one instance where too many cooks didn’t spoil the soup!

Writer disclaimer: Gift-giving is problematic for a Western ex-pat living in the Levant who seeks crowd-pleasing presents that support local causes. Purchases are further constrained by a dearth of handmade products that meet airline luggage limits. So pottery, mosaics and carpets get knocked off the shopping list.

When I first spotted this cookbook, I pre-ordered several copies for US delivery to the foodies on my list. I also bought one for myself, and since returning home to Amman, Jordan I’ve been tearing through the recipes. The ingredients are fairly universal and easy to find and the recipes varied enough to keep my family with spoons at the ready.  My personal favorite (so far) is a brilliantly pink beet-based soup that nearly qualifies as dessert.

Greg Malouf, a Michelin-starred Australian chef with Lebanese roots, contributed this fennel soup recipe, which is next on my list to boil up:

Greg Malouf fennel soup

(Serves 6-8)

60 ml extra-virgin olive oil
2 onions, sliced
2 small garlic cloves, roughly chopped
2 leeks, trimmed and roughly chopped
3 large fennel bulbs, sliced
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
1.5 l chicken stock
1 cinnamon stick
Peel of ½ lemon
½ tsp ground allspice
2 bay leaves
Salt and black pepper, to taste
2 egg yolks
120 ml double cream
Juice of 2 lemons
1 tsp ground cinnamon and 3 tbsp fresh parsley, to garnish

Heat the oil and saute the onions, garlic, leeks and fennel for a few minutes. Add the potatoes, stock, cinnamon stick, lemon peel, allspice and bay leaves. Bring to the boil, then gently simmer for 20 minutes. Remove the cinnamon, lemon and bay, and season. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks and cream, then stir in a large spoonful of soup. Whisk well, then tip into the soup. Slowly return the soup to just below boiling, stirring. Remove from the heat and adjust the seasoning with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Drizzle each bowl with oil and sprinkle with cinnamon and parsley.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Soup is the ultimate comfort food: nurturing, sustaining and all good things. One recipe is a drop in the ocean, but if awareness of the plight of the Syrian refugees is raised with each batch made and shared then that is a force for good. As well as being a delicious meal in and of itself,” wrote Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi and Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi, frequent collaborators on London-based food projects and contributors to this cookbook.

Here in Amman, local friends have hosted “Souper Bowl Sundays”, inviting hungry people over to sample these recipes and make voluntary donations, which are then passed to local NGOs for refugee food relief. You could do the same for any cause of your choosing, or as a simple excuse to eat well with friends and family.

Buy Soup for Syria at Amazon, or through your favorite bookseller (about $30)

All images from Soup for Syria and Barbara Abdeni Massaad

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“My name is Sidra. I am 12 years old… I have lived here in the Zaatari camp in Jordan for the last year and a half.”

Filmmaker Chris Milk took his empathy machine and virtual reality concept to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. This is where a majority of Syrian refugees have fled to, and a couple of Green Prophet writers have been leading projects to mitigate the suffering. His new virtual reality film can help us imagine standing in their shoes and see and feel more about the lives of these vulnerable people.

Milk is using Virtual Reality (VR) technology to increase our emotional bandwidth beyond what was possible in movies. VR technology has been with us for decades but it has been refined and its cost has dropped dramatically.

Occulus Rift, Google Cardboard and other VR devices will be hot sellers in the coming year. But Chris Milk didn’t wait. He shot “Clouds over Sidra” at Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFnhMX6oR1Q[/youtube]

This was the first Virtual reality film ever made for the United Nations. Chris explains that unlike film where the viewer is looking through a window frame, this technology takes the viewer through the frame so that they experience what it is like to be in the room with Sidra or sitting next to her in her classroom.

The project was presented to UN dignitaries in Geneva, Switzerland and it did seem to make a difference in their perceptions. Maybe it will for each of us.

Try it yourself by downloading Google Play, VRSE and viewing “Clouds over Sidra” on VRSE, Google Cardboard or other virtual reality devices. If you watch this film on non-VR devices you’ll see it as a distorted 360 degree movie.

The mechanical details of each tragedy are broadcast to the world via live satellite. While survivors are still struggling to breath, observers are consumed with the statistics of disaster.

A category 5 hurricane, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake, the killers were quiet men who kept to themselves. The death toll was 404.

These facts spark our most primitive emotions first because these require the fewest bits of information. We fear that this tragedy might happen to us or we grow angry and seek to punish the real or imagined cause. Our despair grows as these darker motions consume us.

Empathy is a more complex, less primitive and more uniquely human emotion. According to a Princeton and Duke University study entitled, “Brain’s Social Network Implicated in Dehumanizing Others,” by Rick Nauert, MRI scans show that there is a part of the human brain associated with empathy.

But prejudice, racism and socioeconomic status can turn off this empathic part of a person’s brain and enable one associated with disgust. Might this empathy gap explain why people tend to shun war refugees at the same time as they spend millions of dollars per day on wars?

Empathy seems to require more communication bandwidth. Sometimes it requires direct contact with loved-ones in the faraway land or a memories of a time when we ourselves also lived through such a tragedy. Music, photography and visual arts can also trigger empathy. Functional MRI studies have found that literature literally helps us get inside the minds of others by activating the same regions in our brain that tell us the story of who we are.

Whatever the cause for the connection, some people are able to feel deeply for the victims of disaster. Their empathy expands to the scale of the disaster. The may lose sleep, grow physically sick or fall into a depression. Or they might feel compelled to do something, anything to try to fix whatever it is that is broken with the world, with the focus on the needs of the victims rather than the punishment of the cause.

The late film critic Roger Ebert considered empathy to be the most essential quality of a civilization, “We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised.

“We’re kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

Photos from Chris Milk’s “Clouds over Sidra” at VRSE.
Photo of Migrant mother (1936) by Dorthy Lange.
Photo of Syrian refugee woman(2015) by Washington Post

Thanks also to my Lebanese-American cousin Mud for her thoughtful piece on emotional responses to disasters, Laurie Balbo who works with Studio Syria and Collateral Repair; Gael at Dar al Yasmin for giving my family some non-virtual reality experience with Syrian refugees to help us imagine them not as anonymous faraway strangers, but as human beings.

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Youtube archives threaten to break the internet with flash mob proposals, bridal party dance antics, and epic fail toasts.  Meet a young Turkish couple that refreshingly flipped their big day on its head, making a naturally narcissistic milestone into something all about others. They invited 4,000 Syrian refugees to their wedding feast!

Fethullah Üzümcüoğlu and Esra Polat got hitched last week in Kilis, a Turkish town on the Syrian border.  Ali Üzümcüoğlu, father of the groom, came up with the idea of sharing their celebration with local refugees who had fled Syria since the start of its civil war four years ago. He said that he hoped others would do the same and share their wedding celebrations “with their Syrian brothers and sisters.”

“I was shocked when Fethullah first told me about the idea but afterwards I was won over by it. It was such a wonderful experience. I’m happy that we had the opportunity to share our wedding meal with the people who are in real need,” she told Serhat Kilis newspaper.

Nearly two million Syrians have emigrated to Turkey. In Kilis, there are 4,000 refugees. The United Nations estimates there are now four million Syrian refugees, with another eight million displaced within the country, calling it  the worst crisis of its kind in a generation.

“We thought that on such a happy day, we would share the wedding party with our Syrian brothers and sisters. God willing, this will lead to others doing the same and giving food to our Syrian brothers and sisters. For us, it was an interesting wedding dinner,” said the groom, “Seeing the happiness in the eyes of the Syrian refugee children is just priceless. We started our journey to happiness with making others happy and that’s a great feeling.”

To pull off the party, the family teamed up with Kimse Yok Mu (translates to “Is Anybody There?”), a Turkish charity which provides aid to millions of needy across the world. Spokesman Hatice Avci told i100.co.uk that the couple pooled their wedding gift money to pay for the unusual reception. Wedding guests trucked food to different sites around town.  The bride, groom, and local singer Reşit Muhtar also jumped in serving up meals to the special guests.

Groom’s dad Üzümcüoğlu said he was glad that the couple began a new life “with such a selfless action”.  And he may have kicked off  a trend; his son’s friends told him they hope to do the same during their wedding celebrations.

Hasanat? Mitzvah? Plain old good karma? This story leaves us happier than if we caught the bouquet.

Images by @kimseyokmu

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Canadian artist Jean Bradbury has strong ties to Jordan; she’s been working with a women’s craft collective in Ghor-al-Safi along the southern Dead Sea for over twenty years. (See our story about that craft guild and their unique products, here.) In 2012, when Syria exploded into civil war, Jean contacted the Canadian Embassy to see how she might use her art teaching abilities to help in the relief effort.  So began her annual pilgrimage to Zaatari Camp, where – armed with unsinkable energy and donated art supplies – she holds week-long workshops for residents ranging from toddlers to teens.

Bradbury organized her last visit specifically to teach techniques for sharing stories in a graphic novel format. I was lucky enough to tag along as her paper-cutting, ink-pouring assistant.

The men and women who took part in her workshop were members of an all-male English language class and an all-female cosmetology class who took a break from study to try their hand at art. None was a professional artist, although one young man had been an art teacher in Damascus. Many were drawing with pen and ink for the first time.

After she explained the process of setting up page format (here, arranging story blocks right to left, as per Arabic writing), using time sequences to let a story unfold, and the need to add text or thought bubbles to supplement each scene, the group went silent as they dove into their drawings.

“I chose to teach young adults because they seem to be particularly under-served in the camp. Too old to take part in art programs for children and often at loose ends, at a time in their lives when they ought to be making their way in the world. Their frustration and despair is palpable,” said Bradbury, “I hope that, by giving them a creative voice, they will find solace, have some fun, and be able to direct their energy toward something positive and life-affirming.”

The artwork proved her point. She urged everyone to write and draw small moments from their daily lives in the camp – but deeper messages emerged. Once everyone got comfortable with the tools of the trade, their tales flooded reams of blank paper. The focus was intense.  At times the tent where we gathered went silent, except for the noise of the power generator and the wind whipping against the fabric walls.

Translated from above: “I hope to return to our country soon. I wish I could have a child. Life is unbearable without plants and trees.” 

Bradbury told Green Prophet, “I chose graphic novels because I wanted to give voice to some of the otherwise voiceless young people in Zaatari Camp. Using words with pictures enables the refugee to tell his or her story in a much clearer and more engaging way than if they were to use words or pictures alone. The stories that emerge are deeply personal and intimate. It’s therapeutic for the artist and incredibly moving for the reader.”

She took her idea to a donor in Seattle (where she lives and works) who agreed to pay for workshop supplies. He was particularly interested in providing a therapeutic activity for young men who – in their despair – might otherwise be drawn to violence.

She added, “Comics are suitable for situations where there are no art supplies, all that’s needed is a pencil or pen and a piece of paper. I took old-fashioned nib pens to the camp and taught the class how to make ink from pomegranate rinds and iron – anticipating that the donated art supplies would eventually run out.”

Translated from above: “My life in the past was filled with sadness, death and tears. But I moved on, and now all I want is to live in the future and take care of my children.”

Using a comic book format to tell a serious story became popularized in the mid-1960s.  The genre rose to critical and commercial success in the 1980’s with publications such as Art Spiegelman’s MAUS which recounted his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew during World War II and the holocaust.

In 1996, Joe Sacco published Palestine, a graphic novel based on his several months of research in the early and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip where he conducted over 100 interviews with both Palestinians and Jews in the 1990s.

His resulting two-volume set won an American Book Award that same year.

Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi told about coming of age during and after the Iranian revolution in Persepolis, a graphic novel published in four installments between 2000 and 2003. Named by Newsweek as fifth on their list of “10 best books of the decade”, it was adapted for film in 2007.

Perhaps one of these giants in the genre will tap the stories of Syria. The potency of the pictures made by these amateur artists guarantees a blockbuster.

Translated from above: “I feel sad because I know that a lot of kids and young people die daily in my country and I cannot do anything”

Translated from above: “I dream to be a war man to protect my country”. When we asked the artist who he wanted to fight against, he saidDaesh (local term for the IslamicState of Iraq and Syria, a/k/a, ISIS).

Studio Syria always distributes enough supplies to enable workshop participants to go home and continue their artwork.

Want to be part of this beautiful initiative?  Donate directly through her NGO Studio Syria – website link here. If you are in Jordan and able to provide art supplies, drop her an email. And – a nudge to professional graphic novelists – contact her directly if you’d like to take this project to the next level.

All images from Jean Bradbury and Laurie Balbo

The post Syrian refugees share their graphic stories appeared first on Green Prophet.

Along with the amazing Shaza (that’s her mugging it up in the lead image), I help run CRP’s Hope Workshop, a craft cooperative composed of about two dozen women who meet weekly to learn new skills using mostly donated materials.  It’s a raucous few hours swapping stories that thread through women’s groups everywhere.

We talk about our kids, joke about our weight, complain when we drop a stitch, and help each other master new techniques. They test me with their English, I try my faulty Arabic.  The Iraqis say I sound Syrian, and the Syrians say I sound Egyptian. Shaza’s translating makes it all work.

The group has a more serious mission.  It serves as safe haven to relax and create. We are always on the lookout for new projects to work on (often using recycled, re-purposed and donated materials) which we can sell to buy supplies for more challenging projects. This is where an astonishing opportunity from Texas comes in.

Enter Beverly Hill, founder and president of Gendap, the Dallas-based Gendercide Awareness Project, which focuses on what she calls the global epidemic of female murder. Says Hill, “Gendercide proceeds from the belief that female life is disposable. Gendercide devastates the hopes of women everywhere. It is unworthy of us as human beings. It is time to end this silent slaughter.”

The United Nations Population Fund, which tracks this problem, has estimated that 117 million women are “missing” in the world due to due to sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, female child neglect, unnecessary maternal death, and (for older women and widows) unequal access to food and shelter.

Gendap is raising awareness to the issue through a variety of activities, including an ambitious art installation to show the sheer scale of gendercide.

The installation features a long corridor lined with 11,700 pairs of baby booties, each pair representing 10,000 missing women. When it opens in 2015, the show will urge support for education, paid labor and women’s health care to bring about change.

Hill discovered CRP’s Hope Workshop on the Dining for Women website. She told me, “It’s hard to find women’s sewing and knitting coops in developing countries, as they often don’t come up in web searches. I found that foundations such as Dining for Women or the larger Global Fund for Women have sometimes given grants to such groups, so I scan their sites looking for coops in particular countries or regions that are not yet represented in our art exhibit. I found a number of coops this way.”

The video below offers a fly-through simulation of the ambitious exhibit.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/w4s7nrX8ISI[/youtube]

She emailed CRP director Amanda Lane to introduce the project (Gendap pays $3USD per pair to cover material costs and shipping to Texas) and invite Hope Workshop to make 200 pairs of booties. The women tucked in. Some shoes were delicately hand sewn, others knit from traditional yarn, and more crocheted from shredded plastic bags. Upcycled plastic food packaging was cut into soles. About 25 per cent of the booties are red, black, green and white – the shared colors of the Iraqi, Syrian and Jordanian national flags.

The women of Hope Workshop bear deep wounds of war, displacement, and immeasurable personal loss. They could easily retreat into a belief that the world has forgotten them. Instead, they chose to give freely to a project that insists women not be forgotten.

Founded in 2006 with a mission to support Iraqi refugees entering Jordan, CRP now runs an emergency help program that provides food and household items to the most destitute refugees from Iraq, Syria, as well as Jordanian poor – all of whom lack other assistance. CRP’s Community and Family Resource Center offers many activities and learning opportunities that allow refugees to begin to rebuild a sense of community in the Hashemi al Shamali neighborhood they now call home. Support CRP via their website (link here).

The Gendercide Awareness Project presents basic facts about gendercide, its consequences for society, and practical measures to end it. Support them via their website (link here).

Or chose to get involved with Dining for Women (link here), a giving circle headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina which raises monthly for international charities that support women and girls facing extreme challenges in developing countries.

Each will turn a small private donation into powerful positive change.

The post Jordan’s special refugees: giving back to others appeared first on Green Prophet.

My family and I wanted to learn about the needs of Syrian refugees. So before our recent trip to Jordan, we asked Green Prophet’s Laurie Balbo about volunteer organizations there.

Laurie was a crucial boots-on-the-ground volunteer who performed a bureaucracy-defying miracle to get thousands of donated Irish knit hats to children at Zaatari before winter’s end and long before larger relief agencies were able to complete their winter clothing distribution.

Laurie works with Studio Syria and other organizations inside the Zaatari refugee camp. She was also familiar with a French NGO named Dar Al Yasmin (DAY), which means “House of Yasmin.” It was named after Syria’s fragrant national flower. DAY was formed in 2013 to focus on the needs of families living in Zaatari village.

DAY cofounder Gaelle Sundelin has the crucial mix of organization and language skills, leadership, creativity, optimism, patience, peacemaking and enough pragmatism to recognize that she can’t do it all herself. So for this typical Habaybi (caring love) event Gaelle recruited about 50 people from France, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Sudan and Somalia. The young men from these last two countries told me that wars had forced them to leave their homelands and that they hoped to return one day.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c5-_wzPUqw[/youtube]

We met Gaelle and other DAY volunteers at a bus stop in Amman Jordan on Good Friday. We would fill two minibuses with a diverse group of teachers, artists, musicians, an acroclown circus and my family of four.

Some circus performers tuned their instruments while another handed out plastic clown noses. The troupe burst into song to lighten the mood at security checkpoints and shorten the journey to Zaatari. Our ten-year-old daughter called it the most fun bus ride she has ever been on.

While other volunteers worked on a variety of craft and entertainment projects, my family was asked to help make kites. Gaelle explained that we would make the kites out of plastic bags and cardboard so that the children would learn about recycling. During the long bus ride north, Gaelle wondered aloud whether we would have enough materials for the kites. I looked across dusty fields littered with plastic bags and wondered how we could ever run out.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6eQxkmMWSs#t=154[/youtube]

Volunteers Muhammad Husseis and Feras Hamwy had built a flying prototype kite made from a plastic bag and decorated with Barcelona football club stickers. This was two days after Real Madrid took home the Spanish cup but the Barcelona stickers were a huge hit with the kids as were the Cars, Angry Birds, Spiderman and smiley face stickers. I only knew how to say “Hello” and “Thank you” in Arabic, but “Barcelona” was a universal happy word that day.

This was the first valuable lesson for us, these kids aren’t so different from our own children or from others we’ve known in Ireland, the US and elsewhere.

We used a hot glue gun to assemble the traditional “kite-shaped” kites. It must be natural to feel somewhat useless when trying to help others overcome seemingly intractable problems. But I soon found my purpose as goalie trying to keep the children from burning themselves on the hot glue guns. I began to wish we had used duct tape! But then I noticed that these kids were different. Their level of chaotic energy was high but nothing beyond what I’d seen in the Irish Sunday school classes. The difference being that this room full of 30 kids seemed at even more manageable than my Sunday school class of 8.

When the kites were finished, the children took them outside and we began to clean up. But the kites were so popular that the word soon spread and had a new influx of children eager to turn every scrap of plastic and cardboard they could find into a kite. At first we shrugged our shoulders and thought why not?

But when the chaos rose and we decided to pull the plug on the hot glue guns. As they cooled off, a 5 year-old boy presented his half-finished kite, flicked out a cigarette lighter and offered to reheat the glue for me. I told him, “La shukran.”

That was when someone carried in the little girl. She wore a white and pink floral dress and a beaded bracelet she had made with another arts and crafts group. She handed me the broken shoe. A plastic jewel had fallen off of its buckle.

There was just enough heat left in the glue gun to stick it back on. These children did learn something about recycling on that day. And I learned that even the smallest act of kindness is never wasted.

Photos provided by Dar Al Yasmin (DAY.)

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Ibraheem wrote his Master’s thesis for the University of Salford, Manchester about the many ways in which parametric modeling can enhance architectural design solutions of temporary shelters in disaster areas.

Using Grasshopper, Ibraheem takes the ancient method of constructing teepee-like temporary shelters out of branches or trees, cuts off the empty pyramid point, and then models a shelter with diagonal lines that are proven to be the most resilient in rough winds.

He then uses parametric modeling to determine the best possible method to connect the base joints with the roof joints in a way that creates a flexible internal space that can accommodate any number of residents. Conveniently, a design already put together for four people can be quickly altered to accommodate eight instead.

Interior partitions can create several rooms in any number of configurations designed to match the particular group of people who will inhabit them.

Related:  Collapsible woven shelters powered by the sun

Let’s say a family of seven is going to live in the shelter. They will require perhaps a separate room for a bathroom, and cooking, but will need much less privacy, in general, than a group of four single strangers. Also, a refugee in Russia will need a very different shelter than a refugee in the desert – given the different climatic conditions.

Ibraheem takes this into consideration by creating a structure that can be modeled with thicker walls for greater insulation in cooler temperatures, or longer windows shaded from the sun for shelters to be deployed where the sun beats down constantly.

Likewise, Ibraheem’s shelter is a shapeshifter: parametric modeling, according to him, allows it to become a triangle, or a rectangle or a pentagon even. And the floor sheet can be made into different shapes and sizes as well – all to accommodate the particular needs of each cluster of refugees.

While Seikaly designed a special structural fabric than allows her woven shelters to collapse for greater mobility, Ibraheem hasn’t gone into great detail about the kind of materials would be ideal for this customizable, shapeshifting structure.

But it does have a door and it does meet the Red Cross standards for refugee housing, which calls for a shelter that provides some sense of self-determination and dignity. As one reader said about an earlier post, the only thing that would make these designs better is to not need them at all.

Related: Reusable, stackable Exo emergency shelters for Syrians in need

The UNHCR logo on the rendered design does not suggest endorsement by the organization

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