Love in a hard place: on St Valentine’s evening 2013, the families of Aya and Mohammed gathered in a tiny building in Jordan’s Zaatari camp, housing an estimated 90,000 refugees who fled Syria, and agreed on their engagement. Flickr / Oxfam International. Some rights reserved.
Across the globe 10m people are living in refugee camps. Many, like the Syrians in Jordan and Turkey, arrived recently. Others, like the Palestinians in Lebanon or Burma’s ethnic minorities in Thailand, have been there for decades.
At what stage do people realise their port-in-a-storm might be permanent? What does it mean reluctantly to accept you are unlikely ever to see your home again? What happens to the established social order when the hiatus becomes the new ‘normal’? And when does surviving give way to starting over?
