Clouds Over Sidra

In this 360-view video of a Sidra, a 12 year old refugee living in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, the viewer gets to see first hand what it is like for a young girl to be living in such conditions. With her family, Sidra has been living in the camp for a year and a half. I was surprised to hear that the children attend school while at these camps (although now I feel dumb assuming they didn’t). So children however do not attend, thinking it’s better to just wait until they return to Syria, and Sidra believes that is a waste of time, since there isn’t much else to do. Sidra talks about how the boys get to play video games, yet the girls aren’t allowed on the computer. The boys cannot workout in the gym like the men, so they try to wrestle each other instead. Seeing their lives up close brings simple things in perspective. For example, they have a limited number of soccer balls, so the kids can only play for a few minutes before the next group wants a turn. How simple would it be to send over 100 soccer balls, just so that these children can be entertained and run around smiling for an hour or so? Seeing videos like these make you think about how fortunate you are, but also gets you to think about how easy it would be to make a difference, no matter how small.