Zaatari: The Desert that Became Home

In this episode, Ricardo talks directly from the Zaatari refugee camp located in Jordan, where he is participating in the recordings of the documentary: "Zaatari: The Desert that Became Home" (in a free translation). Zaatari is the largest camp of Syrian War refugees, and, in just four years, it became the third city in the country. Learn more about the documentary.

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Episode transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes PM podcast today, a very special Podcast directly from the Zaatari camp in Jordan, around 50 miles away from I'm on the couch and around 75, eight miles away from the Syrian border. You all know about the War and the conflict. And just to give you some idea of the proportion of what we are talking about, Jordan received more than half-million refugees and these refugees, they were allocated, of course In with the society or on the cities.

And the also in two main refugee camps and zap that he camp is a campaign that hosts around 90 a hundred thousand refugees. This camp was built exactly to support and to give you some dignity to the people. And you may ask me why in the project management podcast, Ricardo he is talking about a refugee Campbell. What does the relation, many of you may think that the scope of building and sustaining a camp, it's something very simple.

Yeah. You just bring the people, find the land, put it up. He will give pants and it's over at So. Okay. This is a very simplistic solution for what we are talking about. We're talking about people leaving their homes without anything, many of them face the trauma of living behind everything they built-in life. Family's where to disperse it and, and everything. And the War that was done by your Jordanian government to get it several endures, what to buy it.

I think bribery from home for them and what, not a temporary shelter, but temporary Home because we're talking much more than today. Just putting a tent or building a prefab house. We're talking about developing roads to give access to the people, to their houses. We are talking about electricity, probably most of you, if not all, are using an electronic device that uses electrical energy to work and to listen, to this podcast.

And you all know that when electricity does not work is the time that you feel the pain off to the lack of militaristic. So one of the first and most complex things is to give power to this. So not only street power, but try to find ways of supporting the homes on the use of power. So many times you do this using a generator. Many times you do this on a very limited scale, but in Zadie, the infrastructure that was built is a fantastic infrastructure to support the people.

They use it at the national grid and they power it up on the national grid. And this allows for around seven to eight hours off the power every day to the County and each district out of the 12 has the ability to manage the consumption because they know that with the power cap if they manage better, the community managed better, they can use and have energy for a longer time during the day. And this makes all difference because then they can have a small fridge to keep things cold.

Then they can have some more fresh fruits, fresh food. So this is just a piece of electricity. Not a very interesting aspect that we saw here is how important is a connection, mobile connection, charge, a mobile phone, to have the ability to talk to the people you left behind families have dispersed it around several different places because of the War.

So how do you connect it? So basic use of electricity. So in your project, you need to think about it in your project. You need to think about washing, water, and sanitation. You need to bring portable water that people can use for cooking that can use for hygiene. And you need to have all the sewage systems to collect all these dirty liquids and throw them away in a safe way, safe and sustainable way.

The camp has a wrong 20,000 youth, or you need to provide a school for them. So you need to build, you need to have teachers. You need to have ways of leveraging their knowledge because they are the future. You need to have maternity clinics. You need to have hospitals just to give you a number of every single day, six to 10 new babies, our board inside the camp.

Most of the kids we see on the camp were born there. So you need to have this infrastructure, you and ATR the high commissioning for refugees, coordinate the work of duty, six entities that in different areas take care of that. And I'm not talking, of course, I'm an engineer. So I'm speaking a lot about the engineering aspect. What do you need to understand is that it's not the deposit of people? There is all the psychological aspect of resuming their lives.

I live that was halted by the war. It's to find ways of engaging the adults in a work. This is why the Jordanian government allowed the construction of one street. When main, there has a nickname of the Avenue, that main Avenue in Paris insurance, or at least say, you can find everything. Absolutely everything from bike repairs too, but yours to fruits, vegetables, clothes, everything, absolutely everything.

You can find him. And this was not only to bring some slime to the camera but also to give a job and employment for people to create a more dignity fine way of living during the war in the construction is a correct. Not yet, but also the maintenance is a project because you may also think to me, but the maintenance is not a routine we bag and we put it and he, every day that this is still the project, because a refugee camp is something you built to protect during turbulent times.

And then people can go back home when the conflict is done, the problem, and this is not the project management related problem. Is that the conflict there's not an end? So people cannot go Home people do not have any condition to go home. And then the temporary becomes permanent. And this is absolutely the sad side of this history. So you create temporary thinks that over time becomes more and it becomes the conflict does not think about that and think about how you can make the best use of your project management skills, not only to make business and make money also to help the society see you next week with another five minutes PM.

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