An insight into life in Ruwaishid camp

CBS reports from Ruwaishid camp on the miserable conditions there, interviewing Miriam, who has lived there with her husband and two small children since 2003: "Thinking they would spend a few weeks in Jordan at the most, they left with the clothes on their backs and ended up in this tent 50 miles from the border with Iraq, surrounded craggy desert as far as the eye can see. They've been here ever since. The tents are of a thick canvas held together by steel poles and reinforced on the inside with plastic sheets and military-style blankets. Most don't have electricity. Residents bring buckets of water stored in raised communal tanks. Inside Miriam's tent, the smell of a small gas heater fills a room that's dark and stuffy, even in the middle of the day. Since the camp is in the middle of the desert, there's very little to do. "Just sitting here, we've become bored and mentally tired," Miriam says. People in the camp have stopped leaving their tents, she says, and the makeshift school and handicraft activities that kept people occupied have stopped due to a lack of will and lack of funding. "Even a prisoner knows how long his sentence will be," says Miriam. She says she fights depression, and her children frequently face infections and skin disorders from the harsh living conditions. Her three-year-old son, Maan, who was born in the camp, has lesions on his legs and his head was shaved due to a skin disorder. As Miriam speaks, the wind shakes her tent's soft walls. The floor is covered with heavy blankets, to soften the uneven terrain. The tent is not solid enough to keep out mice and scorpions, and the wind whips at the bottom edges of the tent. Still, the inside is spotless, with simple wood furniture neatly arranged. A crumpled page from a 2005 calendar is pinned to the blanketed wall. Miriam says she's afraid to cook during the winter. Two years ago, a six-year-old girl was killed in her tent when the wind blew the flames out from under the gas heater. Within minutes, several tents had burned to the ground. "I'm afraid a strong wind will come through and set the whole tent ablaze," she says. Miriam and her family had lived their entire lives in Iraq. She worked in a beauty salon, speaks in an Iraqi dialect, and has never known any other place as home. Her parents fled Haifa in 1948 and headed for Baghdad. She reels off the names of several family members who have been killed, including a cousin whose body parts were returned to the family, she says, in a plastic bag."