A Wedding Dress in Za’atari

One evening earlier this month, Iman, a sixteen-year-old Syrian refugee, was sitting in a makeshift salon in the Za’atari refugee camp, in Jordan, getting her wavy waist-length medium-brown hair permanently straightened. She was being prepared for her wedding, which would take place in ten days. Salon Cham, as Samira, its owner, calls it (the name evokes Syria) is set up in a trailer, with an N.G.O.-issued gray-wool blanket covering the entrance; Samira also rents out wedding dresses. Iman sat in the salon’s only styling chair, blankly staring at herself in the mirror, and then down at the pink phone resting in her lap. She still looked like a child, with skinny jeans that hung off her loosely and a tight orange sweater secured with a black belt just below her small bust line.

The groom, Ihab, was a twenty-year-old Syrian refugee who lived outside the camp and worked in an auto-repair store. They’d both been in Jordan for about eight months, and hadn’t known each other in Syria. They met at the camp, where Ihab briefly lived with his family before they moved elsewhere in Jordan.

Iman doesn’t radiate excitement or enthusiasm. “I lost hope of returning to Syria,” she says, explaining her reason for marrying. “That’s why.” She says she wanted to have a career as a schoolteacher but will now settle for having a husband. She doesn’t think she can have both.

By the time night falls in Za’atari, the aid workers, their shifts over at 4 P.M., have already left. Some have retreated to the logistical hub they call the base camp, a line of white prefab trailers behind chain-link fences topped with coiled razor wire and near the camp’s entrance. Some refugees call it the Green Zone—heavily fortified and disconnected from its surroundings, like its Iraqi namesake. The camp is a sprawling labyrinth of tents and trailers that, like most things here, are covered in a gritty, sandy dirt. It is home to more than a hundred and twenty thousand people, about fifty-four per cent of them female; half of that figure is made up of girls younger than seventeen.

The women and their families are making do in what is now Jordan’s fourth largest city—a city without police. The older parts of the camp, close to the entrance, are generally safer than the newer, outlying areas. They have streetlights, and established communities, often organized around clan or village, that offer safety in numbers and familiarity. In the newer parts, trailers and tents are more widely spaced, people often don’t know each other, and a darkened nighttime dash to the communal toilets, for example, is a heart-palpating trip. There is talk of rapes and other gender-based violence in some places, as well as activities like prostitution. It’s a difficult subject to broach in a society where a family’s honor is often tied to women’s purity; even the violent theft of chastity is considered a grave stain.

The closest thing to security here is the gray Jordanian-military armored personnel carrier at the entrance near the front gate. The camp’s peripheries are marked by earthen berms meant to prevent smuggling, but they don’t stop the movement of goods and people, even in broad daylight—they just slow it down. The Jordanian security presence is like locking a door when there are no walls, as one refugee put it. There are plans to train some refugees to look after their neighborhoods, and to train and deploy Jordanian police in community centers inside the camp. The current system, in which non-governmental organizations deal with mainly self-appointed “street leaders” among the refugees, has largely been a bust. Many of the street leaders, who are uniformly men, are despised or feared by other refugees; they’ve exploited their positions of relative power to benefit personally, by taking a larger share of the aid that is distributed, employing friends and relatives in jobs around the camp, or using violence to extort money and to suppress potential rivals.

There is, too, an uneasy relationship between many refugees and those who want to help them. Some of the daily convoys of visiting foreign dignitaries and others have been pelted with stones as they pass through. The tension is due to a number of factors: cultural insensitivity; a perceived lack of respect; the hopelessness and frustration of living off handouts in a harsh desert climate that many refugees blame for making their children sick. On a recent day, a group of Westerners in a blue S.U.V. drove slowly through the camp. A woman with bright-red, curly hair stuck a video camera out the front-seat window, filming the Syrians as they went about their daily business. She didn’t get out of the vehicle. She didn’t ask permission to capture the images even though many conservative Muslim women, in particular, or those fearful for family members in Syria, do not want to be photographed.

Aid workers and some Syrians have nicknamed the camp’s main commercial drag the “Champs-Élysées,” although all of the Syrians I spoke with simply called it sherra il souk, or the market street. It is crammed with containers converted into stores that sell everything from home appliances to shawarma, as well as makeshift stalls selling cigarettes or phone cards. Families walked along the market street on one recent night, as several young men darted into an Internet café and a few young women shopped for abayas, long-sleeve, ankle-length robes. You can buy anything here, if you have the money—even gold jewelry, which sells for 26.9 Jordanian dinars a gram (thirty-eight dollars). It’s the traditional gift a groom’s family offers a bride.

Iman hadn’t received her jewelry yet. At Salon Cham, cans of hair spray and several packs of cheap eye shadow sat on a bench in front of her, within easy reach of Samira, who was busy blow-drying ribbons of Iman’s hair. Four bedazzled wedding dresses that all ballooned at the bottom were modelled on headless mannequins lined up against a wall of the caravan. Another six hung from a metal rod extending the length of the trailer, alongside other formal dresses in a rainbow of colors.

Jordanian women routinely drop by the beauty salon, Samira says, to casually ask if there are any Syrian women or girls interested in Jordanian grooms or men from other Arab states. She shoos them away, politely at first but then more aggressively if they persist. There have been reports of Syrian girls married off by these Jordanian matchmakers, only to be divorced shortly afterward—little better than trafficking, or legalized prostitution, with or without a financial reward.

Early marriages, however, are a more complicated story. Some Syrian families have married off their daughters earlier than they otherwise may have if they weren’t in the camp in the hope that a husband might better protect their daughter, and to lessen their financial burden. Still, Syrians from Daraa province, where at least ninety per cent of Za’atari’s residents come from, tend to marry their daughters under the age of eighteen anyway; it’s not an aberration brought on by their refugee status.

Most of the brides Samira sees are fifteen or sixteen years old, she says; “If a girl gets to twenty and she’s not married, they give her a psychological complex.” She does, however, see older brides. Earlier in the day, she did the hair and makeup of a twenty-five-year-old, she says.

Samira charges eight thousand Syrian pounds (about seventy dollars) for a bride’s hair, makeup, and rental of both a wedding dress and another formal dress for the traditional party the night before. If a bride opts to just rent the wedding dress, it’s five thousand Syrian pounds. It’s not a bad business; Samira rents the trailer space from another refugee for about eighty-eight dollars a month. She’s busiest on Thursday and Friday, when, on average, she serves two or three brides a day and about five other customers. She buys the dresses from Jordan, for around a hundred Jordanian dinars each, or about a hundred and forty dollars. She has teamed up with her sister, Rana, who will decorate a bride’s body with henna for fifteen hundred Syrian pounds.

Iman listened quietly as the sisters discussed their business. She pointed out her wedding dress, hanging on the rack. It had a prominent spangly heart-shaped motif on one side, and lots of sparkles. It’s the most popular model, Samira said, before adding that it’s been worn only four or five times. After a bit of prodding, she admitted it’s been worn more than that. “Maybe six or seven times, or eight,” she said. Back in Syria, a dress’s rental price would drop every time it was worn, but not here in Za’atari.

Samira turned off the hair dryer. Iman took a hair clip, twisted her hair into a bun, and put a black head scarf on, securing it with a pin. “Don’t wash your hair for a few days!” Samira said as Iman pushed aside the thick gray blanket, and stepped out into a cool night.

It was only 8:30 P.M., but many of the stores in the street were already closing. In the warmer summer months they stay open until well past ten, residents say; a biting chill kept many people at home. Samira, too, decided to close up shop, then walked back to her home, in another trailer covered with dust.

Photographs by Heidi Levine/SIPA/AP (main image) and Dalia Khamissy.

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