Breaking new ground in Jordan

Rajiv Raman. All rights reserved.Earlier this year, Jordan made the
world a proposal: government speaker Mohammed Momani promised it would help any
country that pledged itself to take in several thousand refugees currently
camped out in the wilderness between Syria and Jordan. Jordan had reached its
limit of capacity. But still there weren't any takers and so 27,000 refugees have
been waiting in this no-man's-land until today.

Jordan’s offer to help the
international community in shipping off its refugees was to be sure
disingenuous. Not an invitation but rather a request from a country whose own
population of about six million people faces the challenge of hosting roughly
three million refugees, according to the latest census. Among them 1.3 million
Syrians. A country which realized that the rest of the world had scarcely cared
about this huge burden before seeing photos of a dead child washed up on a
Turkish shore. The realities of the Arab present
foreshadow Europe's own future.

The deserts of the Middle East are a
regular backdrop for drama. But as Europe plummets into desperation about
dealing with Syrians, the region no longer makes the continent's front pages.
So little attention is paid to its current tragedies that they no longer reach
the public consciousness. This is a shame, because the realities of the Arab
present foreshadow Europe's own future. The people that flee violence even
during the cold winter months and arrive at European shores in their thousands,
are driftwood in a merciless tide of globalization.

They are what connects the war
in Syria with ‘the West’. They are living proof that Europe and the Middle East
are much closer than their geographic distance suggests. Globalization has
turned us into neighbors. So in order to really learn about the opportunities
and risks of mass migration, you need to listen to the stories of people here
in the Middle East.

The Jordanian desert is a place
that both tells stories about the brutality of the war in Syria and the
tenacity of its victims. This tour through Jordan starts in Zaatari, the
region's largest refugee camp.

Top 10 refugee hosting countries in 2014. Source: UNHCR

Chapter
1: the refugees

When the day begins to close, they
climb up Telephone Hill. Zaatari looks vivid then, with the setting desert
sun’s last rays bouncing off the containers’ single-pane windows spraying
the camp with colors. For a few seconds, the light distracts from the sadness
of this place. Having arrived at the top of the hill, Syrian refugees erect
their arms towards the sky, cellphones in hand. They chase invisible waves,
hoping for their devices to connect to Syrian networks which would allow them
to talk to their loved ones on the other side of the border.

Zaatari Camp is the
display case of the Syrian refugee crisis. Here you can see it all: Jordan’s
hospitality, Syrian resilience, and the well-oiled machinery of international
aid. It’s a camp so vast that it is visible from space. So sprawling that its streets bear names. And so important that it
warranted its own Twitter account,
which has 14,000 followers.

Sometimes, when the wind blows in
from the north, it carries the thundering sound of the Syrian war
into the camp. It’s the theme song of the tragedy these people ran from, which has
relentlessly followed them. It is the sound of bombs falling onto Daraa, a
Syrian city just 60 kilometers away. The city is considered ground zero of the Syrian revolution, and it’s where more than half of the 80,000
people currently living at Zaatari have come from. Standing on Telephone
Hill, they can listen to their home being razed, while they wait for any good
news from the very same place.

One of them is Ahmad. His tired eyes
look out from behind a pair of twisted spectacles, a cheap metal frame. He stands
in a crooked posture as he extends a rough hand. Ahmad used to sell
fabrics in Syria, had his own home. Now, the carpet in his living container
soaks up rainwater, and when it stays dry, little grains of sand invade every
last corner.

“Everybody who knows Syria knows
that it is paradise.” The old man’s eyes fill with tears, and his son, sitting
next to him on the floor, stares blankly to the ground. The only person in good
spirits is his grandchild, crawling and babbling across the floor, one of 5,000
newborns that has never known another place but Zaatari.

When the camp was opened in the
summer of 2012, the Jordanians rather pragmatically named it after the nearest
town. But the name has come to represent the largest
refugee camp in Jordan, and no longer the small town with its mosque, air
force base, and world famous name. It appears placid and
insignificant next to the city that has emerged, in record time, right next to
it. Jordanian officials don’t like referring to Zaatari as a“city”; but you
could be forgiven for thinking it was. Only the massive steel beams of power
lines standing in the middle of the camp remind you that this is all a product
of improvisation.

Zaatari, may only have briefly been
the second largest camp in the world, but the most famous
of them all. Located just a 90-minute drive away from Jordan’s capital, Amman,
it has hosted a whole array of prominent visitors: politicians, musicians, actors
and kings, all have drifted in and out of Zaatari, shaking hands, caressing
heads, expressing their sympathy. Everyone has heard of it. But the camp’s
residents nevertheless feel forgotten by the world.

Anwar, a man in his mid-twenties,
has aged quickly. His voice sounds bitter when he talks between long drags
from his cigarette. He mentions desperate families and friends suffering from
cancer, that neither the United Nations nor the many aid organizations working
at Zaatari will treat.

Rajiv Raman. All rights reserved.But Zaatari isn’t devoid of hope,
quite to the contrary. Roam between the containers and you see glimpses of new
lives emerging. Left to their own devices, the residents have turned
improvisation into a form of art. Anwar, the chain-smoker, proudly shows off
the inner courtyard which he built for himself and his family by connecting two
adjacent containers with a piece of corrugated metal functioning as a roof. To
visit him, you have to duck your head and slip under a fragrant line of
freshly-laundered clothes while passing his washing room, which he built himself.

His dream, Anwar says, is to build
up a circus at Zaatari. Before the Syrian revolution, he used to work with some
of the French performers of the Cirque du Soleil. Now he trains a couple of dozen
kids at the camp, teaching them the backflip, somersault, and handstand. In the
rooms of a UN-supported woman’s project, the 6 to 9 year old refugees have concentrated
faces as they run, jump and land safely on a mat, high-fiving each other for
each successful trick. From the edges of the hall, their mothers carefully
watch them, with the expressions anyone who has ever invited their family
to an awards ceremony knows.

Only children who regularly attend
one of the camp’s schools are allowed to participate. Anwar has strict rules,
wanting to imbue the kids with values and teach them not to give up. It may be
a daily struggle for most of Zaatari’s residents, but many grow in their
attempts to retain control over their own lives despite the camp.

Rajiv Raman. All rights reserved.And so they open barber shops in the
middle of the desert, where they trim beards and cut hair. They open
restaurants, trade electronics and rent out bridal gowns. Through some
backchannel, an old gas stove and dough-roller have made it to the camp, and
now there is Syrian pizza sprinkled with tomatoes and cheese, as well as the
spices of a cuisine that is an integral aspect of national pride. Its smell
wafts through the air as baker Abu Mohammed turns on the gas knobs to skilfully
roast the flat pieces of dough. He takes orders on his cellphone, then sends
out one of the neighborhood boys on a rickety old men’s bike to deliver the
food. Thus, the residents of Zaatari bear witness to the human spirit, to the
will not just to survive but to actively improve our circumstances.

Statistically speaking, refugee
camps exist on
average for two decades. In 2012, when Zaatari was set up, it
was designed for five years, meaning that it should close at the end of next
year.

But neither the Jordanian officials
nor the refugees buy into that illusion. Anwar, Ahmed, Abu and the other
refugees have long since started turning the camp into their new home.

Chapter
2: the helpers

When the smurfs walk across Zaatari,
they get stopped at each street corner. People implore them to help, burden
them with their sorrows. “Smurfs” are the employees of the World Food Programme (WFP), the UN’s food
program, called that thanks to their blue uniforms. Jonathan Campbell is the
head of the Jordanian refugee program – effectively Papa Smurf – and has been
working at the camp for years. Cynics would say that he oversees the scarcity.

But Campbell is no cynic and should
he be frustrated, neither his handshake nor his well-mannered expression belie
it. He chooses his words diplomatically. Talks about “challenges” rather than
problems. Only sometimes does he emit a sigh.

“When I began working at Zaatari,
18,000 people lived here”, he recounts. “Shortly afterwards, that number went
up to 120,000.” Today, the WFP passes out 350,000 loaves of bread
every day – for the 100,000 Syrians in Zaatari and Azraq, the other large
Jordanian camp.

Campbell and his team follow the guidelines set by the United
Nation’s refugee commission, the UNHCR. Each refugee is entitled to 2100 calories and 20
litres of fresh
water a day. To put that into perspective: your average Austrian consumes 3800
calories and around 200 litres of water each day.

Rajiv Raman. All rights reserved.Supplying the camps is logistically
challenging, particularly when you bear in mind that Zaatari is located in a
desert and that Jordan counts among the driest countries in the
world. “Zaatari”, says Campbell, “works like a city. There are shops and
streets, and we are working on a sewage system.”

A visit to the two supermarkets
underlines his point: Tazweed and Safeway have both opened shops
in Zaatari and are said to sell more eggs here than in the rest of the
country combined. The markets are crowded with refugees, checking off shopping
lists, and pushing their carts through long, cool aisles past vegetables, milk
and yogurt.

It’s only at the cash register when
you see the difference. Instead of bills or coins, the shoppers hand over
credit cards. Each month, these cards are topped up with a certain amount that
each family is allotted. USD 28 is for the poorest of the poor. Those who still
have little resources themselves receive half of that. But even that modest
aid, amounting to less than a dollar a day, had to be reduced – and sometimes
suspended – during the summer. “We can only redistribute what states give us”,
sighs Campbell, finally. “It wasn’t until last fall, when the refugee crisis
started making headlines, that the situation has improved.”

There is much less hope inside the
waiting room of Dr. Jonathan Gootnan. People sit on squalid benches, holding
screaming babies, coughing and sneezing. Faces are skewed with pain, and
breaths rattle. “We have to make do with the bare minimum”, says Gootnan, a
volunteer from the United States. Behind him, your gaze falls on a bone saw and
some disinfectant. He claps a patient on the back, asks him to cough, and
listens through his stethoscope. He tells us that children especially suffer
from the fine particles of desert sand that accumulate in their little lungs.
That he and his colleagues have hundreds of patients to care for, and that they
are frequently forced to capitulate due to the circumstances. People at the
camp who get cancer have particularly slim chances.

“Syrians are extremely tough, but
even they can’t survive without the bare essentials”, summarizes Campbell.
“During the winter, it’s hard to cross the Mediterranean, but I fear that
Europe will see the next big wave of refugees come in spring.” With his words,
he also connects the Middle East and Europe, describing them as closer and
closer neighbors in an ever-globalizing world.

Anyone who can’t make it in Jordan
will seek their luck elsewhere. And refugees have hardly anything to lose. The
UNHCR estimates its yearly funding needs for the work in Jordan at USD 1.2 billion. By the end of February, just a little more than 60 percent of that amount had arrived. Considering that gap in per cent, the situation in Jordan is even more
dire than in the rest of the world, where the UN has calculated a
funding gap of USD 15 billion out of a total need of 40 billion for
humanitarian supplies.

Around two dozen aid organizations
nevertheless do what they can to make life at Zaatari as pleasant as possible.
They host projects for women, stage movie screenings, build kindergartens,
schools, mosques and even a soccer team. There is a palpable sense of gratitude
among the Syrians. Yes, they have been received well. Yes, the Jordanians are
good hosts. But at night, when the sun sets, the Americans, Britons, French,
Italians, Japanese and Germans get into their white trucks and drive back to
Amman. They leave behind the Syrians in their containers, surrounded by Jordanian
military posts, and it isn’t quite clear if they are watching or protecting the
refugees.

Rajiv Raman. All rights reserved.Despite all efforts, the situation
is dire. So dire that many Syrians pack their bags and leave the camp. In April
of 2013, Zaatari was home to more than 220,000 refugees, a number that went
down to 80,000 in a year – and a
trend set to continue. On the dusty circular
road surrounding the camp’s outer perimeter, you can see the occasional coach.
It shuttles people to the border. The early- morning lines to get on rival
those of the daily food distribution. Even though it isn’t even clear where the
journey ends. Some hope for a new life in their old homes, but for many Syria
is just the first stop on their long journey towards Europe.

Chapter
3: the hosts

If you take a taxi from Queen Alia
International Airport to Amman, look out of the window and talk to the driver,
you will learn two things. You will learn right from the get-go that there is a
difference between Jordanian and Palestinian Jordanians: “Oh, you’re from
Germany! I am a Palestinian Jordanian!” And you will see refugees, groups of
them standing or camping on the side of the road. Often with heavy baggage,
always in worn-out shoes. These observations are complementary, describing
past, present and future of Jordan; a country whose history is that of
migration.

Marij Al Hamam Park lies to the south
of the big city. Here, Lina spreads out a blanket on the grass. The air is
cooler, cleaner than it is in the city center, and there are less honking cars.
Lina wears a combination of white hijab and dark dress, covering her properly.
She has friendly, round eyes, from which she looks out just a little tensely.
Lina wants today to be a beautiful day. Not for herself, but for the Syrians
she has invited to the park. Bowls full of food stand ready, as always when
Jordanians get together. Lisa has brought make-up for the kids, hand puppets,
too. The crocodile is the children's favorite.

As she carefully paints a moustache
on a serious-looking girl, Lina recounts how she got started: “Two years ago,
friends told me about a pregnant Syrian woman, who was spending the winter in a
tent.” Even though Amman is in the desert, there is regular snow fall in its
higher areas. So Lina organized a flat for the homeless mother and her child.

The Jordanians have reason to be
proud of their hospitality, which they call
Nakhwa. Cab drivers, politicians, fruit vendors – nobody tires of
mentioning it. And when you go out with Jordanians, you can indeed leave your
wallet at home. Shame on the visitor who tries to pay his or her own bill,
shame on the dinner guest who eats less than three heaping plates of rice,
hummus, falafel and chicken. Just like Lina, many people give their everything
to ease the life of Syrians in their new home.

In the north, it’s even easier to
help, since many Syrians stay with their relatives south of the border. But
there are lots of helpers in Amman, where social ties are weaker, as there are
in any metropolis. You meet Jordanians who use their little spare time to
scrape together enough money for refugees’ surgeries, and others who spend
their weekends selling knitted or baked goods to get one or two people through
the winter. They are everyday Jordanians, who postpone their rent payment,
donate food, or watch kids while their parents try to make some money on a
day-job.

“I help refugees because I am one of
them”, explains Lina. “We are Jordanians with Palestinian roots, and just like
the Jordanians once helped us, we help today.” She refers to the roughly two
million Palestinians that live in Jordan according
to the UN, most are Jordanian citizens. According to unofficial estimates, Palestinians make up 70 per cent of
the total population.

But it isn’t just them or the
Syrians that have characterized the country. During the founding years,
Circassians, Armenians, and Chechnians came to help the young monarchy become
an economic success. Since the 1990s, hundreds of Iraqis came, fleeing
Saddam Hussein’s violent regime. By the end of 2014,
hosting 650,000 registered refugees from Syria alone gave Jordan the second-largest
refugee population in the world when set in relation to the size of the native
population – and even in absolute
numbers it comes in sixth. Jordan embodies the oft-quoted melting
pot of cultures. And coexistence isn’t always easy.

“Some people fear for their
identity”, says Daoud Kuttab and leans back into his heavy leather chair. The
journalist sits in an office decorated with thankyou letters, prizes,
certificates, and photos of himself with the country’s powerful elite. He is
the founder of the radio station Al Balad and has established Amman Net as a
platform for investigative journalism. His political commentary is sharply
worded and informed. He can afford to risk more than other journalists, and he
does. His team had just exposed corrupt civil servants for issuing coveted work
permits for around 20 euros. That’s no way to make friends among the
administration.

Kuttab also believes in Jordanian
hospitality, but doesn’t fail to mention conflicting identities. “There are
Jordanian nationalists”, he says, “that feel threatened by the immigrants.”
Kuttab calls theirs an "East Bank" identity, referring to the banks of the river
Jordan which separate the country from the Palestinian West Bank. “The
nationalists have never accepted that Jordan is a country for all of its
people, not just for a particular tribe.” The descendants of the Bedouin people form the bedrock
of today’s monarchy, they fill key positions in the military, police and secret
service. Career-conscious Palestinians therefore prefer to enter the private
sector. Speak to any Palestinian Jordanian and you can hear their frustration.
Bedouins, they say, are savages on camelbacks. Palestine, in contrast, is a
holy land, the cradle of Arab civilization.

With this conflict in mind, it’s no
wonder that the Syrian arrivals have to fight for their place in Jordan’s
multilayered society. “It’s a popular sport to blame any ills on the Syrians”,
says Kuttab.

Sometimes, the fears seem banal,
like the rumor that Syrian women, famed for their beauty and obedience, will
seduce Jordanian men – an analogous stereotype to the European fear that Arab
men will lure and abuse European girls.

“Some even blame the traffic
congestion in Amman on the refugees”, says Kuttab, shaking his head in
disbelief. “Some radio hosts incite their listeners by telling them that
migrants steal their jobs” – a claim Kuttab considers flat-out wrong. “Most
Syrians have no work permits and are forced to accept jobs most Jordanians
wouldn’t want” If anything, the refugees compete with Egyptian migrant workers,
he adds. And what about the claim that the Syrians are behind the hike in
rental prices? “That’s a short-sighted argument”, says Kuttab pointing out that
rising rents directly benefit the Jordanian home owners.

But the journalist has omitted a
sensitive question – has Jordan profited from its migrants? Kuttab believes it
has. Other people share his sentiment, but don’t want to be quoted. In
December, when the Jordanian Identity Center published the same finding in a
report, this sparked heated debate. Trying to answer that question hits on many
societal and political nerves; among them that Jordan is usually portrayed as a
victim of the war in Syria, a tale it uses to request massive financial aid
from the international community.

As with many complex economic
questions, it’s hard to arrive at a conclusive answer. Look no further than the
country’s GDP: according to the World Bank, the Jordanian economy steadily grew
by around eight percent per year before the war in Syria. Since 2010, that
indicator has fallen
to between two and three percent. While a UN-sponsored report of the Jordan
Resilience Fund assumes that it would have been twice as high
without refugees, critics argue that the statistics are skewed. Three percent,
they say, is an impressive number and only seems problematic when contrasted
with the unusually high growth of previous years. And the referenced growth
itself was the result of two previous waves of migrants from Iraq, one in the 1990s,
the other following the US-led invasion in 2003. Businessmen with cash-stuffed
suitcases fled to Amman and caused what is now remembered as “the golden
years”. It’s a delicate
argument, aimed not just at eliminating the fear of refugees, but also casting
them in the role of engine of economic growth.

It would be a mistake to expect
another economic miracle from the mostly poor Syrians. But the appeal of two
mayors illustrates their benefit to local communities. The two politicians from
Zaatari and Mafraq have rallied to help Syrians, to grant them the right
to stay and work. Kuttab has his own take.
Refugees need water, food, clothing, electricity, and a place to stay. The
Jordanians providing it are being paid – directly by the Syrians, by one of the
many aid organizations, or the United Nations. The World
Food Programme alone has invested more than USD 400 million in the local
economy.

No wonder a process of rethinking the
potential risks and benefits of the crisis takes place in Jordan.
During an international donor conference in London this February it was
announced that labour-intensive sectors might be opened to refugees and Syrians
will be allowed to work in Special
Economic Zones. Some weeks later, in March, the government announced
that up to 200,000 refugees will receive work permits. In exchange the
EU grants Jordan better access to the European market.

Refugees need help, but they are
also consumers. They need support, but they offer potential. Refugees, then,
aren’t dangerous or beneficial all by themselves. Mass migration is an
opportunity and a risk, both in Jordan and in Europe. The ultimate outcome
isn’t set in stone but something determined by society.

Chapter
4: the visionaries

Mass migration is an
opportunity and a risk, both in Jordan and in Europe. The ultimate outcome
isn’t set in stone but something determined by society.

Loay Malameh, 28 years old, has
just founded his second startup, and says things like this: “The Syrians aren’t
a problem, but an opportunity.” The Jordanian entrepreneur is in his office at
King Hussein Business Park, in the west of Amman. His neighbors are Microsoft,
Oracle, and Cisco. “We need to integrate the refugees into our economy rather
than use them for additional aid money”, he says. “There is so much potential”.

To harness it, Malmeh and his
American co-founder Dave Levin have bet on technology. Soldering irons, naked
wires, half-empty coffee cups and half a dozen devices about the size of a beer
crate fill the offices of their company Refugee Open Ware. The startup is a
public benefit subsidiary of the commercial firm 3D MENA, and its office looks like
the famed garages of Silicon Valley. The devices they build are 3D printers.
Instead of ink, they spray liquid plastic to construct, millimeter by
millimeter, any object you can think off.

“We are using technology to help
people”, says Malameh, pointing to a black hand prosthetic with movable
fingers. “Traditionally manufactured prosthetics are expensive. “This one”, he
demonstrates its moving joint and clasping fingers, “costs USD 75 and can even
be used to pick things up.”

But 3D printed limbs for the
thousands of Syrians injured in the war is only the beginning. Malameh and Levin
want to build a chain of open workshops where people – regardless of whether
they are Syrians or Jordanians – can work with this technology. They will teach
them how to program 3D printers or use laser cutters. “We want people to solve
their own problems instead of waiting for others to do it for them”, Malameh
explains. Their pilot project in Irbid, a city in northern Jordan, has received
several millions in EU funding.

For Kilian Kleinschmidt, a German,
it is projects like this that make “his third life” so exciting. Kleinschmidt is
in his mid-fifties, and his face has the color of someone who spends a lot of
time outside. He started out as a goat herder in France, then worked in
development aid in some of the world’s toughest regions, and now is an entrepreneur on a special mission.

Calling him a rock star of
development cooperation wouldn’t be completely wrong. The US magazine New
Yorker nicknamed Kleinschmidt „Major of Zaatari“, after the UN had asked
Kleinschmidt to lead the refugee camp in 2013. Mentioning this unofficial title
has a visceral effect among his former colleagues, who struggle not to roll
their eyes.

Kleinschmidt says things like: “We
call someone a refugee and then assume we know what they need.” His critique is
a full-on attack on the way the international community conducts development
aid, and Kleinschmidt wants to change the way of dealing with refugees in
general.

“The Syrians at Zaatari have demonstrated
that they want to make their own decisions. That’s why they built up their own
businesses – it’s their road back to individuality and towards their own
identity. A humanitarian system can’t provide that”, Kleinschmidt says and
recalls the conditions at the camp when he was hired. “It wasn’t love at first
or second sight. More like fifth. It was brutal. Journalists called the camp
‘the pit of hell’, and who could blame them? How can you love something
designed to hold people?”

The US Committee for Refugees and
Immigrants uses the term “refugee warehousing” to describe overburdened
governments that park the newly arrived in camps and cut them off from the rest
of society. The American NGO considers this a global, not just a Jordanian
problem: when migrants are deprived of basic rights like the freedom of
movement and work permits they will forever remain in a
state of dependency, the NGO criticizes. In turn, the resulting boredom and
desperation causes violence against anything and everything.

“When I arrived at Zaatari, the team
of UNHCR was completely intimidated”, Kleinschmidt remembers. “Cynicism was
rampant and motivation was low. Every day was stressful.” Visiting the camp
today, you no longer get that impression, and many people attribute that to
letting the refugees participate. “It is humiliating to be told, for weeks and
months, how to live and when and what to eat.” Kleinschmidt’s team decided to turn
the system on its head.

Instead of distributing food, they
established supermarkets where refugees were able to make their own decisions
about what to eat. When the living containers, neatly arranged by crane, were
moved, the team accepted it. And when there were problems, they made a point of
first listening to the refugees instead of calling the police. “People have
shown us how to transform a refugee camp into a refugee home”, says
Kleinschmidt.

Total number of refugees. Source: UNHCRNot everybody likes that
development. Azraq, the second largest camp in Jordan, is organized very
differently. Journalists aren’t as welcome there, and those who have been
describe it as Zaatari’s polar opposite: straight roads, no shops, and an artificial and dull atmosphere. “The officials want no second Zaatari”, a
long-time UN employee declares. And since every infrastructure project is a social
undertaking, the message to refugees seems clear: “Don’t make yourselves at home.”

Kleinschmidt no longer works at
Zaatari, but keeps working for its inhabitants. As founder of the Viennese
Innovation and Planning Agency, he wants to network global resources: “It’s
unacceptable that everything required for sustainable aid already exists, but
that it doesn’t reach the refugees”, he exclaims. Kleinschmidt wants his
company to operate between these different worlds. Refugee
camps are the cities of the future.

“Everyone can help turn refugee
camps into better places”, he insists. The goal is to bring knowledge and
resources to places where they do good. He has already persuaded the Amsterdam
water works to run a sewage treatment facility in Zaatari. And he inspires IT
stakeholders like IBM and Microsoft to leverage their knowledge about big data to
improve the camp’s logistics, while universities contribute tools of modern
education. With a nod to the 60 million refugees worldwide, Kleinschmidt notes
that refugee camps are the cities of the future. And not only that. They are
where integration efforts are put to the test, where it is determined whether
societies can truly provide a home for its newest members.

Many Jordanians think it is
possible. Travelling across their country, you meet founders, mayors,
journalists and volunteers, all united in their quest to make the best of the
situation. It would score as an early victory to start listening to them.

The original version of this piece in German was published by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung earlier this year.