'I don’t cry until I leave the tent': Author Neil Gaiman visits Syrian refugee camps in Jordan

More than 2.8million Syrians have fled their homes since the violent conflict began. Refugees have spilled over the country's borders into Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and further afield. In Jordan alone there are 600,000 displaced persons - 100,000 of whom live in the Zaatari refugee camp.

In May 2014 Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of 'Stardust', visited the refugee camp. On World Refugee Day, the writer reveals his heart-breaking story.

Ayman's wife bakes the best fig rolls I've ever tasted. They are small, and she gives them to us in abundance as we arrive. I never get over my surprise, joy and puzzlement over the generosity of the people in Zaatari camp: if they have nothing, they still give us sweet tea, and there's olives and hummus and pitta bread. In Zaatari refugee camp, in Jordan, 400,000 pieces of pitta bread are given out to Syrian refugees every morning. But that's only four pieces for each person in the camp, and I always feel torn between not wishing to refuse their generosity, and knowing that I'm consuming something they need.

[Neil Gaiman reveals trip to Syrian refugee camp 'broke him in pieces']

They call Ayman ‘doctor’, and he prides himself on his bedside manner. In Syria, he was a medical lab technician, and then, when the fighting started, he became a doctor in a field hospital. Now he, with his smiling wife and his four little children, is a refugee. He works a full day as a camp community mobiliser, comes home to his container called a ‘caravan’ (a box-like white space with mattresses on the floor, a one-room living space that will become a sleeping place at night), gets his medical supplies bag, and sets off on his rounds.

He explains his day to me. “I travel from tent to tent, caravan to caravan, performing minor surgeries to remove shrapnel that has been embedded in people – adults and children – for quite some time and needs to be extracted.  Also dressing wounds and things like that.  A lot of these people are unable to get to hospitals or health centres so I go to them.  I don’t get paid for this work, I just want to support the people.  I will help any person inside Zaatari – it doesn’t matter about money or religion or anything else.  Sometimes people I treat will give me medicines and bandages instead of money which is good as I can use it on other cases.”

The supplies in his medical bag are all donations from people who he has helped, or who got out of Syria with them, or who had something they did not need: he has painkillers and bandages and saline, ointments, hypodermics and gauze.

[Syrian refugee Mohamed dreams of reuniting with his six children]

He takes me on his rounds: tonight he's changing dressings. I meet a 22 year old youth who stepped on a landmine in Syria. He's missing a foot, and I find it hard to figure out what I'm looking at as the dressing comes off, and I realise the thing I thought was a heel is a bone, sticking out. Ayman has been coming to him every two days for over six months, changing the dressing. In the early days, it was all pus. Now it's healing.

Then we go to see Rania: she's only eleven. The mortar attack back in Syria that killed her father destroyed a third of her jawbone and the bone in her upper right arm. Metal rods keep her smashed bones in place. She's living in a tent with her five sisters and her mother, a tiny space for seven people to live. Three teddy bears sit on the pile of mattresses that will come out that night.

I watch as Ayman removes the old dressing, cleans the flesh wounds. Rania manages to smile and tells us she loved her school in Syria, wishes she could go to school again. She wants to go home. My translator starts to cry, and has to pull herself together, for Rania. I don't cry until Ayman and I have left the tent.

Ayman tells us Rania needs further surgery, although he does not know if she will get it, and in the meantime he will keep her wounds clean and free of infection.

Ayman sees up to seven people like this every evening, to change their dressings or perform small surgeries. The people look forward to his visits. He's running out of medical supplies in his bag. Yesterday a woman came to his container with tonsillitis, in pain. He had no paracetamol, so gave her some of his daughter's paracetamol. More than anything, he hates to see people in pain.

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Ayman's only immediate regret – other than needing more medical supplies – is that although his wife cooks for him, he does not have time for dinner, and when he gets home each night he is too tired to eat. He has lost 18kg in the last year. “I can't stop to eat when I know people need my help,” he tells me, and in Zaatari camp people always need Ayman's help.

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