It’s an early November afternoon and four teenage girls sit together in the back of a classroom in the Za’atari Refugee Camp in Jordan. They’re wearing silk patterned shirts with ripped jeans, leopard-print hijabs, and shoes that look like TOMS. You can hear some bass through the wall, coming from the Zumba class in the gym next door. A few boys scurry past the doorway, across the sunny courtyard to the soccer field. Inside, the girls are whispering, laughing, and sipping cans of Pepsi while waiting for class to begin. They’re here for a weeklong photography class run by the Lens on Life Project, a New York City–based nonprofit organization providing photography and computer literacy training for marginalized youth around the world, where they strive to engage local communities, empower youth, and sustain settings in which students can share their stories and gain new skills to enter the global workplace.
The kids will eventually leave this class and return to endless rows of white trailers by the thousands. These caravan homes make up the camp, miles from the girls’ homes in Syria, on the Jordanian side of the border. During their teen years, a period in life rife with the complexities of self-identity and growing up, they also deal with the concept of redefining your home and what it means to be labelled a refugee and raised in a refugee camp.
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The following images are a selection of student work from the Za’atari camp.
