Inside the world’s first vaccine clinic housed in a refugee camp

They fled Syria, they’re living in shelters—but there’s vaccine for them, too.

As photographer Muhammed Muheisen captured this image from a helicopter, something struck him about the crowded landscape of prefabricated Zaatari camp shelters: Here and there, faintly visible among the dun-colored roofs, were small splotches of color. "As a photographer, I always look for colors," he says. "And looking down at these tiny matchbooks that are their homes, you start to see colors—some yellow, some red, some green." Each was a shelter an individual person or family had decided to paint, to make bright and special, so that a foreign refuge, however temporarily, might feel marginally more like a home.

Story and photographs byMuhammed Muheisen

April 23, 2021

7 min read

Zaatari refugee camp, Jordan — She was 110 years old, I heard, a Syrian refugee with an amazing attitude and sense of humor—and she had just been vaccinated against COVID-19, right inside her residence, a small shelter inside Jordan's Zaatari refugee settlement. When I found her, she was sitting upright, at peace, on top of her bed. Her name was Zahra. A refugee official showed me her ID. They hadn't factored in her most recent birthday: Zahra was 111. Born January 1910. Can you imagine? She's survived all the wars, she's fled the civil conflict in Syria, she's lost her husband, her new life is inside a refugee camp, a pandemic comes, and she's one of the first to get vaccinated?

There's a message of hope to this story.

Zaatari, which is about 10 miles from the Syrian border, has become one of the biggest refugee camps in the world. It was established in 2012, with support from Jordan and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as what was meant to be a temporary safe place for Syrians escaping their country's civil conflict. About 79,000 people now live there, and when I learned recently that Zaatari had opened its own COVID-19 vaccination center—the world's first such center to be located inside a refugee camp, according to UNHCR—I wanted to come see it with my own eyes.

It's not so simple, visiting Zaatari as an outsider. The camp is really a mid-sized city: neighborhoods, business districts, bridal shops, satellite dishes, solar power, pizza delivery. Entering has always required permission from the authorities, and Zaatari has also been in pandemic lockdown for months—health authorities have confirmed 2021 COVID-19 cases inside the camp, with 20 deaths. I'm Jordanian, born in Jerusalem, and for more than a decade I've been documenting the refugee crisis in different parts of the world. I'd seen Zaatari a few times over the years; I serve as a global ambassador for the Jordan Tourism Board, and in 2019 was able to fly over the camp in a helicopter and photograph its great sweep from above.

What struck me then, and again when I was able to watch a day of vaccination inside Zaatari in late March: Resilience. The human ability to adapt. Hope. Once the very oldest people had been vaccinated by mobile teams, a shuttle bus began collecting refugees from their various shelters and homes and bringing them to a camp health center now transformed into a COVID-19 vaccination clinic. People signed up in advance online, using their mobile phones. There are not so many computers inside the camp, but most of the refugees use or have access to cellphones. Younger relatives and friends offered signup help when needed.

The vaccinating team was all female, which was nice, a special comfort for the traditional women. And I was proud of Jordan, I have to say. All these people, who fled from war and were now facing a pandemic, were going to have another second chance.

Bicycles and donkey-pulled wagons are part of the Zaatari camp's improvised transportation system, carrying passengers and goods throughout the two-square-mile settlement. Refugees have built private donkey enclosures—and planted vegetable gardens—on their designated plots of desert land. The wire fence surrounds a central office for UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, which along with the Jordanian government co-manages the camp.

Inside Zaatari's new COVID-19 vaccination clinic, nurse Fatimah Ahmad gives Syrian refugees their second shots. The apparent frailty of 69-year-old Abdulkareem is deceptive; he pulled up to the clinic, and roared away afterward, on his motorbike. "I didn't believe in this until I saw the news, what the disease does to people," he said. "Then I was terrified."

Fully vaccinated after her second dose, 64-year-old Fatimah waits inside the Zaatari clinic shuttle for her ride back to the shelter where she now lives as a Syrian refugee. Older people, the first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, are greatly outnumbered at Zaatari; more than half the camp's current residents are under the age of 18.

Viewed from a helicopter in July 2019, the Zaatari refugee camp stretches toward the horizon. First set up with tents in 2012 as a temporary refuge for Syrians fleeing civil conflict at home, Zaatari has turned into the fourth largest city in Jordan—with small prefabricated shelter homes, private toilets, washing machines, solar power, recycling facilities, and a business district known locally as the "Champs-Élysées."

These refugees from the Syrian city of Daraa, where anti-government demonstrations began a decade ago, are now COVID-19 vaccinated residents of the Zaatari camp. Adnan, 58, left, and Samia, 76, right, after their second shots at the new inoculation clinic inside Zaatari.

A health worker runs a forehead temperature check on Fatimah, a 64-year-old Syrian refugee. Fatimah's next stop inside the clinic: the inoculation station, for a second dose of COVID-19 vaccine. As of this spring, the UN refugee agency that helps run Zaatari had confirmed 20 deaths among the camp's 79,000 residents.

At 111, Syrian refugee Zahra has lost much of her hearing but retains a nimble sense of humor; when photographer Muhammed Muheisen entered her tidy shelter in the company of a woman from the United Nations refugee agency, Zahra joked teasingly with both of them. Rather than ask her to board the shuttle to the camp's new COVID-19 vaccination clinic, health workers made two visits to Zahra's shelter to inoculate her inside her Zaatari home.

Muhammed Muheisen is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, a National Geographic photographer and founder of the Dutch non-profit organization Everyday Refugees Foundation. Since 2001 he has documented major events around the world, in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the USA. For over a decade he has been documenting the refugee crisis in different parts of the world.