The Refugee Camp: Our Desert Home

What do a professional wrestler, a midwife, a baker, a wedding shop owner, one day-old twins and a teenage journalist have in common? They are all residents of a unique desert city in Jordan called Zaatari.

But Zaatari is no ordinary city - it’s a refugee camp and home to some 80,000 Syrians who have fled the bombs and bullets of Syria’s civil war. What was once a temporary camp has now become a city the size of Bath.

The Refugee Camp: Our Desert Home gets under the skin of this incredible and surprising metropolis - a place of huge logistical challenges and extraordinary human stories.

The presenters - Anita Rani (pictured) A&E Doctor Javid Abdelmoneim and hostile environment expert Ben Timberlake - immerse themselves in the life of the camp, reporting from behind the scenes and meeting the families who call Zaatari home.

Originally just a few hundred tents, it now has 24,000 homes with a busy shopping street, hospitals and schools and like any other city on earth, Zaatari has births, deaths, marriages and everything in between.

In this episode, Anita tackles the logistical feat of providing water in the middle of a desert, while Javid meets some of the children recovering from injuries of war and Ben does the bakery night shift to find out how 90,000 loaves are baked every day to feed the camp.

Anita and Javid are invited to a wedding, and with around half of the population in the camp under 18, Ben finds out how war has affected their education.

Publicity contact: BW