 Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. So when I was in Jordan, we drove out from Amman one day to visit the Zaatari refugee camp just south of the Syrian border. Zaatari is currently home to about 80,000 refugees, most of whom are children. First, I met these three teenage boys who were taking a photography class taught by refugee volunteers. The youngest of them, 15-year-old Obai, told me he had dropped out of school to work, but was now taking the photography class because he missed learning. When I asked him about his biggest fear, he said, What worries me most is child labor. This generation will not be able to help Syria afterwards. We will become year by year more illiterate. I heard this again and again from parents and kids alike. The economic pressures on refugees are so immense that it's extremely difficult to keep kids in school. A problem made worse by the schools being woefully underfunded and overcrowded. Like, kids have to attend class in two shifts, so they only get a few hours of instruction per day, and each classroom often has over a hundred kids in it. I then met Ada's family. She lives with five of her kids in the camp, including twin five-year-olds who found Snapchat filters absolutely hilarious. When I asked Ada why she came to Jordan, she said, Very matter of factly, I want you to picture yourself sitting in your home and an explosive barrel falls on top of your roof, and after the fog is gone, you check your kids to see if they are alive, and you find pieces of flesh lying in your house, and you have to check to see if they are from your family. Of course, I can't picture that, not really. I mean, I can try to imagine the horrors of war, or the trauma of dislocation, but I don't really know what it's like to be a 13-year-old whose house gets bombed. I don't know what it's like to end up living in a single room with my mother and four of my siblings, attending overcrowded schools with a totally unfamiliar curriculum until dropping out to earn $3 a day. You can't imagine those things, but still, I think we need to know that they are real, and that this is happening. But it's not all that's happening, because Zotri is also teeming with vibrance and life. In the main marketplace, you can buy TVs and solar phone chargers, you can rent a wedding dress and get your bicycles and shoes fixed, there's a pizza restaurant that delivers, and the pizza is phenomenally good, like better than any delivered pizza in Indianapolis. People are complex, and their lives are complex, and again and again, I heard from refugees that among their biggest challenges is feeling dehumanized, feeling distrusted and disbelieved, and like much of the world sees them simply as objects to be pitied or feared. Later that day, I visited with a family whose 18-year-old daughter was about to begin university. Her father, Musa Muhammad, was immensely proud of his daughter's achievements. He told me that in Syria they'd lived in a two-story house, they'd had a car, now they had only the hope of their children's education. And when I asked him what he would say to people in the US and Europe, he answered, only that refugees are people, and that being a refugee does not distinguish me from any other human being. After saying goodbye to Musa Muhammad and his family, we went outside and I saw a flock of pigeons flying above me, and I thought, what an improbable moment of natural beauty. But then someone explained to me that kids train groups of pigeons like this one to fly in elaborate patterns. This beauty wasn't some accident of nature, it was a kid's expression of joy. We think this horror is unfortunate, but we can't fix it, it's human nature. We think we need to protect ourselves, however we define ourselves, even if it means treating them, however we define them, as less than fully human. We think, well, that's just the nature of things. But being in Zatri reminded me that human nature is not just some force acting upon me. Human nature is also something we are creating together, as we decide how to treat each other and the world we share. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.