Syrians have come to Jordan because they speak the same language, have similar cultures and often relatives there, and because Jordan historically has taken in refugees—Palestinians, Iraqis and Kuwaitis have all fled there over the years. Sometimes they have even gone home again.

UNHCR doesn’t like camps. The money that is spent running their infrastructure is money that could be spent on more direct support to people living in their own homes. But as the towns and the cities and urban centers have filled up, with a thousand refugees coming in every night, men and women and children, camps have become a necessity. They had two weeks to open the first one, Zaatari—planned for five thousand people, it grew to hold its current population of one hundred thousand.

Before I came out here, I tried to imagine what a refugee camp would be like. It would consist of several rows of tents in a field. It would be dusty, of course, because the field was in Jordan, where it is dry, and it would be a big field, because there were a lot of refugees. I had not imagined cities. Where Azraq is a ghost city of white boxes in a flint and lava desert, Zaatari is an anarchic dusty city of tents and boxlike people-containers, in which every streetlight is covered with a wild spaghetti-tangle of wires, stealing electricity to light people’s homes, charge their phones and power televisions.

Kilian Kleinschmidt, the UNHCR camp manager who is mayor to this “city” of one hundred thousand, has resigned himself to an electricity bill of $500,000 a month, and now concentrates on putting in boxes on the lampposts that allow authorized electricians to access the power safely, and urging people to raise the wire tangles up off the ground during the rains. People move house in Zaatari by putting wheels on to repurposed fenceposts, lifting their houses onto them, and hauling them through the streets, while boys jump on and off, like a fairground ride.

I keep trying to work out how I got to Jordan. Things happen because they happen. UNHCR had noticed that when I retweeted their tweets and appeals, more people read them and acted on what they had read, so we spoke, and I linked to their sites, and read the links before I posted them. I volunteered to get more involved, and UNHCR offered to take me to a camp somewhere to show me what was happening. I agreed.

Coco Campbell from UNHCR had been to school with Georgina Chapman, the fashion designer. I wrote a short film that Georgina directed last year. Coco asked if I would find out if Georgina would be interested in coming with me to see the refugee camps and what UNHCR did, and create another storytelling project together. I asked her, and she was. Georgina brought her husband with her, film producer Harvey Weinstein, who is, in all ways, larger than life. In Azraq camp, Harvey surprises his people by wanting to be there with us and by paying absolute attention to Abu Hani and Yalda. He tells the UNHCR representatives that he wants to pay for the hearing aids their children need, now. They tell him it doesn’t quite work like that. There is a system in place and the children will get hearing aids.