* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Imagine hastily packing only the possessions you can carry on your back, then fleeing your home, unsure when, or if, you'll ever return.
Imagine dodging exploding bombs, rockets and sniper fire while witnessing your family and friends dying right in front of you.
Imagine crossing a dangerous border into a completely new country, your young children wrapped around your waist, afraid, cold, and exhausted.
This is the appalling reality for 80,000 Syrian refugees, forced to flee the civil war that has waged for close to four years, only to put their lives and futures on hold on the edge of the desert in Jordan's Za'atari refugee camp.
Think about it; that’s 80,000 individual human beings living in identical white metal containers with no jobs, no security, and very little hope for the future at present.
Across the country, another million Syrian refugees are sheltering in similar camps or living within increasingly-strained host communities, while a further 2.7 million have fled to Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon.
Make no mistake; Za'atari is not a place for children, many of whom will have been born here and may never know their homeland. As night falls, the camp becomes dangerous for the youngest and most vulnerable residents as groups of disillusioned young men gather on dark corners, an atmosphere of menace permeating every unlit street and pathway.
I caught a glimpse of a child with bright red hair. He looked very much like my cousin Jacob, who attends school in the UK, looks forward to drama and English classes, and loves playing football with his mates - all the things you’d expect an eight-year-old boy to do.
Not this red-haired young Syrian boy. He was buckled over a heavily laden wheelbarrow full of rocks, as he is every day while he lives in the camp.
The horrible truth is that many of the children in Za'atari have to work in order to survive. As heads of their households, since many fathers have not joined their families in Jordan, they're often the only ones able to earn a few Dinar, the local currency, to help support their mothers and siblings.
While Save the Children would rather that these young children not have to work for a living at all, we are forced to be pragmatists in a world where normal rules have been suspended.
Instead we run ‘drop in’ informal education centres for young boys who might be encouraged to return to schooling when, and if, the conflict abates, instead of ferrying boulders around in wheelbarrows for a pittance.
At the very least, we offer the boys a chance to be boys again, to play games like the sack race I entered (I lost by the way), and to give them a decent meal and respite from the brutal world of manual labour. We do this with the support of their ‘employers’.
None of this is ideal, but neither is fleeing your home to live in a dusty, dry field in the desert. It is a tough place to live, so Save the Children tries to do the best it can to improve the lot of children, little by little.
We also run kindergartens for smaller children. Young Syrian boys and girls learn the Arabic alphabet, plus basic arithmetic. Sadly, there are so many children in Za'atari that we can't get all of them into kindergarten. There is a long waiting list for places and, at the last count, we had just three kindergartens for the entire camp. Clearly we need to open more, but funding for education is scant in emergencies.
What amazed me most of all about Za'atari was a scale model of the refugee camp made by a group of very talented and creative young Syrian children.
Weeks in the making, it was constructed from cardboard, foil, and colourful paper and plastic. The attention to detail was staggering, they'd really thought about this model and poured lots of love into it - after all, it is now what many of them think of as home.
Cardboard buildings of our drop-in centres and kindergartens were painted bright red, some with tiny Save the Children logos stenciled on them. It was very impressive, not to mention extremely humbling.
Just imagine what these young minds would achieve back home in Syria, had huge swathes of their nation not have been reduced to rubble and dust. It will be many more years before the children of Za'atari can return home so, while they wait anxiously for that day to come, our 500 staff at the camp will continue to provide the support and care that they all so desperately need.
Now, imagine yourself and your children in their position. Not great is it?
So let's all be grateful for what we have in our lives.
