There are two Champs-Élysées in the world. One is in Paris. It's filled with movie theaters, boutiques, markets, and fantastic restaurants. Two months ago, I found myself walking down the other Champs-Élysées, nicknamed by aid workers, in the middle of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Zaatari is a ramshackle city of tents and containers, home to about 120,000 Syrian refugees. The streets of this Champs-Élysées are lined with makeshift stores. Where the walkways of its Parisian namesake are bordered by ethereal street lamps, here electricity is jimmy-rigged and borrowed from street lamps. It was incredible to see an improvised pizza-delivery place, a wedding-dress-rental shop, and, my personal favorite, a baklava bakery.

The bakery was run by a family of mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and grandchildren, and overseen by several brothers. They had survived the atrocities across the border. They each had unimaginable stories of heartbreak—their houses had been blown up, they saw men shot right in front of them, mid-sentence, mid-conversation. What’s more, the people who pulled the trigger could equally have been from any side. They not only survived, but also endured to re-create their bakery to feed their fellow refugees. Their pride in their desserts was as tangible as a sculptor’s in his creation.

Their generosity was unparalleled. Every time I tried to pay for something, a hand would slap me away. “What, are you trying to insult us? Eat. Enjoy.” Whenever I hear someone say “Eat. Enjoy,” it reminds me of the way my grandmother spoke to me. It reminds me that we are all the same. We are family.

By Jordi Matas/UNHCR.

I came to Zaatari and Jordan to accompany the writer Neil Gaiman and my wife, Georgina Chapman, who, together, had been invited by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.) to create a storytelling project about the plight of the Syrian refugees who had flooded into Jordan.

I met with Queen Rania and asked her why Jordan was so generous with its refugee policy. According to the queen, there are now about 1.3 million Syrians in her country; 630,000 of them are registered as refugees. She said that her husband, King Abdullah II, on seeing women and children fleeing danger, felt that there was really no decision to make, it was the right thing to do, and Jordan will always do the right thing. As a father, a leader, and a humanitarian, King Abdullah II opened his doors. This is not something we would allow in our country, or in England. Not on this scale, when the burden on the country’s infrastructure and services is almost crippling. It is the sacrifice of the Jordanian people, and those in Syria’s other neighboring countries—Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon—that allows for the survival of the Syrian refugees.