"And we thank you, Mercy Corps. You're changing lives."

- OPRAH WINFREY, DECEMBER 2005

[ A CHILDREN'S STORY FROM JORDAN]

Smiles spread from ear to ear as the school-age girls called for the attention of their friends. For several hours, they frolicked on the playsets in the Zara Youth Park, a quiet greenspace set in a comfortable neighborhood in Amman, Jordan.

Iraqi boys and girls shared the playground with their Jordanian neighbors in a Mercy Corps-sponsored activity designed to help acclimate Iraqi children to their new home and to defuse tensions between refugees and their host communities. As many as one million Iraqis are believed to have fled across the border to Jordan, part of what has been called the Middle East's biggest displacement crisis in nearly 60 years. Activities like the one at Zara Youth Park are part of a larger Mercy Corps effort — aided by Jordan's largest nonprofit — to prepare 4,000 Iraqi kids either to attend Jordanian schools or to master academic and life skills through a non-formal educational curriculum.

"If you take children out of a situation and put them in a different, brighter one, there is a mental release, even for just one day," said Mahmoud, who helped facilitate the playground encounter between the Iraqi and Jordanian children.

One girl, Saba, said with a shy smile that she hadn't been to school in two years. Her father was kidnapped in Iraq and was returned only after his captors were paid ransom. "I am very happy today… this is the best day in a long time," she said. "It's pretty here, and it's so nice just to be playing together. I'm very happy."