In despair? Come along and meet the good guys at a refugee camp

A small group of volunteers walks in a snaking line along a narrow brambly path thick with litter and dotted with human poo.

Each carries a few heavy plastic bags, the contents of which are identical — cooking oil, tins of food, salt, sugar, and other super-basic food items. In a clearing is a collection of tents and tarpaulins, battered from awful weather. No sanitation, no standpipe. Nothing. The volunteers distribute the food bags, which the men who live here will attempt to cook on tiny inadequate camping stoves. When they run out of gas, they can’t cook at all.

The men smile and say thank you in English. They are Iraqi Kurds. “From Isis,” one of them says, deadpan. That this man can joke about being a terrorist while living in a pit of sodden gale-blown filth, forced from his home by these very same terrorists, says much about his enduring sense of humour. That the region to which he has run for safety has provided him with nothing more than walls of barbed wire says much about our enduring inhumanity.