Market Rises at Zaatari Camp for Syrian Refugees Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times A tent shop in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. ZAATARI, Jordan - Maintaining a glimmer of hope and humor amid grim surroundings, Noor Ibrahim calls his wares "Eau de Liberty." He stands ready to mix scents like "Red Angel" or "Night of Love" into spray bottles arrayed on a tray set atop an overturned garbage can between the endless rows of dusty tents here. He said he was making $8 to $14 a day. Selling perfume? In a refugee camp full of Syrians who had fled their country's civil war? "People like to have a good scent in front of people in any culture," said Mr. Ibrahim, 30. There is no real hygiene here. Everybody smells. Sometimes, they spray their tent. The little perfumeria is part of a makeshift marketplace that has sprung up here in recent days as the thousands who have fled here, mostly from Dara'a, the city where the uprising began, are beginning to come to terms with their new reality: that the war at home is not about to end anytime soon, and that they will probably live in this camp for months, not days or weeks. Beyond the market, the refugees have also elected several camp councils to mediate disputes and negotiate with the authorities and aid agencies. Several hundred men are employed by the camp, earning about $10 for six-hour shifts digging trenches or distributing supplies. There are at least three coffee shops where people can smoke the ubiquitous water pipes, called shisha, and a brand-new falafel stand inside a tent. The nascent marketplace spreads out along the main road through the camp, which the Syrians call Hamra Street, after a shopping strip in the heart of Damascus. Fruit and vegetable stands allow those with pocket change to supplement dry food rations. Piles of used clothes are being picked over as people prepare for winter. A minimart offers small bags of fresh cumin and chili pepper alongside lollipops and lighters. Cigarette stands, of course. Cellphone cards. And several deep fryers popping out awameh, spheres of doughnut-like delights that can be had for a single piaster, or about a penny and a half. Zemur Reda, 40, a mother of five, picked up a pair of checked Vans slip-on sneakers, vintage 1990-something, for about $2 on Monday afternoon. "For my son; he's barefoot," Ms. Reda said. My kids keep on losing their clothes, so I have to go and buy. A man bought his 9-year-old son, Khaled, a black jacket with a fur-lined hood for about $10 as the sun fell. The little boutique - really, piles of worn garments lined up on the side of the road - is run by Yasser Mekdad, 23, who pays about $5 per day to two employees, one of whom lost a leg in the recent fighting. A woman rejected a pair of pink sweat pants, and Mr. Mekdad nodded in understanding. "In Syria, I wouldn't accept them as a desk cloth," he said. Now desperation makes us wear these things. We're turning into beggars. The refugee entrepreneurs procure their products from Jordanians who visit daily, sometimes investing savings they brought, sometimes making deals on credit. Beyond filling refugees" needs, the kiosks give idle men something to do after weeks of watching the sand swirl around the tents and commiserating about the deteriorating situation back home. "This is what happens when you get tens of thousands of people together: an economy starts developing," said Andrew Harper, who as the representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan essentially runs the Zaatari camp. What we need to work on is getting the sense of community back, the sense of responsibility back, getting people occupied. The 214,000 Syrians who Mr. Harper says have landed in Jordan - more than 80 percent of them settling outside the camp - are just the latest surge of refugees to challenge the capacity of a country where jobs and water are scarce, and the politics fraught. An estimated 800,000 Iraqis fled to Jordan in the middle of the last decade, though many have since left, and Palestinians, who poured in when Israel became a state in 1948 and again after it occupied the West Bank in 1967, make up a majority of Jordan's population of six million. The influx from Dara'a, just over the border, remains steady but has slowed since the summer, when 3,500 people crossed in one 24-hour period. On Monday night, 522 people arrived, including 44 babies, the youngest only 2 days old, and an 18-month-old whose parents had been killed in the fighting. Last week there was a 90-year-old woman. "The most vulnerable are coming across," Mr. Harper said. Ranya Kadri contributed reporting.