A Visit from an MP

Well this week has been one of typical unpredictability and variety. Too much has happened this week for a single blog post, so I'll split it out over two or three of the coming weeks.

Last weekend we got a call from ECHO (the EU's humanitarian arm) asking us if we could host a British MP in our camp on Sunday. He was coming in under the radar over his weekend just to try and inform himself about the reality on the ground. So thankfully, unlike the visit we'd had a couple of weeks before from some high level EU delegates, this one came with no press and much less security. Because he was choosing to be low-profile, I'll keep him anonymous.

On Sunday we were at around 9,000 tents occupied in our camp. As the MP arrived, so did buses of newly displaced people from western Mosul so he saw first hand the state people are arriving in. We gave him a briefing in our office on-site, including going through maps of the camp layout with him, and explaining how we were coping with the surge in displacement that has happened over the last month. He quite clearly just could not believe what we and the other partners on the ground are dealing with. Our camp, when full, is actually not that much smaller than his constituency in terms of numbers of households and people. There's another camp next to it that has been extended to cope with the current surge in displacement which will be almost the size of ours again. Then the actual town is about the same size again. This guy just kept comparing things to his constituency and it was a stark reminder of this emergency. Our camp shares it's maternity delivery room (a portacabin) with the camp next door - that's a population of over 100,000 people using a single room. Similarly the pharmacy is shared for the same number of people. There's a single 'temporary learning space' (very, very basic school) in our camp, where about 50% of the population is under 18. It's no where near enough for the number of children.

After showing him the maps and chatting through it all, we went out to show him the camp, and to meet with a newly arrived family. We were welcomed in to this family's tent. They had arrived 48 hours before. There was an older lady lying on a mat who didn't get up to greet us. We settled down and the man of the family, who looked about 16 began to tell us their story. They are from western Mosul city. Their area is still under IS control, but the fighting was getting close and they were afraid. They were also struggling to find food. He told me his uncles had already been taken by IS and hadn't been seen for several months. He has a blind sister, and the family had to make the agonising decision to leave her behind with his father to take care of her. They knew they wouldn't be able to escape with her - she would have slowed them down too much. 'If they survive, it will at least mean that IS won't boobytrap our house as they retreat'. 

He said they left the house at night and slowly made their way out of their neighbourhood. They knew there were snipers around looking for people trying to escape. Sadly his mother was hit by a sniper as they fled. She was shot in her hip but after they did their best to bandage it they had to keep walking for another 3 hours. This was when the mother lying on the mat spoke up 'it was too late to turn back, they knew we were trying to leave, we would all have been shot if we tried to go back so I just had to keep going'.

They finally reached the mustering point which is where the Iraqi army receive those fleeing and the mother received some very basic medical treatment. It's a sign of the horrendous injuries people arrive at these points with, that a serious bullet wound to the hip on a fairly elderly lady was not considered critical enough for her to be sent to one of the field hospitals run by agencies like MSF. Instead they were moved to the screening site (where the family is checked against various terrorist databases) and then put on a bus to our camp. That process took a full day in which she received no treatment at all. Thankfully on arrival at the camp, my team responded to the medical need immediately and got her to the clinic for treatment.

This is one family. My team have been receiving between 300 and 400 families every 24 hours for the last couple of weeks, often in the middle of the night. People are arriving traumatised, with special needs like this, and the team have done an incredible job at responding to this.

Suffice to say, this MP honestly couldn't believe the magnitude of the situation. I think no matter what you hear on the news, nothing can prepare you for what you see on the ground. The construction of this camp started in November, it opened in December and on Wednesday this week we declared it full. That's 10,000 families taking refuge inside our fence. There have been so many obstacles along the way, and there's still construction going on, but it is a feat of logistics. The MP was so encouraging to my team - they are so used to seeing life like this, that I think his utter disbelief at what they have achieved was a real compliment to them - their heads were definitely being held a bit higher after his visit. So, no matter what I think of politics, I am grateful to this man for giving up his weekend to come and visit us; for taking the time to hear the real stories, to see the situation, for encouraging my teams and myself.

Blessed

This week has, to be frank, been fairly horrid. In my position, there are weeks when I feel like I am constantly having to face up to issues, problem solve for my teams in difficult circumstances. I am regularly having difficult conversations with senior members of other agencies, donors and local government staff. I have frequent internal issues to deal with, staff to challenge or defend. Difficult decisions to make. This week has felt like a treadmill of this kind of thing. For obvious reasons I can't list things here but I have had multiple internal and external conflicts to mediate. Believe it or not, I used to be someone who would avoid conflict to quite an extreme level. I think I still tend to be the peace-maker in my personal life, but I have had to learn to be assertive as a professional. I have had to learn that it's possible to be a woman of faith who is strong and feminine and a leader. And by the end of this week, I was being a complete girl and crying over the latest HR issue that crossed my desk and wondering if this was really the right job for me (don't worry - I'm over it already!)

But this weekend as I've been thinking about these issues of gender in the workplace, I have been thinking back to interviews I conducted in our Kirkuk office recently. One of the candidates was a lady who looked to be in her early 40s. During the course of the discussion, she talked about how she could apply for this role as she had chosen to stay single. Her siblings had married, her friends had married, but she had decided that should would prefer to remain single in order to be able to work and travel. To her this was a simple statement of fact. She knew that in her culture she had to make a choice, she couldn't have both a job and a family. She couldn't have a family and be free to travel. And that choice is not really an acceptable one to many people here. In our livelihoods interventions, including women requires real innovative thinking in order to find roles that are culturally acceptable.

I know that gender imbalance is still an issue in the UK. I know that I am in the minority being female working at this level; out of my agency's most senior managers in Iraq there are currently only 2 women out of 7, and as of about a month's time we'll be down to just me. I have had to bite my tongue when told I'm being over-sensitive - not something that I think many men are accused of when they are challenging decisions. However, the very reason that I have been able to pursue my career, with the blessing of my family, is that I was born and raised in a culture where it is acceptable and encouraged. Yet again, I am reaping the benefits of where I was born. When I have a tough week like this, I need to remember women like the one I interviewed; who have had to sacrifice so much to simply be able to choose to work. And the many others around the world who don't even have that freedom. I am in the incredibly privileged position of having an education, doing a job that for the most part I love, and being able to be financially independent. All with family and friends cheering me on. I am blessed indeed.

Perspective

Disclaimer: I am well aware that there are people living in real poverty in the UK, including in Surbiton. This post is not me being blind to that, or suggesting that a few pounds do not make a real difference to those people.

I had one of those times this week where my separate worlds collided with a great big emotional jolt.

I spent the early part of the week doing assessments of new areas for my teams to work in. In one town, the river runs through the middle. One side is ISIS, the other side has been re-taken from them. On the re-taken side every single family is hosting people displaced from the other bank. Every family is sharing the very little they have with another family, often with multiple families. And they are not complaining. They know what it is like to live under ISIS rule, and so when their neighbours risk their lives crossing the river under the cover of darkness to escape them, they open their homes to them without question. I sat on the floor in a house bare of furniture and listened to stories of ISIS torture, of escape, of return to the remains of property that had been looted by ISIS. It’s been 2 and a half years and yet I’m still shocked by the brutality of ISIS. I asked what conditions were believed to be like on the other side of the river. As we heard the bullets in the distance, they talked of how the people who had been smuggling food across to try and ease the suffering of those caught on the wrong side have been stopped by the military and so they are no longer able to provide that small assistance.

Later in the week, back in the office, I was reading a report on the conditions in Western Mosul. The army is making good progress to re-capture the city, but as they do so, the poorest neighbourhoods are facing siege-like conditions. Food is scarce, prices are rising daily, safe water is unavailable, and ISIS are going house to house carrying out 'inspections' where they take what little food people still have stored. It's a bleak picture, hard to read about; imagine how much harder to actually live in those conditions. Not only are you in fear for your life, but you also can't feed your children.

About an hour later I was on facebook and came across a video from Tescos in Surbiton (my old neck of the woods). They had done the daily price reductions and there was the most horrifying scrum for the bargains. Watching it, I just felt so sick. There's nothing wrong with a bargain. There's nothing wrong with avoiding food waste by reducing prices. But when people in Surbiton (one of the wealthiest parts of England, and therefore the world) are physically fighting over saving a few pounds, there is something very, very wrong with our perspectives.

I don't know what the answer to this is. This kind of sense of entitlement seems to be the poison of my generation. Where is the tipping point between enjoying the good things in life but not at the cost of other's? We can't, and shouldn't, live our lives in continual guilt about what we have because of where we were born. But we can live our lives intentionally informing ourselves about the circumstances others are facing because of where they were born. We can make decisions which go some way to re-balancing the world. We can choose to give our time, money, skills to make a difference to someone else. We each have to find that sweet spot where we live life to the full; but where part of that fullness of life is brought about by serving the needs of others, standing up against injustice, looking after this amazing planet, showing kindness and generosity.

Fasting from indifference, feasting on love

One of the things I have realised about working in the humanitarian sector is that I can quite easily drift in to ungenerosity. When you spend your days working to alleviate suffering, it's easy to end up feeling that this ticks off the generosity box in your life without even realising it. The reality is that personal generosity and kindness is a choice, it has to be intentional. And if I allow myself to think that my job covers it, then I am gravely mistaken.

This week, entering lent, I read this article summarizing Pope Francis' Lenten Address from 2015, it was so helpful for me; I clicked through and read the full address. So often people discuss what they will 'give up' for lent. I understand how this is helpful, and I don't want to disparage it at all, but it is quite an individualistic way of thinking. Instead Pope Francis encourages us to fast from indifference. As the article states 'whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God's voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades...we end up becoming incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own.'

Ouch.

How easy it is, to tick that 'compassion' box through my work and allow myself to think that there is no need for more kindness, more generosity. Or even, to go further, and allow myself to feel entitled to other people's kindness towards me because of the hard job I do. How easy it is to see our direct debits to charities or churches exiting our accounts each month and think we have it covered.

So this lent, I am following Pope Francis' advice and trying to fast from indifference beyond my job and my direct debits. The '40 Acts' movement is another wonderful way to do this - using lent to actively demonstrate kindness to those around us.

'When we fast from this indifference, we can begin to feast on love.'

If you would like to read the articles I'm referring to, they can be found here:

http://time.com/3714056/pope-francis-lent-2015-fasting/

and here:

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/lent/documents/papa-francesco_20141004_messaggio-quaresima2015.html