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.
No comments:
Post a Comment