Tijuana, Mexico

Somalian Refugees

It's not in the media anymore, the news has ADD, but Somalian refugees are still in critical condition. Just because it's not on our television screens or internet news-sites, doesn't mean the problem's been solved or alleviated. They're still starving.

Just a dream

I had a dream last night that I woke up from in panic.

My family had been evicted from our home and almost all our stuff had to be left behind. Our couches, the blender, my bed, camera, computer, books, ipod, pillows, family photos, all the non-essentials couldn't come along. We had to carry what we could out of the house in bundles; limited necessities for basic survival. Then we left. In my dream I glanced back at the house of my childhood...aching.

We moved into a metal boxcar in a dump. Surrounded by the city's garbage, we decorated the corrugated walls of our boxcar with colorful electrical wire from discarded computers. We slept on the floor, ate what we could find, and we reeked of garbage. But we had each other, we had a few possessions, and we had a roof over our heads. When it rained, we'd watch the brown, contaminated water gush by, but we safely out of it.

We lived in our boxcar in the dump for months. How many, I don't know. But one day, we came back from collecting food and working in the city's outskirts to find a bulldozer ferociously tearing apart our metal home. It's huge claw dug into the side, crumpling the walls like paper and ripping apart the welded seams. As it flattened our boxcar, my little brother, trapped inside, screamed. We had to watch as it leveled our home and after an eternity, the bulldozer rumbled away leaving a pile of ruble. Running over, we found everything destroyed and my brother crushed beneath the heavy metal. My world was gone, my home destroyed, and my brother dead. Everything was lost and all I owned were the clothes I wore. I was terrified.

And then I woke up.

I lay in my safe, San Diego bed, completely anguished and devastated. It took me a couple moments to realize it had been a dream.

It took me even longer to realize: they can't wake up.

It must be possible to quicken rebuilding efforts and lessen their pain. There need to be policies established streamlining reconstruction efforts and relief work. UNHabitat works towards this, yes, but it's tangled in international bureaucracy and politics. There shouldn't be paperwork when peoples' lives have been destroyed. There shouldn't be superfluous regulations delaying aid when people have lost everything. There must be ways to coordinate relief efforts in order to help those in need within hours or days. It shouldn't be months. It shouldn't require thousands of deaths before the media's attention is finally garnered. It shouldn't require disease outbreaks or civil wars over basic resources to get the international community's assistance.

These people can't wake up, but we can. There's got to be a way to narrow that gap.

Pablat

His lips were tightly pursed as his callused fingers gripped the pencil. His brow furrowed in concentration as he slowly wrote the letter "s". It was curvy and difficult and in his intense effort the pencil slipped, leaving a dark, jagged streak on the notepaper. Rows and rows of large, shaky letters lined the paper. He'd been practicing the alphabet for near three hours; his dedication a combination of pride and determination. He grumbled in Burmese as he erased his fumbled "s", frustrated at himself and the stubborn curvy letter.

I quietly watched him as he worked. A Karen refugee in his mid-60s, Pablat has seen pain; his scarred hands and premature wrinkles bear testimony to it. CNN dubbed the conflict in Burma a "forgotten story", yet the civil war there has continued since WWII, making it the longest-running armed conflict in the world. Hundreds of thousands of Karen have been forced from their homes, most have lived in refugee camps their entire lives. A lucky few are allowed to relocate to the US; Pablat to San Diego. As a branch of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), we offer english classes to refugees like Pablat and on Monday our little classroom was crammed with 67 refugees. The room quickly filled with Burmese, Somalian, and Iraqi chatter, but silenced as soon as the teacher began to speak. They are dedicated and eager to learn; the room quiets as 67 pencils begin to write.

Completely illiterate, Pablat's never held a pencil in his life. The learning curve is daunting at best. We work through the alphabet one letter at a time and I realize 26 is a lot of letters. I am suddenly aware of how difficult our language can be, our letters look and sound the same to the struggling learner. I realize how confusingly similar "b", "d", "p", "c", "e", "g" are and explaining the difference between "m" and "n" results in exasperation on both sides.

We work on the alphabet for hours and he slowly fills numerous sheets with the letters. He's determined to know their names too; he stops every couple minutes to recite the alphabet, one foreign letter at a time. For a change in pace, I write his name on the top of his paper. P-a-b-l-a-t. I slowly say each letter as I write. I point at the word, point at him; "Pablat". It takes a second, but he suddenly realizes what the word means and his eyes fill with tears. He beams as he takes my pencil and traces the word, whispering his name. He writes his name for the first time and we're both speechless; it's an incredible, beautiful moment.

Totally worth the countless hours more.

"Suffering is never just pure suffering..."

"In the dim reaches of misery, insomnia is a constant companion, especially when twenty-first-century people die of nineteenth-century-afflictions..." -Paul Farmer, Haiti; After the Earthquake

When I was in Jamaica, I held children dying of preventable diseases. I watched the elderly struggle to breathe when, had they been in the US, their symptoms could have been relieved in minutes. The level of poverty, neglect, and medical inadequacy was heartbreaking and I was overwhelmed by my inability to make a difference. How can you fight against a longstanding lack of investment in medical infrastructure and training? How can you fight to save lives when proper supplies are simply non-existant?

As desperate as the need is in Jamaica, I know communities around the world suffer far worse. Even my finite knowledge of the social, economic, and medical devastation Haitians still suffer since the horrific earthquake in 2010 is staggering. Right now, over 200,000 Pakistanis are in urgent need of shelter and attention as massive floods ravage their homes and lands. As we speak, Somalia is enduring one of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today; twenty years of conflict and drought have uprooted over a quarter of the country's 7.5 million people.

Millions of people are suffering worldwide, and yet, as Paul Farmer recounts in his book Haiti: After the Earthquake, "Everyone wanted to help, but no-one knew exactly what to do. We wanted to be rescued by expertise, but we never were...[We were surrounded] by arguments and competition between different dispensers of 'disaster relief" over the privilege of looking after people who had long been neglected."

It's difficult to accept the awful reality that 1) there is very little coordination between NGOs and humanitarian organizations and 2) life-saving aid is often prevented by tangles of bureaucratic red tape, governments paranoid about protecting their sovereignty, or leaders resisting any semblance of Western imperialism. Governments refuse international aid to thousands of internally displaced people within their borders or allow millions to starve as they look the other way.

The question can not be "why?", but rather "what can be done?". Maybe I'm naive and idealistic, but there has to be a way to prevent the unnecessary loss of lives...especially on such massive scales as we are currently seeing. What will it take? What needs to be done? How can this be tackled? I don't have the answers. I don't know how any potential solution could possibly work. It feels hopeless. But we were born here and not there for a reason. We are not Somalian or Pakistani or Haitian or Sudanese for a reason. We might not know the answer yet, but that doesn't lessen the significance of the search. We live privileged lives; a blessing that comes with much responsibility.

We can't forget that.

Kisses from Katie

"My self doesn't want to be starving, and so I don't want other people in the world to be starving."

"Jesus does not ask that we care for the less fortunate, He demands it."

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."