Personally, I love maps. So when I go places, I love pulling up the map and looking at where I am. With all the international travel I do, it’s also really hard to keep an imprint of the entire globe memorized in your brain. So I need maps. :) I pulled up a few screenshots of some maps here so you can see where we are in Syria and where we are in relation to Erbil as well. And where we are in relation to other countries, and where the conflict currently is. It did occur to me that I’m disclosing location information (and driving routes) publicly, but I got permission from our security officer to write this blog in the first place. (I don’t exactly have a big blog following anyway…) He said that we are well known to be working in this part of Syria- we are the only international NGO working in the entire North East region, and there are only a handful of other INGOs working here at all. We’ve also been here since the beginning of the conflict. We do try to keep a low profile, but in general we have really strong working relationships with all the local players around here.
We are not, however, working in the government-controlled areas of Syria, and are managing this program out of Iraq and Amman currently, plus our offices in North East Syria. Although I’m 3-400 miles away from the conflict areas, we do have 4 other offices in towns with guest houses also (which we have for expat staff who live and work there) and we are providing both immediate need assistance, and longer-term recovery assistance in many of the areas just outside of the active conflict. Today I said goodbye to Corine, a Lebanese woman who was staying in the guest house with us this weekend and we had a lot of fun cooking and eating a big dinner with last night. She’s headed to Kobani and will be working outside of Raqqa, which are much, much closer to the front lines and therefore riskier. But she’s doing important work- training local Syrian partner organizations- like small local community groups - on how to deliver aid, how to manage it, and measure its effectiveness. It’s a tough job because their capacity is low and many of these local organizations aren’t used to working with the international standards for quality that we expect. This model has, however, been very effective in other areas since it’s more sustainable in the long run, and it can multiply how many people we can reach, much more quickly than our own direct implementation only.
I happen to have read a program summary document today for one of the programs in our portfolio, funded by the French Government. I was taken aback to read that the city of Raqqa was at least 80% destroyed by the conflict, and then I did a google maps search of photos and found before and after photos of the same areas, and it really is shocking. Corine says the photos of Aleppo are even worse- imagine having an entire city pretty much bombed to the ground. Not only is it terribly tragic for the people who lived there, it’s also such a huge waste of beautiful development and a massive, wasted cost to eventually rebuild it. They bomb out the water supply systems for example, and then we rebuild them, using international aid money from a whole number of countries donors. Sometimes it just seems short-sighted when better diplomacy might have prevented all of this- or should have anyway. Syria was, in fact, a relatively well developed country before the war- I know a lot of people who lived and worked there previously and raved about it. Mostly the work we’re doing here is relief distributions to IDPs and host families, plus reconstruction of some basic infrastructure such as minor water supply systems and irrigation channels. We are also working with farmers and small businesses to try to restart the economy and give people a sense of self-sufficiency. Not only has the physical infrastructure been destroyed, but much of the economic and commercial infrastructure, which also affects people living in other parts of the country.
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