Stranded in Syria

Super hard to see but there is a mountain range surrounding the city of Derik. We've barely seen it because of the rain and clouds but here you get a bit of a peek. 

Yeah….so….technically we’re stranded in Syria right now. Remember my post about the border crossing and how sketchy it seemed, with the river so high it was almost overflowing the pontoon bridge attached by cables to large rocks on the shore? Apparently that bridge broke on Saturday. Our colleagues were the last to cross before they shut it down for poor structural integrity. Or perhaps it really broke during the storm that night- we don’t know the details. It’s been broken, and thus the border closed, since late Saturday until Wednesday.  Which is not a big deal to us since we aren’t trying to leave- we have another day of training today and are scheduled to depart tomorrow to go back to Erbil. But it is a tiny bit eerie knowing that if we wanted to get out of Syria right now, we actually can’t. The Fish-Khabur crossing is the only one that we have permission to cross at, and our organization works with a very careful relationship with the local authorities. However, if there were a real emergency (and believe me, we’ve been through the scenarios because my Scottish colleague here with us is 5 months pregnant!), there are 2 other river borders down stream we could perhaps get special permission to cross at.  We also have an understanding in case of emergency with coalition forces- I’m not exactly sure how that works but I have visions of strapping young Frenchmen with fancy helicopters airlifting us to a posh military base in Iraq somewhere. Yeah right. We’re just here hanging out for as long as we need to, as there’s certainly no emergency here. Lucky for us, there’s a fresh bottle of Laphroaig.

It has, however, raised some issues about contingency planning for us, since we’re headed to Iraq to do the same training there, starting Monday. So we put into motion a call our to our team of, “Hey who wants to jump on a plane on Friday or Saturday and come to Iraq to do a training?”   Amazingly, we had several volunteers right away. I have the best team. The wicked high price tag for the flight quotes they got did make us thankful that for now it’s just a contingency plan until we know more. This border crossing is such a lifeline for commodity movement for the region, plus the 20+ INGOs working in the area (I think I heard that stat the other day) and all the people who are now 4+ days backed up and waiting on both sides. So we are pretty confident that they’ll get it open, at least by the weekend. We have three expat colleagues who live here who are going on leave and have flights Thursday night, but for Hanna and I, we just have to get to Erbil by Saturday when our other colleague LJ arrives (who will be co-training Iraq), or even Sunday would be fine. It has poured non-stop for days and days, pretty much since we arrived, and yesterday it was even hailing. It’s also been cold and damp. We’ve had several thunderstorms and really just hours and hours of high volume, pounding rain. Last night however, the rain stopped and the sun came out! So we’re hopeful. (of course today there was another thunderstorm so who knows). Everyone who lives here- Syrians and expats- keep raving about how gorgeous it is in the spring here, and it seems we’ll miss it by just about a week or two, when the expect the weather to start to turn around.