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"Next
time you drink a clean glass of water, say
a prayer for those who cannot afford it,”
Roshan Kumarasamy says calmly. His smile
is surprisingly gentle considering the
seriousness of the subject matter. His
story is about refugees and the efforts
done to help their survival.
In 1971, in Paris, a
small group of doctors and journalists,
sharing the belief that access to medical
care is a universal right not be hampered
by social, cultural, political, or
religious differences, founded Medecins
Sans Frontieres (MSF). Now, thirty-two
years later, MSF is the world’s largest
independent international medical relief
organization, providing assistance to
populations in more than 80 countries,
including Palestine, Afghanistan, and most
recently – Iraq.
With five operational
centers and fourteen national sections
worldwide, MSF assists people in crisis
situations such as war, famine, epidemics,
and natural disasters. Each year more than
3,000 MSF personnel, joined by some 15,000
locally hired staff, step in to provide
shelter for refugees and internally
displaced persons, to treat civilian war
casualties, to feed the malnourished, and
to establish hospitals and clinics in
areas where medical infrastructure was
previously lacking.
For eight years now MSF has
been present in the UAE. Established under
the patronage of H. H. Sheikh Nahayan Bin
Mabarak Al Nahayan, the organisation’s
local branch aims to raise public
awareness of the plight of populations
affected by natural or man-made disasters,
as well as to gather funds for the various
MSF missions around the globe.
Last month the MSF logo was
present at Dubai Shopping Festival’s
Global Village. There were no stages with
popular singers and dancers on the MSF
site. In sharp contrast to the
extravaganza of colour and sound all
around it, it was very quiet and consisted
of just a set of white tents. The people
exiting the site were not carrying
shopping bags filled with exotic goods,
but had a rather pensive look. The set of
white tents were a mock refugee camp, set
up by MSF. In an attempt to raise
awareness of the plight of some 37 million
refugees throughout the world, volunteers
were leading visitors around the exhibit,
explaining how survival is organized in an
emergency situation.
“Let us pretend from now on
that we are all refugees,” says Roshan to
his tour group. The group – a class of
boys – fifth graders from Delta English
School in Sharjah, listens with a silence
atypical for boys so young. Roshan, as I
am to learn later, started off with MSF in
1994 in his native Sri Lanka, where he
spent four and a half years working as a
logistician in Colombo.
Roshan’s story starts like
this: “Imagine the following situation -
you go to sleep and suddenly at about one
or two o’clock in the morning you hear a
strong noise and everything around you
explodes. You panic and start running
without even picking up you luggage. If
you are lucky, you might flee with your
family. Thousands of people are running
with you, and you run for a month, or two
month, or even a year. Finally you get to
a place where you feel safe, you settle
down and this would be the start of a
refugee camp.”
Once the location of the
camp is established, the main priority is
the building of shelters for the refugees.
MSF personnel counts the number of people
in what would be the refugee camp and
provides registration cards to everybody.
“From now on this is your passport,” says
Roshan as he gives out model registration
cards to the kids, “You have to carry the
card with you all the time and need to
present it when you are receiving water,
food, medicines, and anything else that
you might need.”
Roshan then leads the group
in front of a medium-sized tent, which, he
says, at refugee camps shelters between
ten and fifteen people. “You can consider
yourself extremely lucky if you get into
one of these, since this is five-star
accommodation,” he says and urges the kids
to all enter the tent. As the boys all
silently get inside, he zips up the tent,
saying: “Try to figure out a way so that
all of you would be able to get some
comfortable sleep.” An aluminum can and a
plate, a cooking pot, some cans and some
plastic boxes for food storage, as well as
a lamp, a mat, and some blankets – these
are the household utilities each refugee
is entitled to.
The whole group is now in
front of a model water tap, with one such
tap providing water for every 250 people
in a camp. A refugee is entitled a gallon
of drinking water per day, while a person
living in the UAE uses an average of 100
gallons of water daily. Access to water is
not free, and people often have to queue
for up to 15 hours to get their gallon of
water, Roshan says. Getting food and
medicines also involves 15-hour waits. The
situation is better in the more
established camps. Since some of them have
been around for as long as 20 years, they
have more facilities including showers,
which are freely available. “But here is
the sad part – why do you have to live in
a refugee camp for 20 years,” Roshan
asks.
The group is now in
front of a model medical centre. War and
persecution take their toll on the
refugees, weakening their immune systems
and making them vulnerable to many
illnesses. The sanitary challenges of a
refugee camp, which is often overcrowded
and with no running water, can easily turn
individual cases of sickness into epidemic
outbursts. Cholera is a major threat since
it spreads very quickly and there is no
vaccine against it. “We would have up to
35,000 cholera patients in just a day and
a half,” Roshan says. While cholera is not
deadly it annually kills an average of
800,000 people who do not have access to
medical help nor clean water.
It is now time for the boys
to leave, and they go away quietly,
looking at Roshan with respect. Having in
mind his success with the children, I am
not surprised to learn he is completing
his studies in the US and will soon have a
degree in psychology. After graduation he
would join MSF again, working with
traumatized children in refugee camps.
Roshan explains his decision
by saying that the most painful aspect of
being a refugee is psychological. People
are uncertain about their future and
stripped of all dignity. Having witnessed
violence and destruction at an early age,
children are among those most severely
affected. “I have seen children being
recruited as suicide bombers just like
this,” Roshan concludes.
Fady Joudah, who joined MSF
as a doctor in Zambia in 2001, also says
the psychological burden of being a
refugee is much heavier than the poor life
conditions one has to put up with. For
Fady, whose parents fled their native
Palestine before he was born and were then
forced to relocate to different countries
several times, being a refugee means above
all a loss of identity and a loss of basic
rights. Although he had heard his parents’
numerous stories of trial and persecution,
he was still shocked by the amount of
suffering he witnessed during his
six-month mission. “There is no tomorrow
for the people living in camps, since they
do not know what it will bring them, and
there is not even an idea of individual
dreams,” says Fadi, who like all MSF
staff, lived among the refugees throughout
his mission.
The insecurity and
humiliation that most refugees experience
is only one part of the problem, the other
part being prejudice and discrimination on
the part of the host population, Fady
says. “Refugees are treated as deficient
human beings, they are almost seen as a
contagious disease,” he says, “People
should not show pity, but human
solidarity.”
One week before the end of
the exhibit the MSF team have welcomed a
total of 2,733 visitors. Both Roshan and
Fady say they are satisfied with the
visitors’ response. “Quantity is not as
important to us as is the impact we make
on the people,” says Charlotte Bohot,
Communications Manager of MSF UAE.
Charlotte, who has been with MSF since
1984, worked in missions in 7 countries,
including Lebanon, where she was head of
mission, before joining the organisation’s
local branch.
Charlotte’s responsibilities
have mainly been to oversee the financial
aspect of projects, keeping administrative
costs as low as possible. Globally only
six percent of MSF’s budget is allocated
to administrative costs, while 11 percent
goes into fundrising activities, and 77.7
percent is used to finance operations. One
way of keeping costs down is using
volunteer help, Charlotte says. Currently
MSF has more than 150 volunteers
throughout the UAE, who weekly contribute
between an hour and a day of their time,
focusing on specific projects, helping
during events or with office work.
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