Sonia Khush “driven by ending human suffering”

When humanitarian assistance pays off, dangerous risks are easier to take on, says Sonia Khush, a senior director for humanitarian response for Washington-based Save the Children. She cites Save the Children programs that allowed displaced Syrian children living in tents to return to classes or play in a new gymnasium.

“I go ahead because through all these emergencies, I’ve been able to see what a positive impact our programs have on children,” Khush says. “That’s very rewarding. I usually end up being willing to take the chance and go. But …there are probably places where I wouldn’t want to go.”

Khush, who recently returned from Liberia, has also spent time in Jordan and Lebanon working with Syrian refugees.

“You have to see what the needs of the people are and what you can deliver,” she says. “You have to think on your feet very quickly and, for me, I just enjoy that pace of work. We’re really driven by ending human suffering.”

It’s also necessary to pace the work, she says. Save the Children cycles workers out of troubled areas every six weeks.

Khush, who is single, says when someone doing the same work is kidnapped, “you keep thinking, ‘OK, I’m doing everything I possibly can to be safe.’ I know there’s a known element of risk. But I’m here for a reason.”

[USA Today]

If delivering humanitarian aid was easy, everybody would do it

There is a dizzying complexity to shaping a humanitarian response that is irresistible to American aid doctor Pranav Shetty, who lives with his wife, Nora, in Arlington, Va.

When he trained health care workers and treated patients at the height of the Ebola epidemic last August in Liberia, the local hospital system was in shambles.

He organized the delivery of medical supplies in northern Iraq after attacks by the Islamic State left areas isolated. At the time, refugees from the overrun city of Mosul were flooding into the area. His work brought him as close as a mile from an Islamic State checkpoint.

“Everybody wants to have an impact on the world,” says Shetty. “The greatest impact is not to go to the places everybody goes to. The greatest impact is to help the people that nobody wants to help.”

His wife, who also did humanitarian work, said she occasionally tries nudging him toward the lesser of two dangerous destinations. Nora Shetty successfully lobbied him to fight a deadly virus. “With Ebola, you have a bit more ability to protect your own safety,” she reasons.

She describes her husband, among the first people the International Medical Corps sends to crises, as someone who disdains complacency and is committed to always improving his disaster-relief skills.

“You want to be challenged,” he explains. “You don’t want the same thing every day. If it was easy, everybody would do it.”

[USA Today]

For humanitarian aid workers, global dangers have never been so real

These are spirited, grueling and perilous times for those trying to change the world. The risk of a gruesome death while serving humanitarian needs is frighteningly real.

“It’s a conscious choice and has to be a calculated choice,” says American aid doctor Pranav Shetty about heading into the world’s most dangerous places. Shetty, 33, is emergency health coordinator for the International Medical Corps based in Los Angeles. He has pivoted this past year between two headline-grabbing crises — the Ebola epidemic, and the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

In West Africa, thousands have died, including half of the health workers who became infected with Ebola. In the Middle East, tens of millions have been displaced, and the Islamic State’s savagery has swallowed up aid workers like 26-year-old Kayla Mueller.

“There’s always a certain amount of the unknown,” Shetty says by phone from Sierra Leone, where Ebola remains a deadly risk. “Everybody is taught to be hyper-aware.”

Mueller’s death struck the humanitarian community particularly hard, in part, because she was a young, idealistic woman who encapsulated with her words the passion behind what aid workers do. “For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal,” she told The Daily Courier in her hometown of Prescott, Ariz., about her work with refugees.

Mueller was kidnapped in 2013, a year when a record 460 aid workers were killed, wounded or kidnapped in dangerous places around the world, a 66% increase over 2012, according to data compiled by Humanitarian Outcomes, which provides research and policy advice to aid groups.

When a gruesome hostage killing posts to the Internet … the news reverberates through the aid community. “My first reaction is ‘Oh, my God, that could have been me,'” says Greg Matthews, 35, who has worked in the Syrian region for the New York-based International Rescue Committee. “That could happen to anybody at any time in any of the circumstances in which we work.”

Yet the challenge of providing relief in some of the world’s most chaotic environments, coupled with a lifelong desire to make a personal difference — and a restless hankering for adventure — keeps the humanitarian industry thriving.

[USA Today]

Kayla Mueller represents what is best about America

ISIS confirmed Kayla Mueller, 26, died after Jordanian airstrikes against the militant group targeted the building in Syria where she was being held. National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said the Mueller family received “additional information” over the weekend from the Islamic State that confirmed Kayla Mueller had died. The intelligence community authenticated that information, Meehan said.

The aid worker from Prescott, Ariz., was captured Aug. 4, 2013, as she left a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria.

In a letter to her family in Spring 2014, while still in detention, Mueller wrote she was in “a safe location completely unharmed + healthy (put on weight in fact); I have been treated w/ the utmost respect + kindness.”

In her letter, Kayla also wrote: “I remember mom always telling me that all in all in the end the only one you really have is God. I have come to a place in this experience where, in every sense of the word, I have surrendered myself to our creator. … I have learned that even in prison, one can be free.”

President Obama, in a statement, said Mueller “represents what is best about America…”

The Mueller family statement has more information about her: “Since graduating from Northern Arizona University in 2009 after only two and a half years, Kayla devoted her career to helping those in need in countries around the world. The suffering of the Syrian refugees drew Kayla to the Turkish/Syrian border in December, 2012, to work with Support to Life, the Danish Refugee Council and other humanitarian organizations to assist families who had been forced to flee their homes. Kayla found this work heartbreaking but compelling; she was extremely devoted to the people of Syria.

“From her college graduation through 2011, she lived and worked with humanitarian aid groups in northern India, Israel and Palestine. She returned home to Arizona in 2011, and worked for one year at an HIV/AIDS clinic while volunteering at a women’s shelter at night.

“Prior to her work in Syria, in December 2011, Kayla worked as an au pair in France to hone her fluency in French in preparation for her work in Africa.

“The common thread of Kayla’s life has been her quiet leadership and strong desire to serve others.”

[NPR]

A third of promised International Aid for Ebola not delivered

Only two-thirds of the $2.89 billion in aid promised to Ebola-stricken countries by the international community had been delivered as of the first of the year, a study published in the British Medical Journal found. Furthermore, that funding may have come too late to bring the most help to the affected region — revealing a potential gap in the international aid effort.

Karen Grepin, a professor of global health policy at New York University, said funding, while generous, may have arrived too late to help with the bulk of the crisis — the outbreak started in March and worsened substantially in August and September, but resources didn’t start pouring into the region until October.

Generally, governments far outpaced international aid groups and private foundations in giving money to fend off Ebola. The top donors include the U.S. ($900 million), the U.K. ($307 million), the World Bank ($230 million) and Germany ($161 million).

In addition to governments and aid agencies, a few wealthy benefactors have also sent aid — Paul Allen of Microsoft gave $100 million to the effort and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook contributed $25 million.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has stated $2.27 billion was needed to halt the Ebola outbreak. Based on that estimate, international donors have pledged more than enough for the fight — so long as they deliver.

[International Business Times]

The agony of Syrians and Iraqis who can’t go home

Excerpts of a NY Times Op Ed by Angelina Jolie:

I have visited Iraq five times since 2007, and I have seen nothing like the suffering I’m witnessing now. … In almost four years of war, nearly half of Syria’s population of 23 million people has been uprooted. … For many years I have visited camps, and every time, I sit in a tent and hear stories. I try my best to give support. To say something that will show solidarity and give some kind of thoughtful guidance. On this trip I was speechless.

What do you say to a mother with tears streaming down her face who says her daughter is in the hands of the Islamic State, or ISIS?

What do you say to the 13-year-old girl who describes the warehouses where she and the others lived and would be pulled out, three at a time, to be raped by the men?

How can you speak when a woman your own age looks you in the eye and tells you that her whole family was killed in front of her, and that she now lives alone in a tent and has minimal food rations?

I met a family of eight children. No parents. Father killed. Mother missing, most likely taken. The 19-year-old boy is the sole breadwinner. When I comment that it is a lot of responsibility for his age, he just smiles and puts his arm around his young sister. He tells me he is grateful he has the opportunity to work and help them. He means it. He and his family are the hope for the future. They are resilient against impossible odds.

Syria’s neighbors have taken in nearly four million Syrian refugees, but they are reaching their limits. Syrian refugees now make up 10 percent of Jordan’s population. In Lebanon, every fourth person is now a Syrian. This means fewer resources available for local people.

Who can blame these refugees for thinking that we have given up on them? Only a fraction of the humanitarian aid they need is being provided. There has been no progress on ending the war in Syria since the Geneva process collapsed 12 months ago. Syria is in flames, and areas of Iraq are gripped by fighting. The doors of many nations are bolted against them. There is nowhere they can turn.

The plain fact is we cannot insulate ourselves against this crisis. The spread of extremism, the surge in foreign fighters, the threat of new terrorism — only an end to the war in Syria will begin to turn the tide on these problems.

Read full Op Ed 

Oxfam: Richest 1 percent sees share of global wealth jump

The richest 1 percent of the population will own more than half the world’s wealth by 2016, Oxfam International said in a report released as the World Economic Forum begins in Davos, Switzerland.

Oxfam said the world’s richest people saw their share of global wealth jump to 48 percent last year from 44 percent in 2009. Rising inequality is holding back the fight against global poverty as the world’s biggest companies lobby the U.S. and European Union for beneficial tax changes at a time when average taxpayers are still paying the bill for the financial crisis, Oxfam said.

“Do we really want to live in a world where the 1 percent own more than the rest of us combined?” Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam’s executive director, said in a statement. “The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering, and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”

While world leaders such as President Barack Obama and International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde have talked about tackling extreme economic inequality “we are still waiting for many of them to walk the walk,” Byanyima said.

One in nine people don’t have enough to eat and more than a billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, Oxfam said, ticking off statistics that paint a grim picture for all but the world’s richest.

[AP]

Pope Francis lambasts dictatorial forms of international aid

Pope Francis has obliquely but sharply criticized how financially stable nations lend aid to developing countries, saying they sometimes require concessions that strike echoes of 20th century dictatorships.

Speaking to media, Francis recounted a story of a public education minister he knew who was offered money to construct new schools for the poor. To receive the money, said Francis, the minister had to agree to use a course book with students that taught what the pontiff called “gender theory.”

“This is the ideological colonization,” said the pope. “It colonizes the people with an idea that changes, or wants to change, a mentality or a structure. It is not new, this,” he continued. “The same was done by the dictators of the last century. They came with their own doctrine — think of the Balilla [youth groups of Fascist Italy], think of the Hitler Youth.”

“Every people has its own culture,” said Francis. “But when imposed conditions come from the imperial colonizers, they seek to make [peoples] lose their own identity and make an homogeny.”

Continuing to clarify his concept of “ideological colonization,” Francis said he heard concerns about the matter from African bishops during last fall’s Synod, who told him they often face difficult choices when presented with conditions of acceptance on much needed financial aid.

[National Catholic Reporter]