Kurdish Doctor and Expat Volunteers Help Syrian Refugees in

[Aslan]

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A year ago, over a drink Kurdish doctor Amer Harky and a few expatriate friends decided they wanted to “do something” for the waves of hapless Syrian refugees washing across the border into Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region.

The result was Refugees Integration, Support and Education, or RISE, a volunteers-only organization in the Kurdistan capital of Erbil that is staffed mostly by foreigners and helps Syrian war refugees who have fled to the calm of the self-rule enclave in northern Iraq.

“We have no problem at all finding volunteers,” says Harky, the organization’s 31-year-old leader. “We have foreign teachers, expats, local people and students. About 75 percent of all involved are expats.”

Soon after hatching the idea for RISE, with a British and an American friend Harky collected enough clothes and foodstuff for a first truckload of aid, which they delivered to the Domiz Camp outside Duhok. At the time, it was the only facility for Syrian Kurdish refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan.

“We thought we would be able to distribute the stuff ourselves,” says Harky. But they were in for a disappointment. The camp authorities took the goods, and they could not even see who got to profit from their charity. “I was very frustrated,” Harky recalls.

The friends decided on a new strategy. Harky knew many refugees were scattered all over Erbil, and needed help. “Some of them were living in unfinished buildings or on building sites, with no glass in the windows, no heating, cold and miserable in the winter.”

They visited them to select those that needed help most, then bought the basic necessities that were needed most. To help choose, “I looked at what my mother uses most in the kitchen,” Harky says with a grin.

The result was a package with eleven items, including rice, sugar, oil, flour and beans. They also provided clothes, shoes and heating equipment and if there was enough money from donations the packages went out weekly.

From the beginning they decided they could not help everybody. “We don’t help those refugees that have a job, because they don’t need it. We only offer emergency help,” explains Harky, who balances his work for the refugees next to a busy job as a medical doctor in Qustapa Hospital, just outside Erbil.

After calls on Facebook, donations started coming in from private donors and through events in Erbil.

Some businesses donate part of the proceeds of a special day, and quiz activities are also used to raise funds.

Now, a growing number of businesses and resident expatriates have become aware of the initiative. Some months, Harky’s group receives as much as $10,000 in donations, and at other times the haul is just a few hundred. “It depends on when there were gatherings, and when people are in the mood to donate,” Harky explains.

All the activities are conducted by volunteers, like Harky himself and RISE co-founder Tom Robinson, who is British. American friend Cecily Cook helps with online funding from all over the world. More volunteers help in other ways, including getting the goods to the refugees.

After running the organization for a while, Harky felt the need to formalize activities into a non-governmental organization. Some foreign consulates promised money once RISE became a registered NGO.

“We could be working more professionally. We could employ people to manage the operations. Now I spend one to two hours a day on RISE, and sometimes even a whole day, but it needs to be more focussed to be more successful,” Harky acknowledges.

But after months of trying to get registered, he learned that the KRG has momentarily stopped registering new NGO’s. When he decided to resume as before a new stream of some 46,000 refugees, who flooded in last month after clashes in some of Syria’s Kurdish regions, changed his work.

Because new camps were set up, and most of the refugees are there. “People have been pulled out from the building sites to the camps. We go and see what they need, and bring it to them,” Harky says.

“We will go on helping the Syrians until it is no longer needed,” he vows. “When they are no longer hungry we will move to healthcare, and when they are all healthy we will see what we can do for education.”

Harky is no stranger to the suffering of refugees, many of whom have fled violence and poverty to find themselves in desperate situations in Iraqi Kurdistan. He experienced the life of a refugee in 1991, when he fled to Iran together with droves of other Kurds to escape Saddam Hussein’s attacks following a Kurdish uprising.

“It would be a shame for me as a doctor and a Kurd not to help,” Harky says.

---------------------
More information: http://www.rise-foundation.org/RISE_Fou ... lcome.html


Comments


1 0 Rebaz T Benjamin | 4 hours ago
God bless you Mr Herky. All Kurds should learn from the likes of you.

[Anthea]

WONDERFUL MAN WISH THERE WERE MORE THE SAME