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For most people in Portland the wars and violence in the Middle East are somewhere between a sad, jumbled afterthought and a nightmare that cannot be understood. For the directors of Portland based Mercy Corps' humanitarian missions in Gaza, Syria and Iraq they are a daily reality.
Tuesday
night Stuart Willcuts, Rae McGrath and Marjie Sackett shared the realities they
face every day in Mercy Corps' fifth annual "Stories from the Field" event at their Portland headquarters.
Willcuts, the mission director for Mercy Corps mission in the West Bank and Gaza, was born to missionary parents in Bolivia, but went to Medford High School and graduated from George Fox University in Newberg. He is now the proud owner of two storage units in Portland. He first visited Gaza in 1999 and now oversees the biggest private humanitarian effort in Palestine.
McGrath, who oversees work in Turkey and Northern Syria, is from Liverpool, England. He transitioned from the British military to humanitarian work, and says he "has never been that far from war." In 1997 he and the organization he was working for won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work banning the use of landmines. He has been organizing Mercy Corps mission in Syria since November 2012.
Sackett, who is the senior program officer for Iraq, Egypt, West Bank, Gaza and Yemen, is a Portland native. She has been with Mercy Corps for four years and returned from a month long trip to Iraq in September.
Here were the things that WW found most illuminating, insightful and shocking about their work.
Stu Willcuts on Gaza:
"Roughly 50 percent of the population of 1.7 million had to go somewhere and UN schools were the primary sites, but they were immediately overcrowded. In a room this size you would have 100 families. The men slept outside, the kids got inside and the women rotated, and this for 50 days."
"Gaza has been a tough place to be for 50 years, and in the last three events since 2008 any Gazan who was old enough to go through those three events said that this was the worst one because it was so intense, because there was no safe place, because you never quite knew."
"In the war, the last war, the 51-day war, I call it the "The War" because it's the worst one they had. It's also the most violent. Every holistic aspect of Gaza, the physical, the emotional, the psychological was destroyed."
Rae McGrath on Syria:
"The complexity of what we have to do to support people is small compared to the complexity of peoples' lives. What they have to do every day that none of us ever dream of doing."
"All conflicts are bad, but this one has become worse because there are far more different groups with different agendas. So for us we are literally picking our way through a very very difficult set of challenges."
"There is a Syrian saying that if you give a man a steak and there is no bread with it, he will complain that he is starving."
"So we tried to keep working as long as we could in ISIS controlled areas. Then in the end it became impossible because it was clear they were going to take control of what we were delivering and it wasn't going to go to the right people. We made the decision to suspend our activities in those areas. That was a sad day and it is still lives with us as a sad day."
Marjie Sackett on Iraq and Syria:
"When we are able to give them cash they can say this week we need to pay for rent, this week we need to buy medicine for our child. They can make the decision about what is their priority need. It allows us to make the biggest impact."
"The whole system in Syria was very government controlled prior to the crisis. Once the crisis was spreading throughout the country the market chain really broke down. So bakeries in the areas where we were working weren't able to go to Aleppo to get the flower shipments, so the price of bread just skyrocketed. Bread is the essential staple in that society. Our program was providing flower to these small rural bakeries and helping to lower the price, so the general community could afford to buy bread."
WWeek 2015