We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming...

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

Thank you so much for donating to last week’s #GivingTuesday campaign! It was very successful and will help us keep our high-impact programs around the world running and helping those who need it the most. 

The leadup to the campaign brought back some interesting childhood memories. (It ties in at the end, trust me!)

Hayley as a young humanitarian (in the cute little heart dress).

When I was little, my parents didn’t let us watch a lot of TV, but we could get away with it if it was some historical documentary or nature show on PBS. We even got to stay up past our bedtimes every Sunday night to watch Masterpiece Theater all together. But every year brought the same phenomenon: I’m watching some Victorian drama and they’re about to kiss when I’m rudely interrupted just by the dreaded semi-annual pledge drive. 

They had some nerve to interrupt my shows, only to beg for money (although that commemorative Lawrence Welk VHS box set was a pretty tempting incentive). 

The first 50 donors will receive this limited edition Doctor Who plate!*

Fast forward a few decades. Social media has definitely changed how organizations like PBS and and even LHI raise funds. First of all, I don’t have to appear on live TV and threaten to remove Downton Abbey from our regular scheduling. But one thing remains true: LHI does truly depend on people’s individual and collective generosity to keep on going. We do not get government funding. And like many other nonprofits, we have to constantly find new donors, big or small, just to keep running.  LHI simply would and could not operate without supporters like you. 

Thank you to all of you who donated to our #GivingTuesday campaign last week. Because of a little click of the mouse, refugees all over the world get crucial humanitarian aid that they otherwise would not.   

Didn’t donate for #GivingTuesday? It’s never too late to donate to that campaign here on FB (link) or on our website (link).

*JK, you won’t actually receive the plate. But you will help make the winter a little more bearable for a refugee family somewhere!

Hayley’s Hoodie: A Sweatshirt Memoir

Resting after a long day in the field with LHI.

You probably know me as an article of clothing, yet I am so much more than that. I am a pillow on a plane. A comfort in the cold. A pocket for popcorn. A hood to hide Hayley’s face when she walks past the cafe she forgot to pay for a sandwich at 7 months ago. But it's displaying the Lifting Hands International logo of which I am most proud. 

Together with my owner/wearer Hayley, we spread Lifting Hands International's message as we travel the world doing refugee work with LHI. Also, Hayley only has one hoodie, so she doesn't really have another choice. And boy have we had some adventures together! 

Here we are distributing milk goats to Syrian families in Jordan.

Like in Jordan, where we distributed milk goats to Syrian refugees living in remote desert locations. Together we held a newborn goat, greeted wonderful Syrian families, and unloaded dozens of nervous goats from Ahmad’s truck. In fact, by the end of the day, there was quite a bit of goat poo and pee on my left sleeve. It wasn’t a big deal, and it certainly didn’t stop Hayley from wearing me at a local restaurant later that night. 

Another adventure took us to Serres, Greece, where we worked at LHI’s long-term refugee community center. I met a lot of wonderful Yazidi people who came to our center. I even met some LHI t-shirts and we became fast friends. They’re so nice and friendly, just like the team members and Yazidi resident volunteers who wear them! 

That’s me with Hayley in London!

Sometimes we'll do a side trip to Eastern Europe to fuel Hayley's addiction to history. Did you know that Warsaw was 90% destroyed in WWII? I do, but only because Hayley has repeated that fact at least 30 times in casual conversations since then. 

Now you can have adventures like these by purchasing some LHI gear of your own! 100% of the proceeds come right back to LHI so that we can keep running and growing our high-impact programs around the world. 

We can’t wait to hear about all the places you go or the local delicacies that get spilled on you by your owner!

SHOW THE WORLD THAT YOU SUPPORT REFUGEES!

You’ve seen LHI gear like Hayley’s hoodie worn by our amazing team members around the world. Now you can help spread awareness about our work by wearing your own LHI gear! 100% of the proceeds from purchases support our programs that have benefitted over 500,000 refugees around the world. Get yours today!

Refugee Work at Home: Granite School District

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

LHI provides humanitarian aid to refugees, both at home and abroad. This post will focus on the “at home” part of our mission statement. It is post 1 of 3 in a series about our partnership with Granite Education Foundation in Salt Lake City, Utah.

A family helps prepare an aid shipment at our warehouse in American Fork, Utah.

I spend a lot of time at our program in Greece, and I always get a kick out of telling our team members, most of whom are European, that we also have a huge warehouse in Utah. Before they ask about the warehouse, they’ll inevitably ask, “Isn’t Utah where [insert stereotype]?” After a brief clarifying lesson about National Parks, green jello with shredded carrots, and filming locations for High School Musical—and how I’m from Texas not Utah—we finally arrive at the absolute best thing about Utah: its passion for refugee work!

Even the smallest volunteers help out!

The state of Utah has long been a champion of refugee resettlement, taking in tens and thousands of refugees from all over the world over the course of several decades, no matter the current overall political attitude towards refugee resettlement. That being said, limited funding is always an issue for all states, and especially challenging for resettlement agencies responsible for putting refugees on their path to integration. This is a huge process that starts with identifying housing, enrolling kids in school, providing adult education, finding employment, and getting set up with basic medical care.

Volunteers help sort through items donated through our Amazon Wishlist.

Refugees are often resettled in low socioeconomic-level neighborhoods in urban centers, bringing a different set of challenges altogether. Take Salt Lake City, Utah for example: 70% of the entire state’s refugee population is resettled within the borders of ONE school district alone—Granite School District in Salt Lake City. This is where our Lifting Hands of Welcome program (operated out of our humanitarian aid warehouse in nearby American Fork) comes into play… Stay tuned to learn more!

In our next post, we will talk about how we got connected with the Granite Education Foundation and how we help underprivileged refugee families that live in the Granite School District.

Click here to learn more about our Lifting Hands of Welcome program that assists resettled refugees in Utah.

AN UPDATE FROM HAYLEY: ON THE GROUND IN SERRES, GREECE

Hayley Smith, founder/director of LHI, is on the ground at the LHI Refugee Center in Serres, Greece. Here’s her latest report:

Hayley is on the ground helping out at “the field” in Serres, Greece.

Yesterday’s afternoon shift at “the field” was absolutely wonderful (“the field” is what everyone in Greece calls the LHI Refugee Center, learn why here). These 3-hour shifts, which provide additional support since our teachers and volunteers are otherwise engaged, allow for sitting and chatting with the Yazidi residents of the nearby camps—albeit from a distance and through a mask—who are waiting for their classes to start or just come to take a breather from the camps for a while. 

Even though the current heat wave drains me of any energy (and sometimes my will to live), it is an automatic conversation topic. Over the years, we volunteers have learned how to say “galaki gherma”, which means “It’s sooo hot” in Kurmanji. In turn, the camp residents already know how to say “air conditioner” in English. Our solar-powered AC system is, after all, the most essential part of our spaces in the summer (well, 3 out of our 4 spaces. We’re still trying to find funding for the 4th). 

Conversations often go far beyond the weather, opening our respective windows to other cultures and perspectives. I just wish that you could magically appear here and have a chat with the Yazidis! But since you can’t be here, here are some snippets from some of these chats:

1. Chatting with a Fifteen year-old boy, who melted my heart:

Me: “How did you learn such good English?”
Kid: “Here. And my first German class is tomorrow.”

(By the way, his whole family takes classes from us!)

The three boys who helped Hayley weed the garden beds.

2. Three kids, two of whom have special needs, insisting on helping me pull weeds:

“We help you,” or “Look, teacher, look!” when they pull out really big weeds. “Eat!” when they bring back ripe figs from nearby fig trees. 

3. Murad, an older man who runs our community vegetable garden:

“Stop, stop! It’s better to weed at 6 or 7. It’s too hot. Sit in the shade.”

He wasn’t wrong. Side note: He speaks to me in Arabic, which I LOVE! 

Kids enjoy painting and getting messy in the Child-Friendly Space in Serres, Greece.

Government restrictions have temporarily reduced the overall number of refugees who benefit from our services on a daily basis, but the energy that comes from learning and empowerment is still palpable. Not only that, but our Yazidi resident volunteers more than make up for low international volunteer numbers in a beautiful way; our remote learning program also allows people to learn and do healing activities from their caravans in the camp; and despite the mandatory face masks, the eyes will always show when people are smiling!

Click here to learn more about our Refugee Center in Serres, Greece.

WE KEEP GOING: PART 10

Quarantined… in Greece!

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

The balcony view is so beautiful!

Hayley here, reporting from Serres, Greece. After one failed attempt at getting into the EU a few weeks ago, I’m certainly glad to be sitting here on the balcony of LHI team apartment 1 writing to you. Navigating the tricky EU ban on US citizens wasn’t easy, even with invoking the humanitarian exception to the ban. But here we are on day #3 of team quarantine!

Last night’s dinner on the balcony.

There are six of us in this quarantine set. We’ve got Iñigo from the Basque country Spain, Natalie from the Netherlands, Maddie from England, Jana from Germany, and Katie from Scotland. Apart from borrowing a bread pan from a distance, we’ve had zero contact with the team currently on the ground, let alone anyone else in Serres, in order to prevent the potential spread of COVID-19. It’s not easy for some of our team members to be in Greece and not be nursing an iced coffee! 

You may suspect that I’m writing this post simply out of boredom, since 5 other volunteers and I have 11 more days of quarantine. But trust me, we are all excited to be here and tell you all about it, especially after months of lockdown. I’m even waiting to eat Iñigo’s homemade Spanish tortilla while writing this. (Spanish tortillas are baked omelettes with potatoes, and in Inigo’s recipe, onions). 

Luckily, LHI tends to attract some of the nicest and smartest people in the world, so quarantine has been painless and pleasant. We take turns cooking for each other, play lots of card games, spend time soaking our feet in the river park (where there are very few people), and talk. We’ve tackled subjects anywhere from cooking to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Did I mention that it’s in the high-90s with high humidity and no air conditioning? 

Card games get us through the day. And working on this blog post…

As pleasant a group as this is, we are keeping our eye on the prize, which is finally getting to work on the ground with the Yazidi refugees who come to the LHI Refugee Center to learn, to teach and to heal. We are ready and waiting.

Our own experiences with lockdown have given many of us the opportunity to develop more empathy for those in more difficult circumstances, such as our refugee brothers and sisters throughout the world who have been experiencing such struggles for years: useless passports, being confined to one location, canceled life plans, and perhaps the hardest thing, uncertainty about the future. 

Jana (in the shorts) is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Natalie is not…

This being said, we can’t undermine our various struggles and suffering during this time. Whether we are in quarantine, managing restless kids doing online school, working on the front lines, living in refugee camps, etc., we’re all here for one another, and we will keep going!

Click here to learn more about our Refugee Center in Serres, Greece.

WE KEEP GOING: PART 9

We Keep Going Because They Keep Going

In the early hours of August 3, 2014, ISIS fighters flooded out of their bases in Syria and Iraq and swept across the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, home to the majority of the world’s Yazidis, a distinct religious community whose beliefs and practice span thousands of years. Within days of the attack, reports emerged of ISIS committing unimaginable atrocities against the Yazidi community. 

Many of the Yazidis who survived the ISIS attacks fled through Turkey to Greece.

A number of Yazidis that we work with in Serres, Greece were brave enough to share their stories with us. This is Guli’s story.

PART 1

Our village wasn’t attacked as early as other villages, so we had no idea what was happening. I was spending time with my children and their spouses at home, which was located near the hospital. Suddenly, we started seeing many injured people being brought there. One of my sons went to the hospital to find out what had happened. The injured people told him that everyone needs to flee because ISIS was coming. I told my son that we need to flee, too, but he was confident that the Peshmerga militia would save us. So we stayed put.

The next day, the city was almost empty, and our neighbors told us, “You need to flee, you need to flee.” They were saying that in other villages ISIS was separating people, killing men and taking women. My son said, “This can’t be happening,” so he took his gun and things to confront ISIS. My daughter said, “Are you crazy? Are you going to war? They beheaded all your friends, and they will behead you too.” But he was still focused, saying, “Things like this shouldn’t happen, I will go and fight.”

My son’s best friend called him when he was on his way to fight and said, “Are you stupid? Are you crazy? We are in the mountains right now. They are killing us. We saw how they beheaded people. Why are you still in the Sinjar area? You need to flee right now. They will do the same with you.” So my son came back.

By this time, it was 9:30 AM, and my mother said we needed to leave immediately. My son agreed. I said, “I told you.” He said, “They beheaded all my friends already.”

My son took off his military clothes, because he knew they would kill him right away and behead him. We had to wake up the children. They didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t even eat. I was like a crazy woman, waking them up, saying we needed to leave. We were the only ones still in the area. We heard that the roads leading out of Sinjar were completely blocked with thousands of people trying to flee. We didn’t even try to take our car. We had to leave on foot.

PART 2

After we fled our village, we saw the people coming from Sibur, the first place that was attacked, and they were covered in blood. They had broken arms. They didn’t have any shoes. They were hungry and thirsty. We were so exhausted already, but there were so many people crowded on the streets that there was no place to sit and rest.

There was a temple in the Sinjar area near where we lived, where we worshipped and where our relatives and ancestors of old were buried. Suddenly, it exploded right in front of us. They had already started to bomb our temples. 

We finally found a way out of the city through a tunnel, but people came out of the tunnel saying that there were ISIS soldiers waiting for us on the other side. So we went around it. We had to run to make it in time before being attacked. I had a water bottle with just this much [a few centimeters] in it , and my son told me, “You need to keep this with you. You’ve got just one kidney and high blood pressure, so you need to watch out.” My son’s son was just a young child, and he didn’t want to take any of my water. I saw how thirsty he was, but he didn’t want to ask me for any water. 

As we walked to the mountain, we passed a woman walking with her three young sons. I realized how thirsty her kids were, and I couldn’t watch anymore. I gave them my water. She said, “No, you need to take it.” I said, “No, it doesn’t matter. It’s like I’m fasting today, I won’t eat and drink today.” When she gave a little bit to one child, the other two went crazy with thirst. People also tried to help her by putting her children on their shoulders, and she tried to hold two of them as they went up the mountain.

We passed a city and thought we could stop and rest there, but then we saw people running away from it saying, “They took our women and young kids. We have to go to the to the mountains.” There was a woman who was scratching her face, it was bloody, and the man with her was crying. I asked, “Why are you crying? What happened?” They said, “They took our three daughters away from us.”

Photo: Washington Post

By the time we reached the mountain, our feet were bloody. The kids were crying, desperate for us to carry them, but we didn’t have any strength, we couldn’t hold them anymore. We reached a stagnant pool of water in the mountain. It was very dirty and full of diseases, but we had to drink it.

We stayed seven nights in the mountains of Sinjar, just trying to survive. All the time there were children crying and screaming. They didn’t have the words to describe how they were feeling. I didn’t know what to do.

PART 3

We finally crossed into Syrian Kurdistan. It was too hot to travel during the day, so it took two nights to get there. We were terrified. It was so hard for us to reach there. We suffered a great deal during that journey.

We waited for a week in Kurdistan and realized that we couldn’t stay there. There was nothing there. So we went straight to Turkey, where we lived in the mountains for four days. We were terrified that a wild animal would attack us or a snake would bite us. Some of the mountains were too high to walk over, so we had to walk around them. Some people died. Kids fell from rocks and died. The Turkish Peshmerga militia came with animals to carry old people and children, but sometimes people would fall off the animals and die, too.

We stayed in Turkey for a year and a half. We reached Greece on the 26th of August. My husband and one son who was injured are still in Turkey, and we are here. One of my daughter’s is still stranded in Iraq.

Yazidis have been spread around. Some are in Germany, some in Iraq, some in Turkey and some in Greece. Five daughters and two sons made it to Germany. One of my sons is married, and has five children there. Two of my daughters aren’t married, and three are. I have seven daughters and four sons all together. Most stayed in Turkey because we didn’t have the money to smuggle us all to Greece. I have my 18-year-old son and my 17-year-old daughter here with me. 

I wish you will share this and spread it the world, share it with everybody. Make a movie out of it, so they can see who we are and what we experienced, and so they can help us.

Click here to learn more about our Refugee Center that provides services to 1,100+ Yazidi refugees in Serres, Greece.

Photos by Shannon Ashton, story collected by Kate Hubrich, LHI volunteer in Serres.

WE KEEP GOING: PART 8

Reopening the Refugee Center in Serres, Greece

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

It’s safe to say that we’ve learned from personal experience how important exercise, mindfulness, personal space, and self-care are during periods of lockdown.

The LHI Greece team modeling their masks.

It’s those very activities that refugees absolutely need to maintain mental and physical well-being during years of displacement and isolation. Ironically, while we were discovering the importance of soothing activities during lockdown, the Yazidis who normally participate in programs at the LHI Refugee Center in Greece had to go without when we temporarily shut down back in March.

Nico and Nick prepared “The Field” after four months of foliage growth.

This being said, we wanted to reopen the center as soon as humanly possible so that genocide victims could have access to structured activities, classes, and recreation away from the camp environment, which can be stifling and monotonous after months or years. 

However, the planning process for reopening the center during a pandemic is enough to scare most people away. Wedding or family reunion planning pale in comparison. It definitely would’ve been easier to just throw down our hands and give up. But, the mission of LHI is, afterall, to provide humanitarian aid to refugees. That means that we keep going, no matter what challenges arise.

So, after lots of planning, the center (lovingly called “The Field” by our beneficiaries) has reopened, an event we’ve been looking forward to for months! Let the healing and learning resume once again! 

Making Italian food from scratch during the 14-day quarantine.

So, what does it take exactly to keep our Yazidi beneficiaries safe from COVID-19? Short answer: a lot of planning. We want to give credit where credit is due. The director and leadership teams of LHI in Greece collectivity spent dozens and dozens of hours planning out every and any potential situation. No rock was left unturned. Some examples of this intense planning include the following results:

How detailed is this risk assessment? And it’s actually much longer than this…

• A 14-day quarantine for team members arriving in Greece, and quite a strict one at that

• Detailed risk assessment 

• A small capacity of people allowed in each space at any given time

• Mandatory face mask policy 

• Social distancing inside and outside spaces 

• No air conditioning, as per Greek requirements (think Greek summer plus tents = hot!)

• And so much more...

We don’t know what the future holds, but whatever happens, we are prepared to keep our beneficiaries safe from the virus. Whatever happens, we’ll keep going.

Click here to learn more about our work in Serres and support the LHI Refugee Center.

WE KEEP GOING: PART 7

Serres Beginnings: Moving Back In

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

This post is a continuation of last week’s story about how LHI’s Refugee Center in Greece got started. To read the first part of the story, click here.

Isoboxes were a welcome upgrade in Serres Camp from the rustic tents with dirt floors.

In the summer of 2017 with Serres Camp all fixed up and ready to safely host refugees again, the Yazidis were moved back to the camp to get settled in their new isobox accommodations. Imagine the relief they felt that they no longer had to live in rustic tents with dirt floors that were totally open to the elements! 

But before we had time to celebrate the new camp, a new obstacle came up: Greece announced a new law prohibiting hundreds of non-UN nonprofits like LHI from entering dozens of camps all over the country. UN affiliates were to manage camps in close collaboration with Greece, and small, grassroots groups were no longer welcome inside. This was a difficult time for many groups around the country, and many were forced to give up and leave. But leaving was the last thing we wanted to consider.

LHI’s classes and distributions continued in a public park after having to leave the camp.

Suddenly we had nowhere to host our activities, but we were lucky enough to find an abandoned park as a temporary location for our classes. In the meantime, we searched the area for a building or land to rent for a more sustainable solution. Our search kept hitting obstacle after obstacle and lasted months rather than weeks. Despite a long walk in scorching heat, Yazidis kept showing up at the park for language and fitness classes, so we refused to give up our search. We kept going.

The field that would become LHI’s Refugee Center in Serres, Greece.

With the help of a few sympathetic locals, we managed to rent a parcel of land about 100 meters from the camp. It was uncultivated farmland and we were not allowed to build permanent structures. So we cleared it, leveled it, put down gravel, and built four large, high capacity, semi-permanent tent structures. We didn’t have access to the city’s electrical grid, so we installed solar panels. This is where we would run our language, fitness, and arts classes.

Yazidi children proudly display their flag at the 2018 grand opening of LHI’s Refugee Center.

In 2018, we unveiled the “field” as the new and permanent site of the LHI Refugee Center in Serres. The entire camp population walked down to celebrate the dedication in January. They knew they could trust us. They knew they could depend on us. They knew we would do what it takes to meet their needs, because we keep going.

Click here to learn more about our work in Serres and support the LHI Refugee Center.

WE KEEP GOING: PART 6

Serres Beginnings

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

As we prepare to reopen the LHI Refugee Center in Serres, Greece (with team members quarantining for two weeks first and lots of regulations in place to keep the Yazidi refugees safe from the virus), we are reminded of everything we had to go through to open it in the first place. We hit many roadblocks and overcame many obstacles. But our determination won out. We kept going. Here’s the story…

LHI Founder/Director Hayley Smith stands in an abandoned dinghy that likely carried 40–50 refugees across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece.

In 2016, an independent humanitarian couple came across a large group of Yazidi refugee families living in a field in northern Greece, with only sparse amounts of food and water and the clothing on their backs. The families were there for a number of complicated reasons and were soliciting the Greek government for safety. They are survivors of multiple horrors: the 2014 genocide; dangerous smuggling to safety in Turkey; terrifying trip across the Aegean in a flimsy dinghy to Greece; and then to top it off, persecution by those who ought to protect them the most. 

Molly and Kyle at the grand opening of the LHI Refugee Center in Serres, Greece.

This couple, Molly and Kyle, would become the first directors of the LHI Northern Greece program when LHI funded water and fresh food for this large group of people. Since that humble start in 2016, we committed ourselves to following the Yazidi refugees wherever they went. And whatever the circumstances, if they weren’t going to give up, then neither were we. We kept going.

Eventually, they were settled in a camp in Serres, Greece. At first, we were only allowed to operate our distributions and language and yoga classes out of a tiny tent in an isolated corner of the camp. Conditions were far worse than ideal: the tent would flood, or the ground would get muddy. The living conditions were no better. No matter what, we kept going.

Before LHI’s Refugee Center opened, English was taught to Yazidis inside a small tent in a remote corner of the Serres camp.

At one point, they shut down the camp to clean it up and replace the tents with isobox container homes. The entire Yazidi population of the camp was moved to a city 75 kilometers away. We could have thrown in the towel, but instead we packed up our team, relocated with the refugees, and lived in a cramped motel for 3 months while we continued our classes and distributions. Despite the inconvenience, we kept going…

Next week, Hayley will continue the story about how the LHI Refugee Center in Serres, Greece got its start. To read it now, click here.

Click here to learn more about our work in Serres and support the LHI Refugee Center.

WE KEEP GOING: PART 5

Daily Double: Double Your Donation to Provide COVID-19 Aid to Refugees

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

A little more than a year ago, a representative of a wonderful foundation contacted us with a proposal. It’s always amazing to hear from this individual, proposal or not. She and I had met about a year before in Greece while she was visiting various projects in the Thessaloniki area. She is fiercely intelligent and curious, an ideal personification of the foundation she represents.

In Jordan, our Gather for Goats project provides Syrian refugee families with the life-enhancing gift of milk goats.

Anyway, this representative told me that she was in Jordan with her family and some time opened up where she could visit our Gather for Goats project. Let me tell you what—there are many things to do in Jordan on a day off, so the fact that she used it to visit a refugee site is another testament to her greatness. A meeting with our partner org in Mafraq was arranged and they took her to visit several recipient families.

After her visit, the foundation offered LHI a match grant to raise funds for the project (one stipulation of their match grants is that the foundation remain anonymous). A match grant is a conditional award granted only if we raise a certain amount of money through our own efforts. For every dollar you donate, the foundation matches it. Through this partnership and your generous support, we raised a total of $270,000, significantly expanding the goat program to hundreds of other Syrian refugee families.

As part of our “We Keep Going” campaign, the same foundation has offered yet another generous match grant for our current efforts to supply refugees with face masks, sanitizer, food, and other essentials to help those dealing with the consequences of COVID-19 while living in crowded refugee camps.

Through August, every dollar you donate will be matched! It doubles your donation, which doubles the amount of critical aid refugees will receive. Our goal is to raise $60,000, which when matched will become $120,000! This will enable us to provide COVID-19 aid to refugees for the rest of 2020. This is exactly the good news we need right now!

WORLD REFUGEE DAY: A QUICK HISTORY

by Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

People have been fleeing persecution, war, and natural disaster since the beginning of time. The Roman period saw groups of 100,000 at a time arrive from outside territories. 

Belgian refugees arriving in neutral Netherlands in WWI.

Fast-forward to modern industrialized warfare as we know it, when refugee numbers are staggering: 10 million in WWI & 60 million in WWII. Since no international agreement to recognize and protect refugees had ever been implemented, most pleas for resettlement or basic protection were rejected.

Refugees from East Germany, 1944.

For example, out of the 125,000 Jewish applications for resettlement in 1938, the USA only accepted 27,000. And then there was the SS Drottningholm incident, when a ship of 937 Jewish refugees were turned away from American waters. It’s heartbreaking to think of how many lives could have been saved had there been rules in place to recognize their right to asylum in a safe country.

Vietnamese “boat people” in the 1970s.

Luckily, in 1951 the newly created League of Nations (now the UN) recognized the need for international regulations. And this is exactly what World Refugee Day celebrates: the 1951 Convention, which saw 19 countries adopt the first international laws to recognize and protect refugees. The 200+ page document produced during the convention is one of the most seminal of the 20th century. 

Bosnian refugees in the 1990s.

The 1951 convention actually only covered Europe, since there were still many refugees waiting for resettlement years after the war. It seems like everyone thought that WWII was the war to end all wars, but as the century kept progressing, mechanized war around the world kept going. The 1967 Convention ratified the original document to include the entire world. And looking around these days, it’s a good thing those changes were made.

Syrian refugees arriving in Greece 2017.

As the executive director of a humanitarian organization that focuses on refugee aid, I’m somewhat conflicted about World Refugee Day. Let me explain: 140+ countries have signed the convention. Yet, several wealthy countries have started picking and choosing which articles of the convention to actually follow. And since there is no body that oversees adherence to the rules, refugees are being turned away when they should be accepted.  

So, let’s dedicate World Refugee Day (Saturday, June 20, 2020) to not only honoring refugees, but also to recommitting ourselves to do whatever we can to take make sure that the 1951 convention does not fade into history.

You can help refugees around the world. Click here to find out how you can start now.

WE KEEP GOING: PART 4

Repeat After Me: ana baHki shway arabi (I Speak a Little Arabic)

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

It feels like my life is a series of feeble attempts to thank people for their incredible generosity: The sweet family that took a shy American student into their home in Fes, Morocco; every single donor who keeps LHI afloat; the many LHI volunteers and leadership team members who pour so much of their love and intelligence into our programs. The list goes on and on.

Hayley (top) teaches an online Arabic class for three LHI volunteers.

So, when the COVID-19 quarantine started in March, it seemed like a good time to offer remote Arabic classes to LHI volunteers, both past and present, as a way to thank them for their time spent at the LHI Refugee Center in Greece. Many had previously expressed interest in learning Arabic, since it is an especially helpful language to know in the humanitarian field.

15 students and two months later, our classes are still going strong, and the students are making amazing progress! 

Why Arabic?

Ever since I started learning Arabic at college (it was a toss up between Arabic, Gothic literature, and indoor volleyball: no-brainer), it has changed my life in ways I never could’ve anticipated. The most powerful way hands down is the unmatched hospitality and depth of friendship that the Arab culture is famous for. And being able to speak Arabic bridges a massive communication and cultural gap that can exist between humanitarians and beneficiaries. 

One reason LHI even exists is because of honest and open conversations I’ve had with Arabic-speaking refugees, who were able to express in their own words what they needed in order to survive (both physically and psychologically) years of living in a painful limbo. 

Classes

Hayley uses worksheets like this to help her students learn Arabic.

Since the beginning of April, I’ve been teaching 15 students divided between two classes of LHI volunteers. It’s a fast-paced course in both writing and speaking Levantine Arabic, the dialect widely spoken in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. There aren’t a lot of resources for teaching this dialect, so it does require some lesson planning and creating accessible and fun audio resources. 

At the end of the day, the course is a good foundation on which to build in the future. It also has helped us all get through quarantine. Rosie, who has volunteered at the LHI Refugee Center, is taking the course: “No matter what people learn or take away from Arabic classes, the course gives me structure, a break from lockdown, a chance to see different faces, to train the brain, something to focus on, a purpose and sense of achieving something during lockdown.”

So, repeat after me: 

ana baHki shway arabi (I speak a little Arabic)

أنا بَحْكي شَوي عَرَبي. 

Stay tuned for the next installment of our “We Keep Going” blog series to learn more about how LHI continues our mission to help refugees at home and abroad in the midst of a global pandemic.

WE KEEP GOING: PART 3

LHI's Virtual Choir:
Assembling a Message of Hope

by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director

Hayley Smith, LHI’s founder/director working on the video.

It’s safe to say that these days we can truly appreciate our built-in need for mobility, routine, exercise, and mental stimulation, to see friends and family, to have a personal physical space to maintain sanity. 

You can imagine how painful it was to temporarily shut the doors to our refugee center in Greece, halting those exact activities to those who have been in a state of uncertainty and isolation for years. 

It’s so awful to see them experience more fear than they already have. I was trying to figure out how we could cheer them up, and the idea of putting together one of those collage videos that have been going around popped into my head. That way, they could see familiar faces and hear beautiful music being sung directly to them. I reached out to our volunteer community and was completely overwhelmed with the response.

Roos Meijer, singer/songwriter and former LHI volunteer

Roos Meijer, a singer/songwriter and former LHI volunteer who studies at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, graciously lent us her beautiful voice and one of her own compositions called Dance ’Til We Win from her EP, Maktub (click here to check out on Soundcloud). 

40 singers and musicians joined their voices together to create this beautiful performance. 

The process of making a virtual choir is really involved. 

• Each singer or musician had to record themselves singing along to Roos’s master track.

• I edited the video, one part at a time — melody, tenor, bass, alto and soprano. 

• Daniel Pines, a recent graduate from the Berkley School of Music, who plays violin in the video, lent us his professional audio mastering skills to make the song sound as stunning as it does. 

As you can see, everything in the video, from the songwriting, to the arrangement, to the final production and mixing, was done by LHI volunteers. 

Someone asked if I got sick of the song, since it took me 100 hours to edit. Not at all. I was close to tears every single time I watched it. 

While we wanted to bring familiar faces to Yazidis in Serres, Greece, the song and its message of hope is universal, and we hope it reaches as many refugees around the world as possible.

Here’s the video again, in case you haven’t seen it yet:

WE KEEP GOING: PART 2

LHI Refugee Center in Greece Goes Digital

In non-COVID-19 times, the LHI Refugee Center in Serres, Greece, is a huge program with dozens of daily classes and activities providing healing and education for hundreds of Yazidi refugees. It normally takes a team of 25+ volunteers and program managers to keep it running.

And thanks to our team’s commitment to keep going, the psychosocial aspects of the program are still running remotely during the pandemic! From their lockdowns in Italy, UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and Finland, the team started a Facebook Page to deliver a number of online classes and resources to the same Yazidi population that would normally attend classes in person.

Members of LHI’s Refugee Center leadership team made this video to share with the Yazidi population (with whom they normally work in person at the Center) at the beginning of the quarantine as an introduction to the online learning program. “Bashi” is hello in Kurmanji!

Some of the educational video titles available are shown in the screenshots below. I mean, wouldn’t you want to watch some?

Here’s more info about the LHI Educational Facebook Page: 

• Every program uploads 1-2 videos per week. 

• Videos are all created by LHI volunteers. That includes international and some resident Yazidi volunteers who live in the camps near the LHI Refugee Center!

• The Education program uploads 1 video per level per week (10 videos per week)

• Live question sessions for English language learning are held every Saturday

• Many of our previous volunteers are engaged in this new project

• This effort continues our engagement with the Yazidi community in Serres

Nick, Margaux, and Millie in LHI’s aid distribution warehouse. Serres, Greece.

While these efforts enable us to continue providing programming remotely, there’s one program that simply can’t be managed this way—food and hygiene supply distributions. We’re so grateful that 3 members of the leadership team (Nick, Margaux, and Millie) stayed in Greece to ensure that these aid distributions continue to happen. Thank you!

WE KEEP GOING: PART 1

Our organization’s small size has always allowed for flexibility in how we fulfill our mission: we provide humanitarian aid to refugees, both at home and abroad. In March, as Covid-19 continued to spread across the world and confirmed infection numbers were doubling on a daily basis, it became clear that vulnerable refugees living in overcrowded and unsanitary camps needed more hygiene aid more than ever. So, as ever, we’ve been able to adjust quickly to keep going.

We Keep Going has become a sort of rallying cry for us as an organization and a motto to show our supporters that nothing will stop us from doing what we can for refugees around the world. When we temporarily shut the LHI Refugee Center in Greece, our team started an online program and kept going. When our team of 25 amazing people was forced to leave the Center, 3 stayed behind to ensure that the 1,100+ Yazidis get our crucial distributions of aid. When shelters along our southern border started running out of basic necessities like soap for Central-American families seeking asylum, we shipped some to them. And when we asked our volunteers, past and present, to participate in an inspirational project to send a message of hope to refugees around they world, they did this:

The next few blog posts in this series will illustrate in greater detail some of the origins and outcomes of our adaptability in times of flux and uncertainty. Stay tuned!