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I've been a doctor for many years and the most rewarding thing is to be able to
help the community. But recently,
I have become inspired by a nonprofit organization helping displaced people in
Kurdistan. My friend is sending me updates about these cities in Kurdistan.
It is so intense to see how destroyed these cities are.
I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing.
Jeez,
this is crazy...
So you are at ground zero.
And this is four and a half years later.
I've been to Kurdistan three times.
Been over there on relief trips both with refugees and to get the orphan program
started and to see how things are working over there.
The refugee crisis is a combination of ISIS,
violence caused by ISIS in Iraq but also the Syrian War so because of the
conflict you get refugees and IDPs from all over the region.
And because the Kurdish region is actually very stable relative to the surrounding
countries, that's where everybody tends to go to,
and that's where the majority of all the UN camps are.
Wow. It's completely destroyed.
I've known the Kramer's,
especially Jerry Kramer for about 35 years now.
And been involved on/off with Love for the Least.
And then about three or four years ago became much more heavily involved when
they started working in Northern Iraq.
Let everybody know we are the soldier of the Islamic state,
we are coming with permission from God.
Wow. But love is coming here. It is true. Yeah.
But love is coming here.
They just deface everything.
They tunnel between the houses.
So that's an ISIS tunnel system.
We asked for God to fill this community with your presence and your hope that
this place once again is Holy unto you and that your name is worshiped here and
praised above all.
We bless your heart and your plans and your vision for your people here.
We ask you to give them courage, hope, faith, patience, steadfastness,
gentleness and joy, great joy of the Lord within this community Father God.
We thank you for the people around the world who have not forgotten your people
here. We ask you to bless those who bless others.
I wanted to go and help so I found out when the next medical team was going,
and I signed up to go. I'm going to bring a few things for the kids there.
I have here some soccer balls.
Very nice soccer balls, so I'm going to put them in here,
and I'm planning to give them some cards.
These are some players, so I'm going to give it to them.
Now, I've got everything I need, and I'm ready to go.
We're based in Duhok in Northern Iraq right now. Kurdistan.
Which again is important because it's really the epicenter for the refugees,
displaced people from ISIS.
So we have about 2 million displaced people from ISIS. Syrians, Yazidi,
Christians from the Nineveh Plains. All right, you know,
within 45 minutes of our house.
It was a long flight coming from the US to Europe.
Myself and another volunteer flew together to Kurdistan.
I was super happy to meet Jerry and Stacy.
Along the way, we've just picked up
this great team of church partners and friends and organizations and
civic groups that just come with us and walk with us and love the least with us
in East Africa and here in Northern Iraq.
I went to help the refugees and displaced people
living in the camps in Kurdistan.
Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to come to Kurdistan from Syria
because of the civil war there.
Kurdistan welcomed them and the United Nations supplied the tents for the flood
of refugees coming out of Syria.
But people were still living in the camps with very little assistance,
and I knew that I could help with medical care.
Our organization is called Love for the Least,
and we've been around since 2003.
We work in Tanzania,
we work in Kenya.
And then in 2014 we began working in Northern Iraq.
The main reason for me to go to Kurdistan was to
see with my own eyes the situation there.
We have sent, quite a few,
I think about 14 or 15 medical teams that visited Kurdistan starting in 2014
when ISIS really kind of made their push into Mosul,
and it created a huge refugee flood out of Northern Iraq into the Kurdish region
where they were put into UN camps there where it's a much safer area.
But when ISIS first went into Mosul,
it created a massive outflow of refugees,
and that's when we first started working there.
We help refugees,
the Yazidi in one camp and then we help the Syrian refugees in another camp.
And then we've worked with Christian refugees,
IDPs in about 40 or so villages over this time.
So there are about 2 million refugees,
IDPs from ISIS within about 45 minutes drive of our house here in Northern Iraq.
So they are all around us.
There are a million Yazidi left on the planet, Yazidi people,
and a half a million of them are in UN camps right now.
This year about a quarter million Syrians right around us also.
So this is a tremendous place for displaced people.
I am here in Iraq. This is my fifth mission trip.
I came initially being asked by one of my patients who's a pastor to come over
and do a mission trip right after ISIS had come into the country.
So my first trip here was in 2015, and now this is my fifth trip.
It's a beautiful day today and we are heading to the Syrian camps now.
It's about half an hour from here. I'm expecting to have a lot of patients,
a lot of kids mostly, and let's see what happens.
The camp where we're going now is located in the Northern region of Kurdistan
near Duhok. When you arrive there, there isn't that much you can find.
It's a very difficult time for them after crossing the
border and settling into a strange land.
The Syrian conflict has become an enormous humanitarian crisis.
After so many years of fighting,
thousands of refugees have come to this area.
Their temporary tents have become permanent concrete cities. But still,
there's only one healthcare facility for the ten-thousand people who live here
in Domiz Camp II. They leave behind their lives,
their homes and everything they own just to find a better future.
But in this journey they might find all kinds of challenges and health issues.
Today we are at the Domiz Camp and we're going to see Syrian refugees.
I'm happy to be here.
To manage these camps is a massive undertaking.
There are international organizations that work in these camps to supply basic
needs to the people who are arriving and living here.
We're just going to see patients and hopefully help them.
There's still refugees coming in so we still see
some patients with acute trauma,
but most of the time we're seeing chronic disease and acute illnesses like
bronchitis and sore throats and things like that.
The majority of the patients want to be seen for their diabetes and their
hypertension and their back pain and their knee pain,
so a lot of chronic illness.
We tried to help the best we could.
I'm a pre-med engineering student, and I'm also being an interpreter.
We are here today at Domiz Camp to help out kids and families that are in need.
We're doing everything we can from the big things to the small things and
whatever we can provide.
The displaced people living here have a traumatic history of persecution.
It is especially difficult for the children.
They are suffering from conditions like PTSD, depression,
malnutrition and anxiety.
And the chronic conditions that would be easy to treat can't be because they
lack the very basic needs like clean water,
electricity and the proper sanitary system.
They need more help here.
The amount of need that I have seen here is very profound.
There are thousands of people living here. We have a lot to do still here.
These camps were supposed to be short term emergency solutions,
but they have turned into longterm cities.
We're lacking sustainable relief to actually solve this problem.
The interpreters and volunteers that work here are just amazing.
They really want to help the displaced people living here,
and anything they can do to help, they will do it.
Each camp has only one ambulance.
Sometimes in Iraq we see seizures that are more hysteria,
and I'd never seen it before until I came the first time.
And she gets these under stress, and then she seizes us up, she faints,
seizes up, and then eventually she'll wake up. She's not been to a neurologist.
We talked to her family,
and she's not been so she really does need to work up for seizures.
We met many people today, and some of their stories were just heartbreaking.
Once people arrived, they're moved from a tent to a small one-room,
concrete house with a toilet and a kitchen area.
The family then will receive food, water, some supplies,
and a blanket.
It is very difficult to afford private health care.
In some cases they need specialized doctors who only practice in other
countries. The doctors here do a great job,
but they're overwhelmed and can't provide certain
treatment that some people may need.
Children and adults with special needs are especially vulnerable.
There were a couple of cases that needed specialized attention.
It is very difficult to deal with.
Besides the easily and treatable illnesses of colds and cough,
these kids have survived and escaped war. It is completely unfair,
unjust and wrong.
The most recent project that they're launching in the camps is "Caring for
Widows and Orphans of ISIS." In one of the Yazidi camps there,
they got over 400 plus widows and orphans that they're documenting and providing
both education and mental health counseling for.
So all of these widows and orphans have some serious post traumatic stress,
and they have no counseling at all up to this point.
And Love of at Least is providing that to all of them.
The first time we screened, we just,
I think they just made an announcement in the camp that they were going to be
recording who the orphans were,
and just documenting them because they were kind of running around all over the
place and people knew there were lots of orphans in camp,
but there was no centralized list and there was no way to identify who they
were. And there was no medical screenings.
So we sent a team in a little trailer and hundreds and hundreds of people
showed up and we were a little overwhelmed by how many people actually came.
And they went through medical screening,
and there was three times more orphans there than we were expecting.
We got a call from one of the camp directors, and he called Jerry and he said,
we have an orphan crisis and can you help us?
So for two weeks during the summer,
we called two nurses and another volunteer and we moved into a caravan in like
110 degree weather and no
power. Right. And we began to document the orphans. We took pictures,
we took names, we took their medical history. And at the end of the day,
after two weeks and some change,
we got a count of 326 orphans in just one camp.
And mind you, there are 28 camps? 28 camps. So just,
all from ISIS. Yeah.
And then we also documented 300 widows and
they're all young. They're young widows,
and they all have children. And so that's
why we're called Love for the Least. We bring aid to orphans,
widows and now refugees.
After spending a few days in a Syrian camp,
it was time to pack up some more supplies and go to the Yazidi camp.
The Yazidis came to live in the camps after 2014 because they were attacked,
and many of them were killed by ISIS because of their beliefs.
They're not Muslim or Christians. They have their own ancient religion.
They have continuously been discriminated against because of their religion.
This was the 74th genocide against them.
The big difference is when we go to the Yazidi camps
is the Yazidi camps are still in tents.
But one of my favorite thoughts is the kids don't care.
The kids are playing in the streets, they're happy,
they have no material things, and yet they're really, really fun to be around.
They're all eager to speak English,
and they're getting better at it because they're teaching it now.
And anything that we can provide them, a piece of candy, they love us.
Once we got to the camps, it was time to set up and start seeing patients.
So we are in camp Shariya.
It is one of the 28 refugee camps or IDP camps,
internally displaced people. It is a camp for Yazidi people.
It's a distinct people group, about 7 - 8,000 years old.
And they have, they're their own people group. They have their own culture,
language, religion. Very neat, wonderful people.
She's asking if she needs the medicine for...
No, no medicine for this, no.
So the people are here because they escaped from ISIS off Sinjar.
They went into Syria, and then from Syria,
they came back in here. Around August 2014,
they were on the streets. And when we were here,
there were literally thousands and thousands of people on the streets,
and they were living under maybe those blue thin tarps tied to trees.
They were also in any space in an abandoned building,
and they were littered on the roads. Thousands. And then the UN came in,
and the next time we came in, which was three months later,
most of the people were in camps.
So these people are in camps because they cannot go home.
Their homes are now rubble. They've been destroyed by the war with ISIS,
bombed out rubble, can't go back. And I'm not sure who...
Hello baby. I'm not sure who has control of Sinjar right now,
but last week it was some of the Iranian militia.
It is very important, the blood pressure is very high, let her know.
I actually got to spend an afternoon with my Yazidi doctor who's been with me on
every trip. He's now working in a government hospital,
and he came over for the afternoon to spend it with us.
So we have 400 orphans or so here in the camps with the Yazidi that we're caring
for, providing trauma care for, teaching English,
doing as much education and care with them as we can.
Also providing medicine, doctors, medical care, food,
you know, with the basics of life,
we're trying to get them beyond from relief into recovery.
Trying to find at least the new normal for them. They're very bright kids.
They're very, very capable. They're hardworking and they're smart.
You know, they want to provide, they want to work, they want to go to school.
So the barrier there is really just the funds to put
them in the local private universities.
I was so happy I brought the soccer cards for the kids here.
It was unbelievable how happy they were to get a
simple gift from the United States.
All these sponsorships for orphans go into a pool because we don't ever exclude
any orphans. So right now the majority of it is going to education and,
primarily, mental health counseling.
So because all of the Yazidi orphans have had trauma, every single one of them,
and they've had no trauma care whatsoever up to this point,
is that that's where the majority of the funding goes to have qualified
professional mental health counselors dealing with them.
We spent a day seeing as many patients as we could,
evaluating what their needs were.
It's much more organized than it used to be. We used to be out on the,
just on the ground out there in the sun, hot,
and all we had were tents. Now they have a school, a soccer field,
this clinic area that we can be in. And so it's much more organized.
The teams have gotten better as they've come. So we have,
the pharmacy is really nice to have pharmacists there and people that know all
the different medications. The screening team was great,
and if you don't have a great screening team, it's a long day.
We're going to call her and see if we can work something out with the speech therapist.
Many of the children we saw would benefit from early intervention like physical therapy,
occupational therapy, and speech therapy. We saw about 30 patients today.
All kinds of cases from hypertension, diabetes.
Actually that's one of the biggest problems here, right? Osteoarthritis.
We have tons of people with osteoarthritis. People with, you know, overweight.
But in general, if they would take their medication, do their exercise,
they would have better health. And that's just like the United States.
We can hand them all the meds we want.
If they don't do what's right their health is impaired.
They're just wonderful people,
and they're very grateful when they come in to see you.
Most of them have a chronic illness. When you came, you know,
four or five years ago, it was all acute trauma, PTSD.
They had been fleeing from ISIS. Everybody was crying,
everybody was displaced. They were trying to find their families.
Now they've kind of settled in. We got to visit a tent yesterday,
and visit with a family. It's nice to come and help,
and hopefully we'll make a little bit of an impact.
They'll know the outside world helps and cares.
Today we're going to go to the Yazidi camps,
and see the situation of the people living here.
I've been a couple of these days working as a doctor inside the building,
and I don't really know what the situation is so we're going to walk through and
see what happens. Hello?
I was talking with some of these kids last time and they were super nice.
We gave them some cards and they enjoy it.
They love soccer over here. They're huge fans of Barcelona and Real Madrid.
They really love it. Hello?
They live in a small area.
Sometimes family of 10 members in a couple of square feet.
Hey, how are you? Hi. Hi. What's your name?
They might be looking for cards because the last time I was here I gave them some
soccer cards, but I don't know. How are you?
You see, they are very nice kids.
They have nothing. They have nothing, believe me. But they are happy,
happy kids just going around and playing with each other,
and you know, it's amazing. Amazing,
amazing. Look at this. Hello. Hello.
Look at these girls. Drawing on the floor.
The Solar Light Project was something that was started in East Africa where we
are providing solar lights and water purifiers to
widows and orphans and families,
and it's something that's very inexpensive but makes
a huge difference in the camps.
The solar light is instrumental because they only get six hours of power a day.
There is no generator in this camp.
That has to be on a government level because this camp is big,
it's got four sections. We need, you know,
it'd be like maybe even 500,000 per section or a million to generate this entire
camp. For example, other camps have generators, big ones,
and every home is connected to the generator in the sections.
Not here. So six hours of power. When those six hours are gone,
they sweat in the summer, and they freeze in the winter.
All right, so let's go through the camps a little bit. As you see, well,
they have some kind of system here. The waters, residual waters,
but to live in camps like this...
The other thing we're doing is that water filtration kit,
they are not drinking clean water. We want to clean the water,
and that will help with UTI's and kidney infections and help in that way to just
fix it overnight.
Some of these kids get very, very sick because of the condition of the water.
They get, some of them they get diarrhea, you know,
they get vomiting.
And then, the saddest part is they don't
have immediate healthcare.
This is something that needs to be fixed.
It needs to be fixed quickly. As you see here,
many people share these community bathrooms.
Hundreds of people sharing the same toilet because they don't have toilets
inside their tents.
See, all the floors are dirty. The water's leaking.
And as I mentioned before, the conditions of the water are not the proper ones,
are not hygenic.
And a lot of people get sick because of the water.
So we are going to walk through the tents.
As you see, they're very, very small.
Hey, Naseed.
This is my friend, Naseed. He actually invited me over a couple of days ago,
and he was super kind. He invited me in his house,
and we were having some drinks, some treats and they were extremely,
extremely kind to us. Okay. So I have now one friend here in Kurdistan.
Seeing these kids out here playing soccer,
it's hard to believe they had escaped from ISIS.
ISIS is still of danger to people living here.
Many of their family members were captured, killed, or they're still missing,
even today. You want your loved ones to be safe.
Living on with these memories is not easy.
These kids are not able to go back to the towns that they are from because those
villages were destroyed and they aren't safe.
After meeting the people here and hearing their stories,
I really began to understand how complicated the issues here are.
So, you see many conditions,
most of them infections that they pass from one person to another person.
A lot of respiratory tract infections, eye infections.
Regular checkups will help to prevent these infections.
Even though they have almost nothing,
I have been welcomed here with an amazing hospitality.
As you see, there are hundreds of tents over here. Hundreds of tents.
You can see like old people hang out together,
and sometimes they don't have any job, so they want to do this.
They hang out together and speak and I guess they share their stories. So,
I'm going to go ahead and say hello to them.
Medically speaking, there are many layers that need to be addressed here.
One layer is basic food and water along with simple medicine and health care.
Then there are much deeper issues related to the persecution that these people
have suffered for many years.
Some have a hard time finding a reason to live, finding a purpose,
or believing in a safe or happy future.
You see, very nice people, very kind people.
Meeting people in the Yazidi community has been an honor for me.
I really enjoyed getting to know them.
Days here have turned into many difficult years for
those hoping to move on from these tents.
Pretty much everybody in the Yazidi camp was in Sinjar and escaped from ISIS and
saw what ISIS had done.
They experienced violence of ISIS and got away from it. Almost,
the camp director says, 95% were there and witnessed it all. So,
pretty much every single one of them experienced some pretty traumatic violence
or very traumatic violence. And again,
the camp mentality is let's just keep them safe and alive and give them bare
necessities, but that's it.
And mental health counseling is not very high on the list
for a UN camp.
But it's extremely needed there because all these kids,
you know,
have severe PTSD that's untreated and a lot of the times PTSD doesn't flare up
for two or three or four years. That's about where we are right now.
They've been there between three and five years,
so it's kind of a really critical time for them to get some help.
The camps have been up four years, right now. Their tents are falling apart.
They get six hours of electricity a day.
Conditions are really eroding in some ways,
but there's no blue sky for them. I mean,
that's where we're seeing suicides, you know, in camp right now,
unfortunately, at sort of a steady pace, and it's just them giving up.
They, can't leave, they can't go home. They're stuck,
and no one's offering any path forward for them. So, you know,
we're trying to find the new normal,
you know, again, trying to have some kind of, you know,
daily life hoping for hope.
We have some trauma counselors provided by Father Aram who's a Catholic priest,
who's a Harvard educated trauma care counselor or mental health counselor,
and he's one of the only ones in the region.
And he comes up to the camp with this team,
and they're providing professional care to the orphans right now.
So, we have those 326 orphans documented,
and we have behind us the life center. And, basically,
what we do is three months at a time,
we'll run a three month trauma care program.
And in that program, we will do art therapy,
music therapy, dance therapy,
and then we'll bring in trained professionals to do group therapy.
We take the most traumatized first to the least.
So those that have actually either been with ISIS or saw ISIS or saw
their parents...
These kids have seen and experienced the most horrific trauma you can imagine.
Some of them saw the whites of ISIS as they were fleeing from Sinjar.
Some of them were taken by ISIS.
Some of them escaped from ISIS, some of them were rescued. Those, of course,
are going to be the ones that are the worse off.
I'll leave it to your imagination.
We met a young girl in the camp today who has recently escaped from ISIS.
She had been held by them, and a few weeks ago, she was able to escape.
Sadly, her story's similar to many of the children's in this camp.
Oh, look at this. He speaks English. My name is Joseph.
What is your name?
So I'm talking to him,
and he's actually talking to me in English the most he can and he has a good
pronunciation so I might, I don't know,
in the future give him a book or something.
Because he's very interested in learning another language. Okay. He said, thank you.
These kids are amazing. They are great,
but when you hear stories of their life, it is very tragic.
We might not be able to change the past,
but we can work together to make a better future for these children.
So we have the orphan program and we have the English learning center,
and we need people. The type of people that we need,
we need people who are willing to do conversational English with them.
They don't necessarily have to be ESL certified, but if they are,
that would be awesome.
(Counting...)
For you, but you play with everybody.
I think the biggest thing that I noticed when I first went to Kurdistan,
first was the refugee camps, which really struck me that, you know,
any one of these people could literally be your next door neighbor.
So you get people who are literally just picked up out of their house with
whatever clothes and belongings they had,
moved to a new location and they're educated, there's doctors, there's lawyers,
there's engineers, there's nurses, there's dentists, there's students,
there's children.
And it's as if you just picked up a large US city and just told everybody "you
have 24 hours to be out of your house,
take what you can and leave." And they've been in camps for at least five years now
with no end in sight.
And are trying to lead some sort of normal life,
and it's shockingly difficult because, you know,
the average stay in a UN camp is about 17 or 18 years.
And so you get children who spend their entire childhood
growing up in a tent in a camp.
And it really shocked me that there wasn't a better method to move people on and
reintegrate them somewhere rather than just warehousing them in a camp.
I promised to one of the children, I'm going to give them a ball,
but also have some cards. These balls actually are meant to
found one of the
first soccer junior leagues in the camp.
But I decided to give one of the kids one soccer ball.
He was extremely nice,
but I think they're going to be very happy with this soccer ball.
Okay. All right. Let's go
A few months back, we did the Yazidi world cup in camp,
so we had 16 teams of the guys and had this great big tournament.
And then had the world cup championship with,
we had paid refs and an award ceremony.
They got metals and they had cheering sections, you know,
and what it was was just a great relief from the current situation.
Just something else to think about, you know? Something to enjoy, have fun,
get excited about and just break the monotony of camp. And then,
we did it for the girls about three weeks later then,
so we had the girls Yazidi world cup. So, yeah.
Activities like that just, I mean, it's good for, you know,
it's good physically for them to get out of the
camp or the tents and play sports.
But it also kind of clears their heads a little bit and gives them something
else to think about, you know, enjoy it.
Barcelona or Real Madrid? I'm Barcelona. Oh my goodness.
There are a lot of people for Barcelona here.
You, Real? Real Mardid, yeah.
We've had a great week. It's been a very different week than my other trips.
When I first came, it was more crisis mode. First couple of trips I came,
people were scattered in villages. They were in tents.
There was no really running water. We had well water.
Supplies weren't getting in. We were bringing supplies.
And now this many years later is really settled communities that we're visiting.
Imagine your kids living in these conditions.
We have everything. We have healthcare, we have schools,
we have access to food very quickly.
These kids sometimes have no access to healthcare for months,
and they live under these conditions.
I will continue to speak on behalf of the kind people living here.
They also deserve to live a peaceful life.
♪ Ey Raqib ♪
It is important to bring awareness to the displaced people living in this
region, whether Syrian, Kurdish, or Yazidi,
they need our support.
We need people here. We need people that help. We need doctors, nurses, psychologists,
all those people to come and be kind with this culture.
They really, really need it.
Look at how happy they are, how happy they are. Oh my goodness.
This is just great. This is just great.
As we were walking through the camps, we saw a couple of cases, and one of them,
it was an eye infection, nothing major,
but the biggest thing is the happiness of these kids.
I had a small present for them,
but eventually we're going to give them more soccer balls,
and then we're planning to do a soccer league here for them.
So they're going to be extremely happy.
So, I would say it's a really good trip. I will be back, I don't know when,
probably this year or early next year,
and I encourage anyone to come and just see how the people are.
And don't forget them.
Come over here. Come over here.
Bye!