Broken lives

By Dr. Sherzad Al-Khalifa:

Just imagine yourself:

You have a house to return to every day,  you prepare your children in the morning to go to school; you make food for the family; you feed them when they come back home; you have a TV and you wait for your favourite programme; you cover yourself at night with a warm blanket;  you phone your family and friends to gossip and talk about everyday things.

In effect, all the usual things human beings do in the course of their normal everyday lives. Suddenly, you find yourself, with all the possessions you have in a plastic bag, in a barren field with your family; if you are lucky, that is, and haven’t had them snatched from you or raped or sold or their throats cut by some being who somehow surfaced to this world from the depths of the sewage of human history.

Hundreds of thousands of human beings just like you and me have been forced to become refugees, living in camps awash with water and mud, and hit by bitter cold winds. Thousands of others live under bridges, in half-built buildings, some still live under trees, salvaging whatever they can to survive.

It is a human disaster on a very large scale. It is unspeakable.

No good for us just to sit in our warm rooms watching the news and feeling sympathy – we need to do something, anything that alleviates this terrible suffering, even a little bit.

What we can do?

1. Get a large plastic bag and go out and ask your family and friends to give clothes, dry food, covers.  In fact anything that they can spare to help.
2. Form a group from among your interested friends. to sit together once a week to see what can you give or do for our fellow human beings.  Agree a plan of what you can do – simple things, perhaps for a couple of hours a week. We all can spend two hours a week, surely?
3. Write, if you can, on the misery of our people, for the world to know.
4. Go and see these people in their camps or other places. I myself left my comfortable life in the UK to go to a Yazidi refugee camp in Shirnak, to see for a short time their situation and whether I can help in starting a school for the children.

We all can spend a little time to help others and that is what makes us human.

Dr. Sherzad Al-Khalifa is a senior academic who worked from 1985 to 2010 at the School of Engineering, Warwick University, UK and as Director of Research at Duhok University from 2010 to 2012. He is now back in the UK as an Emeritus Fellow.