Super Bowl Monday [in Damascus!]

Couldn't find the Super Bowl on any Syrian channel this morning at 2:00a.m. That's OK...I'm sure I didn't miss an historic upset!!!

We are gearing up for another packed day of meetings. Yesterday we shifted our meetings from the refugees themselves to people working for organizations that manage the resettlement process and those providing aid. The access we have been given has been pretty amazing. Ellen from Catholic Charities in San Jose (the person who put together the delegation) has done a fantastic job of coordinating meetings with a wide range of perspectives. Her 30 years experience has also meant that most of our appointments have been with director level staff...as Ellen describes, "people pretty high up on the food chain" in this work.

Yesterday we met with a representative for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the country director for The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), a representative from the primary player in refugee work around the world-the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and a Catholic nun from the Good Shepherd sister, Sister Mary Claude, who is on the front lines of ministering to the Iraqi refugees her in Syria.

In meeting with all of these people two things [more really, but two for now :-)] are becoming really clear:

1) People who are working on behalf of and with the Iraqi refugee population are feeling an enormous amount of pressure to do their jobs. This is a result of the attention that the Iraqi refugees have been getting, but even more so because the size and scope of the crisis is getting bigger and bigger everyday. For those for whom numbers put things in perspective here are a couple:

• UNHCR had registered about 30,000 refugees in Syria from 2003-2006. Since that time (13 months) they have registered 125,000.
  
• The World Food Programme of the UN is planning on increasing the number of Iraqi refugees in Damascus that they provide food for to increase from 125,000 last year to 360,000 by the end of this year.

Staggering numbers that illustrate that this crisis is growing, and the concern from many of the people with whom we are speaking is that the crisis is growing as the interest and resources begin to shift away.

2) The second thing that is clear to me is that this process is a mess. After our first night in Amman we talked about the name of our delegations report being "Designed to Fail." Little did we know then what we are seeing now! To say the process if registering, interviewing and examining people who are refugees is cumbersome would be an insult to things that are cumbersome. I sat yesterday and listened to the Chief of IOM in Syria explain the process that she has to deal with and even I [with zero experience] was left speechless and the hoops, delays and hurdles that are built into the process.

To illustrate what I mean: when people show up at UNHCR they are given an appointment to come back and register that is 6 months later. Once their appointment arrives, they register and their information is sent on to Cairo, then processed through Beirut, before it makes its way back to Damascus...and then that person can be interviewed for the first time. Which wouldn't be such a big deal if there weren't anywhere from 5-6 interviews that need to take place before one can be referred for resettlement.

Add to this the fact that this is an urban refugee crisis, meaning people are not living in clearly defined and densely populated camps. They are scattered throughout the city. If there phone number or address changes during the 6-9 months it takes to get that first interview, the IOM is burdened with the responsibility of trying to track them down which is time consuming and staff demanding.

Suffice it to say that I am trying to figure out what to think and what to do about this reality and a crisis that, by all accounts [NGO's, the State Department and the people working on the front-lines] is in the process of getting a whole lot worse before it gets any better.