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No Place Like Home<br />
Ali, our nurse, seems unusually<br />
chirpy today. He’s not really a<br />
morning person.<br />
“Good weekend?” I ask,<br />
waiting for the kettle to boil.<br />
“It was great.” he replies, eyes shining.<br />
“I got to see my family.”<br />
I answer without thinking. “Oh, good.<br />
Been a while, has it?”<br />
“Yes - two years.” he says, and laughs<br />
at my surprise. “I was afraid I would not<br />
see them again.”<br />
Ali grew up near a city called<br />
Shirqat, in Iraq. He fled from<br />
there two years ago, just<br />
as it was being taken<br />
over by armed groups.<br />
His elderly parents<br />
couldn’t make the<br />
journey - several<br />
days of walking<br />
through desert<br />
areas littered with<br />
landmines. So they<br />
stayed put, but after the<br />
Iraqi army retook the city<br />
recently, were finally able<br />
to be reunited with their son.<br />
Many other families in Iraq have<br />
stories like it, and not all get happy<br />
endings. They are classed as Internally<br />
Displaced People (IDPs): people forced<br />
to flee their homes, often by war, who<br />
haven’t crossed their country’s borders<br />
(those who have would be refugees).<br />
Right now in Iraq around a third of the<br />
population have been displaced. I left<br />
Sheffield in June to work here for an aid<br />
organisation called Medair, helping to<br />
run mobile medical clinics for IDPs. It’s<br />
been a steep learning curve at times,<br />
but seeing the appreciation of those we<br />
work with, often women and children,<br />
Children from an IDP<br />
family play in Kirkuk,<br />
Iraq. © Medair<br />
does makes all the<br />
difference.<br />
Families do the best<br />
they can to build a new<br />
life wherever they end up,<br />
but many have fled with absolutely<br />
nothing, and end up camping out in<br />
unfinished buildings, sharing them<br />
with several other families and a few<br />
pieces of furniture. Many rely on loans<br />
or the kindness of strangers for food<br />
and clothes. Their future remains very<br />
uncertain.<br />
And now (early November) we are<br />
preparing for many more people to flee<br />
Mosul, a city three times the population<br />
of Sheffield. The UN estimates up to<br />
700,000 people will be made homeless<br />
as Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers fight to<br />
recapture it. The humanitarian world<br />
St Chad’s Church, Linden Avenue, Woodseats<br />
Church Office: 9 Linden Avenue, Sheffield S8 0GA<br />
Tel: (0114) 274 5086<br />
Page 20<br />
email: office@stchads.org<br />
website: www.stchads.org
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