Russell Gardens resident Latifa Woodhouse said she and her husband decided to witness the Syrian refugee crisis for themselves after seeing a television news report about a young boy who had drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and washed ashore in Turkey.
“What really hit home was when a young kid, Alan Kurdi, washed ashore dead,” Woodhouse said. “That was on every channel everywhere and it just broke my heart.”
The image of the drowned young boy would eventually result in Woodhouse, her husband, Colin, and their 26-year-old daughter, Alexandra, spending three weeks in Lesvos, Greece, where they volunteered at a refugee camp in January and early February.
The experience, they said, further convinced them that more help is needed to support Syrians and Afghans seeking an escape their home countries.
“Nothing makes you feel more human than offering humanity to those who need it,” Colin said. “We would like to build more of a groundswell of support for this effort because it is a global crisis and it’s not going to stop.”
Latifa said when she and her husband decided to visit a refugee camp their first move was to approach the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, where Latifa is a board trustee, for financial support.
She said after receiving the unanimous support of the Board of Trustees and the congregation’s Social Justice Committee, the entire congregation supported a “large crisis grant” of $200,000.
Of that money, Latifa said, $100,000 was given to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a human rights organization, and $100,000 was given to a Syrian medical staff working at the border of Syria and Jordan.
Aside from monetary help, Colin said, he researched what the needs of refugees were and how their family could aid them.
Colin said he attended a Syrian refugee solidarity concert in Brooklyn and found that most of the support refugees were receiving was from groups of “young” volunteers.
While they had made appointments with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-Brooklyn) and U.S. Rep. Steve Israel (D-Melville), the Woodhouses said, they knew things were taking too long and they needed to act quickly.
With the help of their five children, the Woodhouses began fundraising through Crowdrise, a website that uses crowdsourcing to raise donations, to financially support a trip to Lesvos.
“We needed money to take with us,” Latifa said. “We were going on our own, but we needed money to give to the refugees and help in different ways.”
This past January, Colin, Latifa and Alexandra embarked on their journey to Greece, where they volunteered at “Better Days for Moria,” a volunteer-operated refugee camp adjacent to a refugee registration point called Camp Moria in Lesvos.
After arriving in Lesvos, Colin said, he was surprised by the services volunteers were able to offer refugees that they would not have been able to receive in Camp Moria, which he called a “detention center.”
“These big institutions were totally unprepared, as was the entire of Europe, to receive 1 million people in the last 12 months,” he said. “If not for the volunteer groups, it could have been much worse.”
Colin said volunteer groups had set up various different stations including a clothing tent, a tea tent and a medical tent.
Unlike the services available in the detention center, he said, the volunteer stations operated 24 hours a day.
“Often times they would close down at night and people would ask to come out of the facility into where the volunteers were where we had doctors 24/7 and food and clothes,” Colin said. “And that was the difference, to some degree, that the volunteers were very responsive and flexible.”
While the services and clothing were all benefitting the refugees, Latifa said, there was still a disconnect between them and the volunteers because of the language barrier.
She said her family was able to offer critical assistance at the camp because she spoke both Pashto, which is spoken in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, and Farsi, while her daughter also spoke Arabic.
“We were instrumental in the work of translation,” Latifa said. “Providing them with dry clothes that fit, with warm food, with medical help.”
The Woodhouses did not arrive in Lesvos empty-handed.
With the help of one of their daughters, who was connected with the vice president of the Patagonia jacket company, the family brought “10 boxes” of Patagonia jackets, as well as shoes and backpacks, for refugees.
“The first week we were there, you should have seen the people dressed in the beautiful colors,” Latifa said. “The kids loved it, the mothers loved it, the fathers loved it.”
She said that while the refugees appreciated all the things that were given to them they most enjoyed the moments that made them feel “human” again.
A hairdresser from the Netherlands had volunteered to give haircuts to refugees, Latifa said, which was greatly appreciated.
“Their lives are so devastated,” she said. “If you could provide one hour of happiness, it is something that was a wonderful experience for me to see a light in their eyes and a smile on their face.”
After speaking with and witnessing the struggles of refugees, the Woodhouses said, they know that comments made by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, calling the refugees “terrorists,” were completely unwarranted.
“They are desperate. They are devastated,” Latifa said. “They are running for their lives. They are not the terrorists that he thinks they are.”
Colin said the refugees were being accused of being the people from which they were trying to escape.
“We don’t know the percentages but probably 99 percent of these people seek safety because they have lost their homes, they lost family members, they lost their means to make a living,” he said. “They’ve lost their countries to terrorists. They are fleeing terrorists.”
“We met these people who had their brothers beheaded and saw that happen,” Colin added. “They saved their daughters from the hands of ISIS by pulling her away.”
He said the notion that Muslims are a danger to our society has been made in the past about other groups as well.
“You can look back and that statement was made about the Irish, it was made about the Italians,” Colin said. “It was made about every immigrant group that came in any mass to America that eventually got integrated.”
In an effort to regain control over refugee services in their country, the Woodhouses said, the Greek government has closed the volunteer-operated refugee camps, including “Better Days for Moria,” and replaced them with military-operated camps.
Colin said the government’s intentions were good, but its military and police personnel were not properly informed on how to handle refugees.
“In defense of the Greeks, they needed to get some control over the operations,” he said. “They were supposed to be looking for criminals, and now they have to take care of thousands of refugees with rights that are attached to those refugees and they haven’t been briefed on those rights.”
Colin and Latifa said they plan on going back to Lesvos to continue their volunteer efforts, but in the meantime are trying to educate the public on how they can help support the refugee crisis.
“Our biggest concern is education and awareness,” Colin said. “People aren’t going to respond unless they understand the nature of this issue.”
They said they would be willing to speak to local community groups or at local events to tell their experiences and guide the public in different methods of support.
“We must feel responsible as human beings, as a society, as a government, as civil rights people and take care of this massive migration and lives that are being lost,” Latifa said.
