World Humanitarian Day: Remembering Lives Given To Bring Others Hope
Today is World Humanitarian Day, a day that honours those, who have lost their lives in humanitarian service and those, who continue to bring assistance and relief to millions.To mark the day our colleague Johan share his insight into the things he has seen and experienced and why we should all be celebrating the remarkable work of these wonderful people.
By Johan Eldebo, Senior Humanitarian Policy Advisor, World Vision UK
If you’re a seven-year-old living in Gaza today, you would already have lived through three significant conflicts in your lifetime. A child growing up in South Sudan is likely to remain among the 80% of the population who are illiterate. In the Central African Republic, teenagers face the choice of depending on the uncertain delivery of aid or joining armed militias.
With many humanitarian crises intertwined with conflicts today, children don't just fear hunger, disease and lack of shelter, but increasingly they fear bullets and recruitment into armed groups. There are more people displaced today (51million) than at any point since the Second World War, and children trapped in these crises have many reasons to fear for their future.
Humanitarian workers try to replace that fear of hunger, disease and violence with hope in the form of food, healthcare and safety. Today, eleven years since 22 UN staff were killed in an attack in Baghdad, we commemorate World Humanitarian Day and remember the humanitarian workers who have given their lives to give others hope.
In the last few years, I have worked across Africa and the Middle East as part of World Vision's emergency response team. I’ve seen and been a part of humanitarian responses in some of the world's most challenging places, places such as South Sudan, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and the Central African Republic. I’ve met humanitarians who have made some extraordinary choices in order to make the world around them a little better.
In Lebanon I met Ahmed who runs a school in a poor area of the country. When the influx of Syrian refugees began, he had the option of leaving the country for an easier life. But instead he chose to stay and open the doors to the arriving children, providing for their needs where possible. There are many people like Ahmed, and international agencies work to support the local humanitarians when they face crises.
Humanitarians choose to get involved with the problems of the world. They refuse to ignore the people that the world would rather forget about, and they invest themselves in finding solutions.
This comes at a cost.
To give hope and protection to others humanitarians have to leave behind the safety, comfort and familiarity that we take for granted in the West and enter some of the most complex situations in the world. Last year just over 150 aid workers lost their lives, and almost 500 were seriously injured.
The humanitarians we remember today chose to go where no one else wanted to go, or to stay when everyone else was leaving. They were willing to remain where people suffer, to offer compassion to those forgotten by the world.
Today the world faces such dramatic disasters in Syria, South Sudan, CAR and Iraq that we barely remember the hundreds of thousands living in refugee camps in DRC, Somalia and Pakistan.
But it does not need to be that hard to make a difference; World Vision and other humanitarian agencies are working to impact the biggest crises in the world by supporting humanitarian’s work and by encouraging the government to provide humanitarian assistance. With the staggering list of disasters facing the world today, they need your help to meet the growing needs. One small step at a time will make a difference.
World Humanitarian Day presents us with the opportunity to support the ongoing work of humanitarians so that the children of today can live in a better world tomorrow.