Syrian crisis depletes aid agencies’ funds
BURLINGTON, ON—Syria's humanitarian crisis gets worse by the day, while the ability of some Canadian Christian aid agencies to help alleviate the suffering is being hampered by a lack of funds.
"We feel like we're just chipping away at the tip of the iceberg," says Wayne de Jong, the director of international disaster response with World Renew in Burlington, Ontario. "We're trying to do as much as we can with what we have. We're extremely stretched."
A ministry of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, World Renew partners with the Canadian Foodgrains Bank on projects to provide food and food vouchers to 2,625 families that have fled Syria for neighbouring Lebanon and Jordan.
The Foodgrains Bank is a partnership of 15 Canadian church-based agencies working to combat hunger. It has committed just over $4 million to World Renew to fund these projects. Yet once those funds have been spent, their coffers will be just about empty.
"Come December," says de Jong, "most of the funding we currently have approved is going to run out. The Canadian Foodgrains Bank is running out of funding, and therefore we are too."
Both agencies are scrambling to raise funds to keep these projects going into 2014.
"We're going to be sending a proposal to the Canadian government for additional funds to be able to continue our program through the end of our financial year in January," says Foodgrains Bank international programs director Grant Hillier.
World Renew is hoping to raise $1 million for Syrian refugee relief from CRC churches in North America and Europe. Yet by late August, only $290,000 had been collected.
"A conflict is always difficult to raise money for," says de Jong. "It's easier to relate to victims of a natural disaster than the perhaps complicit victims of a conflict, although most of the people we're working with are in fact innocent bystanders."
Close to two million Syrians have sought refuge especially in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, but also in Egypt and Iraq. That figure is expected to reach 3.5 million by the end of the year. And it does not include a further five million internally displaced people.
"I've been to many disasters, but this is the worst, because this is a manmade disaster," says Abraham Shepherd, executive director of Canadian Global Response, who visited Syria last spring. "You see evil everywhere. It's sad people can do this to one another."
"You see babies crying non-stop. They're traumatized by war," he adds. "When you hear an explosion, it shakes you on the inside. Imagine what that does to a baby."
Yet an even worst-case scenario would be if Egypt were also to descend into civil war—not to mention Lebanon or Iraq.
"Imagine all the Coptic Christians fleeing Egypt for other locations. It would be massive. The international community would really need to respond," says Hillier. "As for us, we would struggle to have the resources to respond in a meaningful way."
"We've already been asked what are we doing in Egypt," says de Jong. "We haven't really had a chance to think about that yet."
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