Refugee camp Story

[Karwan Akrawi]



Hi there... My Name is Karwan AbdulKareem Akrawi, I am from Akre in Northern Iraq. Currently I am Computer Science Student at University of Kurdistan-Hawler. Since a long time, I was feeling responsibility and big desire to serve and support people and community even by simple things available especially refugees and displaced people who suffer from the most basic necessities of life as humanitarian service. In our educational system, we have summer break for more than three months. At that time, I was thinking to do something that can help refugees. In my city, there are two main camps for refugees.

At the summer of 2016, I have decided to work for serving refugees and I went to one Camp to find out a non-governmental organization in order to work through in favor of refugees. At that time, I found an NGO office known Japan Emergency NGO (JEN) and I met Mrs. Anne Rapin. I requested to work even as a volunteer. After a while, she called me to start working with them and that was a moment of happiness for me. After several days, I started working with JEN and they assigned many tasks to me which collecting information, opening English course for refugees and hygiene kits distribution.

The first task was an assessment for collecting information of all refugees who living at the Camp through visiting every single family at the camp. This task was hard because the whole work is under the sunlight and sometimes the temperature reaches to 50 °C. Although it is difficult to work under high temperature, I could recognize how hard they living and that gave me a fact of how they suffer and living. As well as, I found many people there whom have no food, no job, no money and they are depending only on NGOs  aids, as well as, they are really in trouble which representing by financial challenges .

The positive point of JEN is that they employed those people to work for JEN projects and that’s helped them to earn money and improve their lives.

[During the work]



The impressive thing that I found is that the people challenging the harsh circumstances and they try to live their normal life by simple things especially the children whom trying to re-life their dreams. At the end, I learned how to fight for life and I earned wonderful colleagues within JEN. As well as, I wish a quick back for those families to their homes in order to re-start with bright future.


[Kids playing football]



[An innocent child]



[A disabled child playing football]




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