Diplomacy / Humanitarian Assistance Aid Workers Offer Firsthand Perspective on Third World Issues by Mark Hilpert Call Sean Garcia’s work family business. The son of Cuban immigrants who fled the country for Miami after Fidel Castro’s ascension 50 years ago, Garcia feels a personal connection to refugees around the world. Study at the George Washington University helped him gravitate toward his current job as an advocate for Refugees International. “GW taught me that changing policy in D.C. has a huge impact on the way people live in other countries,” he said. For 13 years, Garcia has worked with people uprooted by war and unrest, ranging from Iraqi refugees to internally displaced Colombians. Approximately a quarter of each year, he is on the ground in trouble spots, spending up to a month at a time visiting remote communities to learn about the problems faced by people whose lives have been turned upside down by conflict. Garcia is one of millions of humanitarian workers around the world who leave the comforts of home to voluntarily head into war zones and poverty-wracked nations. But why do these ordinary people risk their lives in unglamorous, often thankless jobs to help people largely forgotten by the outside world, witnessing devastating and disheartening tragedies along the way? And what firsthand perspectives do they bring back that can shape actual policies? To answer these questions, The Washington Diplomat took a look at two unofficial diplomats of the developing world. From the Ground Up “It gives you a field-based analytical view,” Garcia said of his travels. “Seeing things firsthand enables me to talk about [refugee issues] to the U.N., Congress and the U.S. administration and to provide them with workable solutions. We bring back photo and video images to get people to relate to what’s happening on the ground.” In foreign countries, Garcia usually travels with translators and “fixers,” locals who provide context to the issues and teach aid workers the finer points of local cultural sensitivities. “They are vital to what we do, guiding us through the subtle changes that are taking place,” he noted. Most recently, Garcia worked with an ethnic Muslim population in Burma called the Rohingya, which are both internally displaced within their home country and exiled to nearby Malaysia. In Burma— called Myanmar by the ruling military junta — Garcia saw Rohingya living in squalor in unofficial squatter camps immediately next door to official government camps with far-better facilities. “They had been driven out,” Garcia explained. “There were 2,000 people who no one was doing anything for. This was a camp with open sewage and no clean water right next door to a camp with medical facilities.” Garcia also visited thriving Rohingya camps in Kuala Lumpur that had been well funded by international benefactors, as well as rural camps that had no schools or health services. In fact, Garcia and his group were the first Westerners to ever visit the rural camps, where he found refugees living in constant fear of being deported to the Thai-Malay border. Garcia writes about his observations in a regular blog for Refugees International, where he documents the living conditions he sees up front. For instance, writing about internally displaced people in Colombia, he said conditions in an area known as Bajo Tuma “are some of the worse we’ve seen.” “Sanitary conditions are abhorrent. In the community of Brisa de los Angeles (translated as Angel’s Breeze), bathrooms are just holes in the floor, which empty out right below the house. Trash is just thrown into the water, but since this is a tidal zone, the water becomes a trashy, fecal stew that floats around beneath the houses. In Bajo Tuma, the people are forced to relieve themselves in plastic bags and throw them into the sea. Since the town floods regularly, excrement and garbage wash right back into town and then spread,” Garcia wrote. At the same time, Garcia strives to highlight the success stories that often get overlooked, such as Ecuador’s “innovative effort to register tens of thousands of Colombian refugee” to give them equal rights. It’s these kind of personal insights that he brings back to D.C., Garcia told The Washington Diplomat, “to raise awareness that such refugees exist.” Visiting the Headlines Garcia acknowledged that he’d chosen a tough career, but he’s happy with his choice. “The work is definitely challenging,” he said. “You have to get into the field and deal with anything that comes your way.” Indeed, Garcia makes a habit of visiting locations torn from recent headlines. In Zimbabwe, he took a 5,000-kilometer trip around country, touring communities forgotten in the country’s turmoil. “There’s lots of political speeches about the situation in the international community, but South Africa and neighboring states say that people who are fleeing Zimbabwe are just economic migrants looking for a job,” he said. “They’re not. They’re looking to survive and no one is providing any help or even acknowledging that they’re legitimate refugees.” Garcia added that Zimbabwean refugees are suffering from a lack of recognition not only from U.S. and other Western nations, but even from many nongovernmental organizations. “There’s almost a complete blindness to the fact that most Zimbabweans need to leave the country to survive,” he complained. “We’re trying to raise awareness that we need to provide security and recognition for these people. The country has been devastated and will take time to rebuild, but right now, almost none of those things are taking place.” Garcia downplayed the physical threats of the job, pointing out that because he’s working with refugees who are running away from conflict, he’s never been in a war zone. But danger often lurks around the corner. Last year, Garcia was working with internally displaced people in southern Colombia, just 10 miles from the front lines in that nation’s long-running civil war. Besides trying to communicate with a shell-shocked population, Garcia and his colleagues faced the prospect of landmines on the roads they regularly traversed. “In Syria, I went into an Iraqi refugee community as a tall blond white guy, seeing posters saying ‘Death to America’ and paying tribute to suicide martyrs,” he recalled. “You just keep your head down and go to your meeting as low profile as possible.” Facing the Problems Garcia’s constant contact with those he helps is what keeps him going despite seeing heart-wrenching situations, such as a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria comprised of people who had been kicked out of Iraq and had “absolutely nothing.” “It does make you wonder, will this ever be fixed,” he said. “But we try to take small steps like getting some small groups out to better situations. There are some experiences like that where I think, ‘My God, this is a disaster. I’m at a loss on what to do.’ “So sometimes I take a day and stay in my hotel to think about how to come up with a solution or I consult with colleagues. I don’t have all the answers, but my colleagues may have parts. We come up with very few new solutions but we give voice to solutions and ideas that are out there.” Garcia advises that Western governments address displacement issues immediately after people become refugees to save them frustration and resources in the long run. He cited the estimated 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan and other countries who even two years ago were still refused official recognition by the United States and United Nations. Letting the problem fester since the start of the war in 2003 has since resulted in one of the largest humanitarian and displacement crises in the world, with another 2.7 million internally displaced persons within Iraq itself, according to Refugees International. Garcia believes that providing these refugees such essential needs as medical care and education allows them to return and rebuild their country and local communities — before it’s too late. “The Rohingya has been exiled so long they can’t be expected to go back to their country and rebuild,” he pointed out. “That results in a lost generation — children of professionals who are illiterate because of lack of schools in refugee communities.” Scratching the Itch Clearly, despite the hardships, Garcia loves the travel his job involves. “It takes a certain type of personality to do this work. You have to have the travel itch,” he said. “I love being in D.C. but I need to get away because after 18 years, life becomes very routine. I get to see parts of the world that most people don’t even get to hear about, which is exhilarating. But it does take a toll.” Next Page

Would you like to become a WashDiplomat sponsor?