Essam Daod co-founded Humanity Crew in 2015 to provide first response mental health and psycho-social support for refugees and people in crisis. Journalist Ray Suarez sat down with Daod to hear more about his unique “inverted pyramid” approach to mental health support, and how communities have the capacity to heal themselves.
Ray Suarez: In your work as a psychiatrist, how would you describe the best way, if in your normal practice in Haifa, what would a clinical setting be like if you were going to treat a child?
Dr. Essam Daod: You need to be there for him. I think being is the most important thing in working with children, being with him in the room as a human being, as a therapist, to give him the space where he can express himself because most of the children … I believe that children, all children born okay, we, the adults just make something bad for them that make them not okay. So, the therapist first thing need to be that good model of a caring adult that will be there for him in the room.
Suarez: How would you compare the way children are seen when they come rolling ashore in the Greek islands from across the Mediterranean?
Daod: It’s difficult because you have to be there to really feel it. They don’t cry. Most of the people think that they cry. If they are crying like there’s children, for sure, they’re crying, and there’s the minority, and the majority don’t cry. They cry all the way and then, they stop. Because crying is an alarm for the environment, for the adults, for the parents that there is something wrong and when the alarm is not working, you know, the alarm are stops and they use more strong defense mechanism of just split, and just be just the body and the soul and the mind just go beside and there is no connection, and this is the core of developing of a post traumatic stress disorder in the future when you’re just dealing with the body and there is no mind anymore in the shore.
Suarez: A lot of these children, haven’t they already suffered tremendously even before they got out of boat back home in a city, a village in Syria? Haven’t they seen things? Haven’t they experience things that no seven year old, an eight year old in the world should ever see?
Daod: Totally, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to intervene in the shore. If we can help at that point and to make less trauma for them, we have to. What they suffer all the way, it has a huge impact on them. And that’s why also, we don’t see the classical PTSD that is known in the States with all the veterans, for example, coming back from Iraq. We see something called the complex PTSD which is not written in the western book. It’s not part of the DSM-5 which is like our bible for the psychiatry which is what we are talking about, the complex PTSD is a result of this ongoing trauma that’s not just a one single trauma, and the work with complex PTSD is totally different and hard.
Suarez: You say it’s not even in the DSM-5 yet.
Daod: No.
Suarez: How does it present? What do these children have in common?
Daod: Mistrust, I think. They mistrust the culture, the environment, the community, the parent. The parent object is not because the parents are the guilty or not there but because the trauma that the parents suffer from make them not there for the children. So, we have a lot of attachments issues, a lot of cognition problems, cognitive problems because of, when the trauma occur in early age, it’s also affect the developmental process of the children. A lot of somatic symptoms and disorders, and it’s complicated. It’s like affect the whole spectrum of life.
Suarez: So, when you’re dealing with a young child who already has this complex collection of problems, where do you begin? Can you create a hierarchy of problems? What do you try to work on first?
Daod: First of all, the community. I think in the refugee crisis, especially to Europe and to the west, to the US and Australia, we are dealing with refugees coming from the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan. We’re talking about a total different culture which is a culture that build on the collectivism. It’s not about the individual, and the power of the community is so strong that can really heal people and their well-being is actually attached to the community. So, the first thing that we need to do is to create the community again, and then, we need to start working with the people. But the western approach of psychology that it’s based on the individual well-being doesn’t work for refugees. We need to address them as a group. We need, not just to be sensitive to their culture and mentality, we need to be competence for this. We need to work through their mentality, not against it.
I agree that we need to empower women, but is it the right place to do it on the shore or in the transit camp or in the alpha male that was ruling all his life, now, lost everything and now, you are empowering his woman and leaving him aside because he’s so violent and aggressive. He’s not violent and aggressive, this is how depression in the east. I am coming from there, we take it out. We don’t do internalization process when we are depressed. We don’t sit and say, “Oh God, what happened to me?” No. We become aggressive. We become a little bit of agitated. This is how depression in the east is. So, we neglect the men, and we focus in the woman, for example, and this is how domestic violence just start to raise inside the camps.
Suarez: Is a camp in Greece different, more harmful, less harmful than a camp on the border between Lebanon and Syria?
Daod: Sure. Totally.
Suarez: How so?
Daod: Now, I think if I’m not wrong with numbers, we are talking about 1 billion economy in the Zaatari camp, for example, in Jordan. People there are creating their business and they are creating their life and they just rebuilt everything, which is not happening in Greece. It’s not because Greece or Europe is not allowing this, it’s because the people are not able to do this. And this is because of the clashes between the two culture. You know, what I’m saying all the time, what drive me crazy, these people who just cross seas and mountains and fight ISIS and Bashir and regimes and smugglers and Turks, whatever, name it, when they arrive to Greece, the first thing we say to them, “Oh, you are weak. You are refugees. Come here. I am the white man with the keys for everything. I will take care of you. You will use the washing machine just twice a week or you can enter here. I will take care.” We don’t celebrate the strength of the refugees.
So, actually, we are part of the problem. It’s not because we are bad people, it’s just because we don’t understand the difference. And in the camps that are inside Syria or even Turkey or in Jordan, it’s totally different because it’s the same community. There is no threat for my culture, there is no threat for my religion. I don’t feel that I am starting a new fight now. And so, it’s more easy for them to start their life again.
Suarez: You’ve written about and spoken about the many needs of people who land in Europe but there’s just not enough psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists in the world to handle that level it all at once, hundreds of thousands of people coming. There are people who’ve suffered terrible trauma, there are people who maybe just need a small course of treatment, but there simply just isn’t a supply of helpers to meet that population. Must we just accept that there’s going to be a high degree of untreated mental illness in these communities for a long time to come?
Daod: I think that we are witnessing a catastrophe like a mental health catastrophe for sure, but it’s not because there is not enough people. In most of the camps, and maybe you will be surprised, there’s enough people and mental health support for the refugees, but there is no referral system. When a psychologist enter a camp and open his caravan and wait for people to come, he’s coming from different culture, he expects people coming from Iraq or Syria to come to him depressed or traumatized. It doesn’t work like this. You need to fight the stigma of the people towards mental health. You need also to acknowledge that people who are depressed are less active, are feeling shamed and guilty, which is part of the depression disorder. So, you need to have a referral system.
In our daily life, we have this referral system. If you feel a little bit not good, you can go to your family doctor and the social worker or someone, if he can’t help you, you will see another one and another one and then, you will reach the one on one session, or you will reach the psychiatrist. But when you have a three psychologist in a camp of 500, it’s enough, it’s even too much. The thing is we don’t have the referral system, and also, you don’t have the power of the community.
Suarez: So, ideally, what would that look like? How would that work? If you could arrive at one of these places and say, “Here I am. I want to set up a system that’s going to work, that’s culturally-relevant, that meets the needs of people who are not going to drop in voluntarily,” what would it look like?
Daod: I did it.
Suarez: Well, tell us what you did?
Daod: It’s called the inverted pyramid. The inverted pyramid is when you arrive to a camp where there’s no referral system for mental health and you start with the community, you start with everyone. You start setting the rules and the rules of the communication, “I’m not the regular volunteer who will stay with you up until 4 in the morning,” “I am not the someone who will give you money and feel pity on you and mercy and say, “Oh, you are poor,” No. I am here as a service provider, I am here as a human to human. This is what you deserve. This is why they pay me money. This is why there is a funds goes for mental health.” First, the community, let’s have election so you can have represent yourself. Let’s see what’s your right. If you are a teacher, you can teach. If you are a hair artist, please, open a store. Let’s create the community because the community can heal itself, especially, especially for people who coming from the east, from a culture that it’s above and based on the collective well-being.
And when you create the community and the community start functioning by bringing food, for example, it’s much easier and it’s photographed well if I bring pizza for everyone. Maybe the funds will like it, and go, “Oh, he feeds 1,000 people,” but no. If I bring thyme and olive oil and Za’atar and I bring it to the camp and make the people make their food, they can come together. They will celebrate. The smell has a power. If you smell now a coffee, you immediately will remember like a nice moment that happened to you. So, if you bring olive oil or something that can make him remember home, Syria, so you will reactivate the good memories, not the bad ones.
So, all these community activities, creating the community again, the together, it can heal a lot, a lot of the problems. Then, by living in the community, then you can go for another level of focus group, for women, for young adults, for children and parents, for only minors, for example. And from these groups that will be moderated by social workers and professionals, you can detect the vulnerable cases and go for one-on-one session with psychologists or refer it to the psychiatrist. And we saw that with three to four professionals and group of trained volunteers, you can give a full service of mental health support to 500 people in one camp, for example, in Diavata and Thessaloniki in 2016.
So, it’s not about that there is not enough, it’s about that there is no referral system. And this referral system, when we create it, it need to be culturally-adapted to the people.
Suarez: If trauma, if PTSD goes untreated in young children, does that change? The teenager will eventually see, the adult will eventually see?
Daod: It’s not just about PTSD, any other mental health issues. Even what we call the soft psychiatry or the soft disorders also can do a lot of harm in the future. Being suffering from mental health issues in the future, it will affect your level of education, of how much you will be involved in your society, your ability to go back and rebuild your country. No one wants to stay in the US or in Europe. Look at the refugees for now, the Palestinians, they still want to go back. No one want to stay away from home.
So, even if you are a right-wing hate everyone and stranger, you still need to invest mental health in these people because they will go back when they feel strong, and they can rebuild their country again. I, all the time, say that terror, for example, and extremists, they do not recruit people, it’s wrong. They fill gaps. They fill gaps. They sell narrative to people that doesn’t have narrative. A young 18-19 years old Syrian now in Athens or in Berlin that just sit in a middle of the square doing nothing, just using drugs and have nothing, no meaning, his mental health is bad, he is traumatized, he’s depressed, he’s using drugs now, he’s not working, there’s no meaning, it’s not right to say that he have been recruited, for example, it’s very easy. They fill the gap. And mental health, it’s a huge gap that in the future, terror and extremists will fill.
Suarez: It sounds as if you’re making a case for mental health to be higher on the list of things we have to worry about along with fresh water and shelter and reliable food and so on. That we can’t forget the role that mental health plays among people who have been uprooted from their homes.
Daod: You know, there is a lot of nice sayings and quotes by philosophers all over the world, what makes us different, the humans from animals. I think what makes us different from a machine is just our soul. What different between a car and a human being is our soul and mind, and it’s not right even in our daily life that we don’t give the same part and the same efforts that we give to the body needs, to give it also to the soul and the mind. Especially for people who are on the move. The people are suffering every day from this, and disconnected from their home, from their rooms, memories and everything, and this should be the first priority.
One of our missions or our mission in Humanity Crew, the organization that I founded for mental health support is to bring mental health to the forefront of the humanitarian crisis and to make it a major component of all the humanitarian aid for people on the move. And I think it should be a priority, yeah.
Suarez: There’s a whole built up network of interests, a built up network of techniques, of approaches, let’s say the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, they have an approach. Can you bring them around to your way of thinking? Are you bringing them around to your way of thinking that mental health has to be higher on the list of things that we worry about?
Daod: I don’t understand the question, sorry.
Suarez: When a team lands, they put in the water pipes, they build the tents, they set up the infirmaries. They have a way of doing this. Have they bought in to your idea? Do they believe your idea that mental health has to be higher on the list of priorities?
Daod: I can say that in recent years, there’s a shift. We are talking about mental health more that’s why I’m here. I think that there is a huge awareness that raise up towards the mental health, in general, mental health for refugees, but there is still a huge, huge gap and lack of services. I think we can say that this is done when we know that it’s the same efforts and the same budget will go for mental health as will go for all the other needs.
You know, one of the pictures that over time, stuck in my head, the children in Aleppo that was in the ambulance, I don’t know if you remember that sitting like this and was staring at nothing and he was covered with dirt. I was telling myself, “God, if I was there …” The White Helmets is there, they saved him, they saved the child. They did their job, but I wasn’t there. We need to have another helmets there, not just a helmet that protect the head, it needs also to protect our mind. If they give me 5 minutes with him, ten minutes, I can just make him believe that this is not something wrong. This child doesn’t have the capacity to understand what happened to him. That’s why he just was like this.
So, if we were on site, on real time and explain to him what happened, explain the experience that had, then, we can not just ease the trauma or reframe it, we can transform it to something else, something positive. When a child cry on the boat, why he’s crying? If his parents was singing and dancing from Turkey to Greece, he will also sing and dance. He was crying because everyone cry, no one told him anything. If I told this child that he just get down from a boat or the child in the ambulance in Aleppo, I’d tell him a different story, that he’s the hero who stopped the waves with his hands, for example. That he’s the strong one who survived this bombing. At least if I couldn’t transform it to something good, I can give him good memories that in the future, when there is any kind of free activation of this encapsulated drama, it will be also activated with the good memories.
Suarez: It sounds like you’re saying you don’t need that much time.
Daod: No.
Suarez: That it’s just when they get the therapy, not how much they get. That when they get it, right when they’re wounded, it’s more effective.
Daod: We go back to the first question. You asked me what’s the best practice. I said prevention, not treatment. Treatment is a process, it’s an ongoing process. Treatment is something that takes years. Prevention is just an act. You need to act to prevent something and that’s it. If we put an effort to be at these, all these steps and levels of the children especially, and also, the adults that go through a lot of traumas, and then, they are on the move, for example, now in Venezuela, and in doors, all the refugees as go around and cross borders, and et cetera, if we, as mental health professionals and also, volunteers that trained to provide first response mental health intervention. We are there as we are there already, but for just for the body.
If we are there also for the mind and soul and we provide these very simple techniques for being with these people, we can prevent a lot, a lot of the mental health issues and disorders and we can really stop this catastrophe. It doesn’t mean 100 percent. There’s no success all the time, but you will prevent most of the disorders and the problems in the future.
Suarez: You’ve come to be known by a lot of people through your work with refugees in the eastern Mediterranean, but you mentioned Honduras and I’m wondering if in those situations, a child whose mother takes him out of his school, out of his hometown and tries to get to the United States, are they different from somebody who’s been driven out of Aleppo or homes by bombs or gun fire?
Daod: For children, as a child psychiatrist and psychotherapist, it’s the same, because children doesn’t really understand. It’s bombing or ISIS or Daesh or poverty and Maduro and the other guy, they don’t understand the differences. They understand that they are not in their bed, their parents are not happy, they are not loved, they don’t hug them, they feel the fear of the parents, they are cold, the emotional and the body needs are not covered, they feel that there’s something wrong and then, on the US-Mexican border, they’re also separated. So, it’s the same. And that’s why the intervention or the prevention is the same.
Suarez: Will that have consequences for the 20-year-old worker, the 30-year-old young father? If there is an 11-year-old who’s not treated, an 11 year old who doesn’t have a Dr. Essam to give him some contexts, to give him some ways of processing this experience, are we just postponing real problems down the road?
Daod: Yeah. You know, with children, it’s like you have a huge big tree on a small bush and you have a storm. Both will be affected by the storm, but the tree is strong enough. It has the good roots, the healthy roots, it will recover. This is the adults. The problem, when the children that they’re still young, these trauma will be imprinted in their brain. They will affect their cognition, their working memory, their way of thinking, the frontal lobe will change in their brain, how they act, their attention, everything, and this will make them not the people that need to be or can be. We just decreased the potential of them being an active member of the society, a productive one. They will not die, for sure, maybe they will be hard worker, but they can be more. Not just by achieving academic, but as their well-being and the way they would act with problems and violence and et cetera.
Suarez: You mentioned the frontal lobe, do these experiences in childhood actually cause a physical change down at the neurological level?
Daod: Yeah, it’s known. Yeah, for sure. Most of the changes are in our frontal lobe with this, it’s like our brake system. And all the attention, the working memory, the abstraction of things, the span of attention, all these change. And we saw this. There’s the ACE study, one of the biggest studies in the US about child trauma and it’s known and it’s proven that even small incidents and trauma, experiences in the child can affect even the mortality rate and body disease, not just the brain development.
Suarez: When we deal with populations of children like this, isn’t there going to be a range of what we see presenting, some kids who seem to be more resilient than others, some kids who, okay, fine, they’re not in school for a year, a year and a half. Then, you send them back to school and they seemed to be okay, while some other kids really kind of unravel. Isn’t there some variation in the ability to withstand some of these terrible experiences?
Daod: Yeah. This is our minds and souls, we are not machines. It’s not like if your Mercedes-Benz has a problem, it will exactly behave the same and all the Benz. And children, it’s a war, they will act different and it depends. And you say the magic word, resilience. There’s three components of resilience. It’s being capable, loved, and safe. So, if your parent were less traumatized and they were more resilience and they can provide you these three things, you will be more strong. If you were in the way, you met all the wonderful NGOs, the IRC, MSF, Humanity Crew, and Save the Children and they help you, it will be different. That’s for sure.
But what we’re trying to do is to bring all the children to the maximum potential that they can achieve and I think we can do this, and we can do it by prevention not by treating, because treatment, there’s damage, it’s already there. This will never be the same, for sure.
Suarez: There are now so many places in the world where there’s terrible suffering going on. The border between Burma and Bangladesh where Rohingya Muslims are being driven out of Burma. Families are being broken up. Kids are ending up not even knowing where their parents are. In Sudan, we saw thousands of children separated from their parents, raised by the state. In places like Uganda, thousands, and in west Africa and Sierra Leone, thousands and thousands of young boys turned into soldiers at 11 and 12 and 13 years old encouraged to commit the most horrible crimes of violence. In a world with so much suffering, how do you do the triage work? It’s a world of a lot suffering and finite resources, and it seems a big challenge to me. Well, I’m not a professional but I look at it and I think what do you do first and who do you help and how. It just seemed to unimaginably big, the problem.
Daod: Start by doing, you know. I set home for, I think, five to six years. I’m coming from Israel and Palestine. We think that we are the most complicated, or we are the center of the world. So, as a Palestinian living in Israel, I think I remember myself around 2012-11, I said, “Come on, that’s it, khalas.” I was just focused in my work. I decide to be a plastic surgeon after I finished my medical school and I just stop going for demonstration. I dream about my big wide jeep and the fancy house and I will be rich.
And you start doing this, but you didn’t feel good with yourself. And when I switched to child psychiatry, and then, I go to Greece with the first mission and things start change. You understand that you will not solve all the problems but you will start with something. You will start with Omar on the beach. You will start with Ahmad in the hospital, with Nadia and her kids and you will say, “Okay. At least if I start doing something and someone else will do. And it will be a movement. People will start to understand that this is what we should do.” And it’s really important to know that you are doing this for yourself. I’m not doing this for others.
As I say, at the beginning, I decide to go for one direction. I didn’t go back and I become a child psychiatrist and then, I become like a human right activist or working with refugees. I’m doing this for myself. It’s a total selfish need, a total narcissistic need to feel okay with myself because I know that these clothes that I wear now, people in India working to color them and they die from cancer because the polluted water, they drink it and they die. I know that my phone, there are children in Congo digging in the mines and north Africa dying for $1 for this. So, if I’m not aware of this, so, you know, I just doing this because I cannot be naked and not using phone or something. So, I need this even, I need to feel okay with myself so I’m giving back.
And I think when we are aware that we are doing good just for ourselves, we will deliver this in a better way and with more compassion and being more human in our giving. Not just a selfie, and then, like I said, tourism or volunteering or something.
Suarez: Well, you mentioned that you could have been a plastic surgeon and Haifa is a beautiful city and a wonderful place. You could have been giving people smaller noses and larger breasts, but instead, you’re doing this. Was it a gradual process or something that just clicked in your head that said, “That’s not me being of use to the world. That’s not me being of use to myself”?
Daod: It’s a funny story. The switch was I was drinking a beer with my boss, the head of the department in surgery and he’s like a second dad to me. He told me, “Essam, you can’t be a surgeon. You are good. You are my favorite. But you talk to people too much. It doesn’t work. I think you write articles, and then, newspaper about the rights for doctors.” We had a strike that time, about our rights, “I think you need to be a child psychiatrist. There’s no child psychiatrist in our community. You know that, there is none. The children are waiting.”
The real transformation happened seven days after our first mission. Seven days after our first mission, me and my wife were sitting in a coffee shop with friends and I was telling all these crazy stories about CPRs and saving 27 CPRs, 21 was success. Confirming death for 54 kids and telling all these crazy stories and showing pictures from the New York Times and there is like one picture in New York Times, I remember that they wrote an editorial, the human rights watch based in our testimonies, the people who work in the beach about an incidence that a shipwrecked had happened in 28 of October, 2015. And I was telling them how I saved everyone and then, told them, “You see this kid? I was in the boat. I took it from Nicholas, Nico, the Spanish lifeguard. I did CPR, he was totally dead and then he was alive. I was so happy.”
And then, my wife, Maria, came and she look at the picture like this and she said, “Ah, this is Ahmed”. Everyone just stopped because it’s the first time since like three hours I was talking and talking and talking about what I say after that and diagnosed with myself with superman syndrome. It’s the first time there’s a name for the people and everyone said, “Who’s Ahmad?” And she said, “He’s like a 12 years old, 10 years old Syrian kid who came to the hospital on 28 of October after a successful CPR,” so I just jumped, I say, “Yeah, it’s me.” She said, “Honey, you’re the successful and the unsuccessful one almost. You were the only one.”
And she said, “He came to the hospital and he was not reacting at all.” We used to feed him and they used to have catheter to give urine and they put a needle in his hand, he didn’t cry and they used to close his eyes so they can’t get dry because he didn’t sleep. And she said how, spontaneously, she’s not a health professional, she’s a lawyer, she’s still in George Washington and how she start hug him day after day and talking with him because there was no parents in that moment. And the third day, he started moving and he went down from bed and they walked together and he go to the glass door of the department. He put his hand and he said, for the first time, the first three words. He said, “I want home,” in Arabic. When she say this story everyone was crying and I start crying like crazy.
In the first mission, I used to be a surgeon, I wasn’t a child psychiatrist. This was my entry ticket to the post. That’s why they make me be in the frontline with all the rescuers, because I was the only doctor. I was with the child. I didn’t give attention, and I think this is the first time that I understand, I start crying and telling everyone this story, I say, “What I did, I create robots with my hands. I am the child psychiatrist. I’m the one who speaks Arabic. No one else should understand these things. Why?”
And I think this was the point that I understand the importance of mental health really and I was accepting that being a child psychiatrist or a mental health professional is not just compromising from not being a surgeon. And 21 days after that, in 28 of November, we sent our first team of mental health professionals. And I think this is the moment that I get in peace with myself and I did had this transformation.
Suarez: After weeks at a time on the humanitarian frontline, not the battle frontline, do you need to talk to a therapist yourself?
Daod: Sure. Yeah. I went back because I lost it. There is an unknown video, I think AFP called it A Volunteer Cries for Help because I start crying there, and I used to have nightmares. And then, now, sometimes, I hearing voices, run to beach say there’s a boat and my friends bring me back, say, “There’s nothing.” I had a girl that I found and she was with me in the car. She’s dead and I remember myself talking to her. I couldn’t handle it, and without therapy, I couldn’t succeed to manage. I think Humanity Crew is part of the therapy that I’m going through.
That’s why all our volunteers, for example, you go for 30 hours of training before they travel and we follow them during their mission and after they come back. Our workers too, they have a therapist through Skype every week. Because as a therapist, you are a tool and you use this tool to help people. If this tool is broken, you cannot help them. You also can do harm with them. So, this is like one of the first things that we take care of, you need to take care of yourself.
Suarez: I wish I was optimistic enough to think that we’re going to stop wars, that we’re going to stop domestic conflicts inside borders that create refugees, I don’t think we are, not any time soon. So, without that, because that’s going back to the root cause. If we can’t go back to the root cause, what’s the second best thing we can do? For people who are not in their homes, for people who are not in their home countries, for people who are uprooted, until that day when human beings start treating each other a little better, what can we do in the meantime?
Daod: Vote for the right people. I think someone who’s sitting in Milwaukee or in Haifa or in Berlin, vote for the right people and the right people who are the people who are looking at the whole picture that we are part of the world. It’s not the one who promised that will make Milwaukee better or the US great again or Berlin stronger or Haifa more beautiful, the one who’ll say that we are part of this globe and we need to take care of each other. I think this is the small contribution that we can start by voting the local people because it’s not just about war.
We have refugees now, climate refugees, moving because of the climate. We have refugees coming from Africa. I also worked in boats in the Mediterranean, in front of Libyan coast. Some of them running from war, but some of them just, you know, they saw that Europe is so nice and they say, “Okay. I want it also.
By voting for the right people, Africa will change and US will change, and the Middle East and Europe and we will accept each other, and start by this, I think.
Suarez: Right now, today, there are millions of people, in camps in the region, the population of Lebanon has grown by like 40 percent just from refugees. When those people go home, what kind of help are they going to need then? Is it going to change? Are they going to need different sort of mental health services to be resettled?
Daod: You are very optimistic that they will go home. The Lebanese still have the percent of refugees from 48 until now. And the Syrians used to have the Palestinian refugees and they sent them now to Greece. Palestinians, they used to be refugees in Lebanon and they moved in ’67 to Syria, and they moved now to Greece. The average is 14 years to come back and resettle.
So, to make people go back, you need them to be strong. I think one of the major obstacles of refugees is dealing with the state of mind of being a refugee. Now, camps is open, but we teach them the system, teach them to wait for the fish, not go and fish. We don’t celebrate their strength. We welcome them with, “Oh, you are poor. Come, give me the baby.” If you are strong enough, go to the Turkey side, take his baby and cross the sea. He already have the baby all the way. He arrived to the shore, why you took his baby? You just make him panic more.
So, let’s celebrate their strength. France won the World Cup with almost 80 percent of refugees and immigrants in their national team. Diversity can makes us looks better. Babies look better when we have mix. My wife is half Russian, we have a baby now. She’s so beautiful, not just because she’s my girl, it’s because it’s a mix. And I think diversity can makes us just more beautiful and more human. And this is what we need to achieve, to celebrate the strength of these people and to celebrate the diversity, not the opposite.
Want more stories of transformational change on the world’s most pressing problems? Sign up for Skoll Foundation’s monthly newsletter.
