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| Lynn Hector |
Lynn Hector is Media & Communications Manager for Mercy Corps. She is based in Portland, OR, but works with communities in over forty countries to help them get back on their feet when disaster strikes, economies collapse or conflict erupts. She recently spent time in Colombia, near the Venezuelan border.
Can you tell us a bit about Mercy Corps, its vision and mission?
Mercy Corps is a global organization with 5,500 team members, the majority from the countries where they work. Our mission is to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities. We truly believe a better world is possible, and across more than 40 countries we focus on helping people survive through crisis, build better lives and transform their communities for good. We have a wide range of programs ranging from disaster relief and disaster risk reduction to economic and agricultural development to conflict prevention to food security, health, and water and sanitation.
How does Mercy Corps help support lasting change in the countries where it’s involved?
We believe that to truly create lasting change, communities themselves must be the agents of their own change. In 2018, we invested 74% of our program spending into long-term solutions that build stronger communities for tomorrow. We don’t just deliver aid or implement one-off development projects; we work with communities to identify their greatest challenges and then connect them with the resources they need to build solutions. Everywhere we work we bring together partners that play a critical role in ensuring a community’s long-term resilience – often these partners include local and national governments, the private sector and local civil society groups. As just one example, in our agricultural programs we don’t just provide agricultural inputs like seeds or fertilizers; we help connect farmers to trainings and education, financial services (bank accounts, loans, savings groups) and other information (weather, global commodity prices) to help them improve their crop yields and incomes over time.
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| Colombia/Mercy Corps |
You recently spent time in Colombia. What did you experience there?
I recently spent a few days with our team in northern Colombia near the Venezuelan border, in the department of La Guajira where tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants and refugees are living. Over the course of two days, we met Venezuelans with harrowing stories who have risked everything just on the hope of a new life promising some semblance of safety and opportunity. We spoke with a mother who brought her baby over from Venezuela when she couldn’t pay for treatment for his pneumonia; a 12-year-old girl who hasn’t been in school since leaving Venezuela and can no longer even write her name or do very basic multiplication; and a mother with a severely malnourished infant, weighing under a dozen pounds at one year old. At the border crossing, I saw hundreds of Venezuelans streaming over on foot in just the span of just 30 minutes or so – many with all of their possessions in a few bags or suitcases they could manage to carry. While there are “pendulum migrants” who cross over just to purchase food, medicine and other supplies they can no longer get in Venezuela before returning, the people we saw headed back toward Venezuela were few and far between. The number of Venezuelans fleeing to Colombia each and every day (believed to be about 4,000) is staggering when you see it up close; Paraguachon, where I was at, is just one legal border crossing along a porous 1,300 mile border (about the distance from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City). Many Venezuelans cross over via “trochas,” or illegal paths (many visible from legal crossings) where they are subject to extortion, robbery and violence; women are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault, and their children at risk of being swept up by traffickers or recruited into armed groups.
From your time spent there, what would you say is influencing the migration of Venezuelan residents to Colombia?
The decision to flee your country is a deeply personal one, and the Venezuelans we met near the border each had their own stories and reasons. But all of them left when they could no longer make ends meet and decided they were better off risking everything. Often, it was because they could no longer get reliable access to money, food, healthcare or medicine, or that there just wasn’t enough work to sustain their family. Many pregnant women had not received any prenatal care in Venezuela and were fearful of having their baby in Venezuela, where hospitals are short on doctors and supplies. Venezuela has had crippling electricity blackouts recently, and I met one woman who had just arrived and finally decided to leave with her husband and children when they could no longer get any cash out at ATMs because of the blackouts.
What is Mercy Corps currently doing to directly address the plight of those Venezuelan refugees?
Mercy Corps is currently providing emergency cash assistance to Venezuelans in the La Guajira and Cesar departments of Colombia, in the northern part of the country near the Venezuelan border. We provide pre-paid debit cards that can be used at stores or at ATMs so people can buy what they need most – whether that is food, water, medicine or to pay for shelter. We’ve assisted more than 11,000 people since starting our response last summer. We are also supporting Venezuelans who have migrated to other parts of Colombia where we already work to provide assistance to vulnerable Colombians displaced by ongoing conflict.
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| Colombia/Mercy Corps |
Would you say that Colombia has been an example of how to treat refugees with kindness?
Absolutely. The Government of Colombia and individual Colombians should be commended for generously welcoming Venezuelans. The government at all levels (national, local) is working with local groups and international organizations like Mercy Corps to figure out solutions as this migration crisis continues to grow. And our teams have met countless individual Colombians opening up their homes to help Venezuelans. But Colombia is struggling under this weight, and it can’t do it alone. There are more than 1 million Venezuelans in Colombia. Venezuelan migration into Colombia is putting pressure on Colombia’s already-stretched capacity to respond as the country faces ongoing volatility, challenges implementing the 2016 peace accords and its own protracted humanitarian crisis.
From Mercy Corps’ point of view, where are the current “hot spots” most in need of humanitarian aid?
The humanitarian community, including Mercy Corps, is stretched incredibly thin and there is no end of need in the world today. The important thing to recognize though is that the “hot spots” most in need of humanitarian assistance are all struggling with some form of conflict: Yemen, Syria, Northeast Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Central African Republic to name a few. A decade ago, 80% of all humanitarian need was driven by natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis. But today, 80% is driven by conflict. In all of these places, traditional humanitarian assistance (and funding to support it) is absolutely needed to help people survive, but ultimately humanitarian aid alone is not the answer – there needs to be political solutions to the conflicts driving this unprecedented level of need, and a greater focus on preventing violence from erupting in the first place.
According to Mercy Corps’ 2018 Annual Report, the organization did quite a bit of good in Yemen. Can you describe how Mercy Corps got aid into Yemen, given the logistical challenges created by war?
Last year we reached more than 3.7 million people in Yemen with assistance. We have a lot of experience working in conflict environments like Yemen. Our mission is to find safe ways in which we can connect people with the resources they need to survive and help their communities become stronger. We recognize that we need to accept a higher level of risk to keep operating in such a conflict.
More than anything, Mercy Corps relies on community acceptance. We know that if we and our work are valued, communities will commit to our protection. By engaging with communities over a long period of time and building trust, they’re able to secure the safety of our team members. In the conflict zones where we work across the world, we conduct daily security assessments of the routes team members travel to access our target areas. We are not blind to the risks involved in our work and dedicate a great deal of time and resources to understanding the communities where we operate as well as the impact of the aid and services that we provide.
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| Colombia/Mercy Corps |
In general, what is Mercy Corps’ biggest challenge in bringing relief to refugees?
I would say one of our biggest challenges is just the lack of attention and funding – the conflict in Syria has dragged on for eight years now; the conflict in Yemen for four. Other conflicts producing refugees have raged for decades. Donors (governments, foundations, individuals) are fatigued, and keeping attention and funding coming in the door for protracted refugee crises where there is no political solution in sight to the conflicts driving them it is a challenge. We also need more funding for violence prevention and conflict mitigation programs; we can’t just keep focusing on addressing the symptoms instead of the causes.
A second challenge is integrating refugees into communities and getting the funding needed to pursue long-term, durable solutions. For many refugees who have now spent years away from their home country, or children who have now been born as refugees, the reality is that they likely will never go home. So we can’t just focus on providing “relief” in the traditional sense; we must also work with governments and civil society to help them build a new life in the countries where they are living – that means access to jobs and sustainable income, education and social services. That is an incredible challenge for any country hosting millions of refugees and the international community as a whole to tackle.
What myths get in the way of adequately addressing the plight of refugees?
There is a general myth that refugees just need ongoing hand-outs of support. But the refugees we meet in our programs have incredible skills to contribute – they were doctors, engineers, teachers, students in their home country. They can – and they want to – contribute to their new countries, but they need a way to do so. They need safe and legal access to education and jobs, support to start their own small businesses and a way to safely integrate into their new communities. Another myth, which I alluded to earlier, is that the solution to the global refugee crisis is a humanitarian one. It isn’t. Of course, it is critical that we continue helping refugees meet their basic needs – shelter, food, water – but we will not truly tackle the global refugee crisis unless we address the conflicts driving it. We need political solutions to the conflicts tearing our world apart or we will forever be chasing our own tails.
Does Mercy Corps have an official position of how the US is currently handling its own refugee challenge along the border it shares with Mexico? How about offering solutions?
Mercy Corps is deliberately nonpartisan, apolitical and independent. We take positions solely based on what we see in the more than 40 countries where we work around the world. We are not experts in border security, and we recognize that governments around the world make difficult decisions every day to keep their citizens safe. Ultimately the Administration and Congress, with input from American citizens, will need to determine what policies will best meet those challenges. What we do believe is that none of the current proposals will do anything to address the reason people are migrating in the first place. Building a wall won’t solve it, closing the border won’t solve it and cutting aid that goes to help people in Central America won’t solve it. If the Administration hopes to curb migration from Central America, it must address the causes forcing people to leave their homes in search of safety and opportunity elsewhere. Mercy Corps has worked in Central America for over 30 years. We know that the choice to migrate is complex. Families risk leaving their homes only when desperation has set in, when they feel physically unsafe and when they see no hope for their future. We urge the Administration to maintain, not cut, U.S. investment in Central America to address insecurity, corruption, poor governance and economic devastation, as part of any comprehensive border security and migration policy. By reducing violence and generating greater economic opportunities for the people most likely to migrate, we can, over time, address the reasons families are leaving Central America.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
It is easy to feel hopeless and overwhelmed by the number of conflicts raging in the world and the massive levels of human displacement we see today – more than 68 million people on the run. But people are incredibly resilient and every day there are incredible stories of people overcoming adversity and making their lives and their communities better and stronger - you just don’t hear these stories as often. That’s why at Mercy Corps we believe a better world is possible and have 5,500 team members working under that fundamental belief every day. We encourage you to join us – as a donor, champion or advocate!
To learn more about Mercy Corps or donate, click here
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