My first career was in the military. I spent 12 years in the regular British Army, and then eight years in the Territorial Army. I've seen that refugees are part and parcel of conflict.
Now I am a Trustee for Goodwill Caravan, an NGO providing aid and support services to up to 20,000 refugees a year. Things like food, medical care, and legal advice.
I was in Cairo, Egypt, recently where we've been working with refugees from Gaza. The Gazans have been shunted around by Israel inside what I would call a collapsing bag, and most ended up down in or near Rafah.
We held workshops with women and girls talking about their experiences of the war, and many are simply shocked and stunned. They have been exposed to all-out war and they had nowhere to escape to. They are traumatized.
But there is a lot of angst and animosity too because many people in Gaza have nothing to do with Hamas, but they feel the Israelis are unfairly treating them like they do.
Trying to get goods into Gaza to help people has been difficult—boxes of food for families for a week, beds, defibrillators, and so on—but it's now better than before.
When these refugees end up in places like Cairo, they don't have any money because they can't access their accounts in Gaza. So, we help them to get things like ID cards through the authorities so they can open bank accounts and recall funds from Gaza.
Things like that make so much difference. We take the view that allowing refugees to self-determine their own lives relieves the burden on the rest of society and is also much better for the mental well-being of these individuals, who can take control of their lives again.
On top of the situation in Gaza, there are a lot of refugees coming up from sub-Saharan Africa, such as the Sudanese. They tend to be forgotten about.
When we visit these refugees, something I find surprising and sad is an awful lot of those forcibly displaced are the kind of people a healthy society cannot survive without, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, and so on.
One of the places we visited and distributed aid was a school run for Sudanese children, by the teachers who have also come from the Sudan.
We've only been in Cairo for a few months, but we have a pretty sophisticated setup in Greece already, particularly on the medical side of things. We connect refugees with the Greek medical system.
At a hospital in Athens, there's a whole ward of refugees with oncology issues, and they also deal with a lot of the on-call needs, such as births.
One thing people don't fully understand is that the authorities mostly let the refugee camps run themselves.
The police may go in if there has been a serious crime, such as a murder. But other than that, the refugees handle things. Therefore, inevitably, one of the challenges is traffickers are operating in the camps and taking advantage.
Most forcibly displaced people—60 to 70 percent, according to UNHRC data—leave the country they're fleeing from and sit on the border. They don't want to go anywhere else. They want to return as soon as it's safe to do so.
But that can mean sitting in a camp for years with your life effectively on hold. You can't make any progress, your children grow older, and you're stuck.
So, traffickers come in and push for people to travel all the way to the supposed land of milk and honey elsewhere, such as the U.K. with its National Health Service (NHS). And these traffickers charge royally for that—thousands of euros a person.
To pay the traffickers, these camps end up with prostitution of women and children, slavery, and forcible organ harvesting. A kidney for a ticket to England, that kind of thing.
We're trying to educate the refugees about the right places to go for information and services, and who to avoid. For example, if someone offers you a free blood test, don't take it because they may be seeking your organs.
And we're trying to reunite refugee families. There's a lot of separation of children from their parents.
In the refugees issue, all these crises are linked. There is a quite massive movement of people across Africa and the Middle East into Europe.
You have countries in Europe not able financially to support the extra people coming in as refugees, and that's going to increase the political pressures against them.
The UNHCR recognizes about 160,000 refugees in Greece. But I believe the real figure is considerably more than that.
If you are forcibly displaced you generally don't want to draw attention to yourself in a foreign country, so those people tend not to make themselves known to any authority.
It is a sad, but common trait, that those who are in great difficulty withdraw into their shells and don't even communicate with their friends, which compounds their difficulties.
I took a carload of aid for refugees through Serbia and Bosnia to Athens, and every bridge you drive past there's a bunch of them sitting, waiting for the rain to stop. They are all over the place and it's very visible.
In more developed countries, people ask: Why have they come all the way here?
But the reality is that most of these people, if they were given the chance, would stay next door to their local border. If you're used to Sudanese weather, are you going to be particularly happy living in England? No, probably not. You go because you are living in purgatory.
So, it's important to educate the refugees—who are at the behest of traffickers trying to extract money from them—about the right places to go for the things they want and need.
We believe they should have a refugees app with all this vital information to help thwart the traffickers. They've all got smartphones because that's how they bank and communicate, so an app could reach them directly and undermine those seeking to exploit them.
The traffickers are relying on the fact that the refugees don't know anything or have enough good information to make an informed decision. Europe and the West would be better off spending more money on educating refugees with the right information.
There is all this talk of stopping the boats and so on. But the reality is you need to look deeper than that. You need to look where it all happens. If you're going to solve the problem, you need to solve it on the border of the country those people are leaving.
For the Gazans, there is the hope that they can return home. But there is also the practical question: Will they have a home to return to?
At the moment, a lot of Gaza is flattened and not fit for purpose. But I suspect the UN and various development agencies will go in and spend money on infrastructure when the fighting ends, to try to return things to normal there.
But for now, there is only hope. And I hope that something is resolved very soon.
When you see it on the television, it's pretty horrible. But when you actually meet the people, you get a far better sense of how they're suffering—and what they need.
And that is the important thing: Trying to help these people so they've got what they need to determine their lives, which is far better for them to have some control over their lives. It's better to get them back on their feet.
Most of the people you meet just want to live their lives. They don't want to overturn the state or anything else like that. They just want to go to work, to earn money, and to have children and provide for them and enjoy life.
James Cannon is a Trustee of Goodwill Caravan.
All views expressed are the author's own.
As told to Shane Croucher.
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About the writer
James Cannon is a Trustee of Goodwill Caravan.
