Photos by the author
I couldn't get the stench of the tannery out of my hair for days.In September, I was interviewing the director of an NGO in Lebanon for a story about the plight of migrants in the country when he pulled out his phone and showed me a video taken by a Syrian woman. Lebanese Internal Security Forces had allegedly bulldozed her camp while she and seven refugee families were sleeping inside it the night before. The families were forced to move into a tannery near Saida, a city in the south of Lebanon.In that numbed-out way journalists sometimes have, I was excited to find a story. The NGO director did his best to dent my enthusiasm. "Bring a mask or something," he warned me. "The smell is very bad."I've been to some pretty smelly places, so I didn't think much of the warning until I arrived at the factory and almost gagged on the aroma of the rotting animal skins strewn everywhere. The harsh chemicals from the tanning process made it difficult to breathe; the kids were all coughing like heavy smokers.
"Most of us need to go to the hospital because we inhale these chemicals," a ten-year-old girl told me as I tried to breathe through my mouth. Before I left, she gave me a hug. "Please come back and visit us," she requested shyly.
It should have just been another scene to add to the collection of suffering witnessed since the Syrian war broke out. Big-eyed children in rags, raped women, amputees—after a while, the horror of these people's lives just seems to bleed together. But weeks later, the tannery was still all I could think about. Maybe I was tired of impotently watching the collection accumulate, but I wanted to change something, and not in a vague, existential, witness-bearing way. So I broke a journalistic rule and got involved directly.
The goal was pretty simple: Find the girl's family and their neighbors somewhere new to live, ideally a place where the air didn't border on lethality. I started two crowdfunding campaigns, on Indiegogo and GiveForward, and began pestering the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). That's the UN agency charged with sending people to inspect the tannery, which they soon confirmed to be unlivable.
But between the two campaigns, I've raised a mere three grand so far, and been exposed to all sorts of depressing defects and systemic problems with the humanitarian process. First, I wasn't about to hand the families a wad of cash and send them on their way; not only might that have placed them in danger at the hands of other refugees, it would be like giving someone who's inches from starvation a plate of foie gras and caviar. These people don't have toilets, so $3,300 in cash could do more harm than good.
In short, I've learned that it's a lot easier to earn some applause by teeing up internet fundraisers than it is to actually get Syrian families out of a hellhole.
I started the campaigns at the end of September. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that more than 4,000 people died in Syria that month; 1,201 were civilians, 257 of them children. So imagine 13 bustling grade-school classrooms, then empty them. In the second quarter of this year, 44,000 Syrians applied for asylum in the EU; 19,600 did not get it. There are no asylum statistics out for the third quarter of 2015 yet, but using those numbers as a yardstick, it's safe to say that in the month of September, thousands of refugees were told they had survived the incredibly dangerous, 3,000-mile journey for nothing. The Mediterranean Sea, the primary route taken by migrants fleeing to Europe, claimed an estimated 280 refugees last month. And as of the end of October, the seven families I'm trying to help myself are still living in that tannery.
Crowdfunding has occasionally made headlines stateside amid political stagnation over the issue of refugee asylum. At the beginning of October, the White House mounted a humanitarian initiative with Kickstarter—which normally caters to creative projects—to raise money for UNHCR to help Syrian refugees. The weeklong campaign accrued $1,777,007, but attracted criticism from those who pointed out that the 5,000 refugees benefiting from the campaign mean little next to the 4 million people registered with the UN. Some went so far as to label it a PR move designed to deflect attention away from other issues, like the fact that America has accepted only 1,500 refugees so far.
Bob Ottenhoff is president and CEO of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, a think tank that strategizes how to fundraise for humanitarian crises. He argues that while crowdfunding campaigns can be an excellent way to provide limited assistance to small groups of people, they won't make much of a dent in the refugee crisis.
"The war in Syria has been going on for nearly five years," Ottenhoff says. "Several hundred thousand people have been killed. There are estimates of as many as 8 million people that have been dispossessed.
"The hope is that Kickstarter will bring in new audiences and some additional funds for the Syrian refugee crisis, but I think we have to be realistic and recognize that it's only going to bring in millions of dollars for a problem that requires billions of dollars," he added.
As Ottenhoff points out, there are structural problems that have to be addressed even as we start to raise money for displaced migrants. "There are bigger issues here, like we really can't fix this refugee crises until we stop the war," he explains. "So there's a large additional amount of money that's needed, and then there is the issue of how many refugees should we allow into this country. There are lots of other parts to the story. Kickstarter raising a few million dollars is only part of it."
Justin Kazmark, a spokesperson for Kickstarter, maintains that the company never had techno-utopian illusions about ending the crisis with some internet magic. "We've seen the headlines over the last few months, and it's clear that this is a global crisis that's affecting millions and millions," he says. "I don't think that any Kickstarter campaign is going to solve this thing overnight, so that was not an expectation that we had. We just felt that we could have a modest effort, in fact, and play a modest role in having a positive impact."
It's clear that crowdfunding has the power to change lives, albeit somewhat arbitrarily. For example, Gissur Simonarson's Indiegogo campaign to raise money for a Palestinian-Syrian refugee photographed selling pens with his daughter in Beirut raised $191,214. Meanwhile, my campaign to help seven Syrian families hasn't come close to the $7,000 I was hoping to raise. How did the internet decide that Abdul, the pen-seller, was more deserving than others like him?
Simonarson, who runs a conflict news website, believes the success of that campaign stemmed from a single image: the picture of Abdul and his daughter selling pens. As with the viral photo of a drowned Syrian boy that sparked a surge of interest in the refugee crisis last summer, a dramatic, intimate vignette of suffering made an impact where statistics could not. "I saw the famous photo of Abdul holding his daughter," Simonarson recalls. "I'm a father myself, I have a five-year-old and actually, a 15-day-old right now… I tweeted the photo out. I just wanted to share the struggles of a Syrian refugee… the image took off. It got 6,000 retweets, and people started asking 'Who is this? How can we help?'"
Simonarson managed to track down Abdul and his daughter in Lebanon, started the Indiegogo page, and has been blown away by the amount raised. But he does admit there are logistics issues involved with distributing the cash. "I think the problem with crowdfunding this crisis is the hassle of getting it to the refugees who have no rights, like I'm having with Abdul right now," he says. "He wants to open up a bakery, so we're going to try to help him invest the money instead of just giving him the money and being like, 'OK, good luck then.' $190,000 is a lot of money, but it will run out still fairly soon if he starts to live a normal life and is not on the street. We're trying to make it sustainable for him and his family, and then he wants to set up an aid organization for other Syrian refugees."
Slava Rubin, the CEO of Indiegogo, explains that the most successful campaigns usually involve personal stories such as Abdul's. "These people want to be able to not only read about it, they want to be able to take action. And when these issues are talked about at a macro-level, like the Syrian refugee crisis, it's hard for anybody to feel like they can do anything," he says. "But when they feel more connected to an individual, and they see on Indiegogo that they can take action, that's where the impact happens."
I point out that had I been so inclined, I could have easily taken the money from my campaign and spent it on a trip to Vegas. Is there any way of ensuring the funds garnered from crowd-funding actually goes to the refugees?
"We work with the fundraisers to ensure [the refugees] are getting the money however they think appropriate," Rubin says. "So if that's through a nonprofit account, if that's into their personal bank account, if that's into somebody else's bank account—If we need to get creative as it relates to disbursing the money because they think that's more important for the safety or integrity of the funds or the fundraisers… We're always working very creatively with our campaign leaders."
It's an imperfect medium, albeit one with potential to empower the public. For the seven refugee families I'm trying to help, the $3,300 I've gathered so far might not buy them a bakery, but it should help ensure their lives are more comfortable once their housing situation is resolved. Other campaigns, such as this one to airlift food and medical supplies to civilians in Syria via drones, or this effort to buy baby carriages for refugee mothers arriving in Greece, should have a tangible impact; both have raised around $40,000 respectively.
"This just shows that one person can do a lot, if they try to help," argues Simonarson. "Many people feel very passive in this whole situation, but that shows the power that one person has. We just hear thousands and millions of the awful stories. We can kind of check out, so we need one good story to help galvanize people and get them interested. I've always looked at this as one act in a much bigger play."
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