 Hi everyone and welcome to our discussion today on migration and humanitarian work in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. My name is Isabel Rosenbaum. I'm a senior Tufts and a co-leader of the middle Tufts Middle East research group which is part of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. Thank you also to the Tufts chapter of Amnesty International for co-sponsoring this event and to everyone at the Institute for Global Leadership for making this possible. And of course many thanks to our four panelists today and welcome back virtually I suppose to Tufts. Alex another member of Merge will briefly introduce our panelists and outline the structure of the event. Thank you. Hi I'm Alex Dingel and I'm a first year at Tufts and a discussion leader for Merge. I'm excited to introduce our members today first with Aline Sarah who graduated from Tufts in 2006 and is the co-founder and CEO of Natakallam, an award-winning social enterprise that hires displaced persons and host communities as online tutors, teachers and translators. Andreas Ashikalis graduated from Tufts in 2002 and is the founder and manager of Project ELEA, an NGO located in the ELEONAS refugee camp in downtown Athens, Greece. Georgie Nink who graduated in 2015 has worked in Jordan for five and more years leading youth development, programming and producing research on the Syrian conflict for humanitarian and government actors. Biz Herman who graduated in 2010 is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of California Berkeley and a photojournalist based in New York City. Her work focuses on the politics of history, conflict and group belonging. Her dissertation research examines the ways in which trauma impacts social stability. For the structure of the panel all of the speakers will introduce themselves and their work for five minutes each after which we will open the floor to Q&A from attendees. Please write your questions in the Q&A found at the bottom of the screen. For the final 10 to 15 minutes each panelist will be in a separate Zoom to which we'll send out the links and then attendees will be able to ask questions and talk more casually with them. Thank you so much. Thank you Alex and right now in the chat I'm going to send out the links to each of the Zoom rooms and so please copy and paste these or mark them down just because I'll post them again towards the end of the event but they won't be available once this webinar ends. Great thank you and now if we like to turn to our panelists to start introducing themselves and then Bis if you would like to start. Sure so my name is Bis Herman I graduated in 2010 from Tufts and I kind of have a dual career path that I'm on right now so I'm happy to talk to people about either of them. I am currently working on my dissertation at the University of California Berkeley in political science and I also work as a visual journalist freelance and have worked on stories both in the US and abroad over the past decade but the the core of my research focuses on the ways in which trauma as experienced through conflict or migration impacts communities after conflict cessation and Izzy actually was an RA with me this summer on one of these projects but so the the focus of my work intersected with the sort of research on the Middle East working with another alum another Tufts along Mike Nick and Chuck he is he works with Beyond Conflict which also has a connection with Tufts and he was he developed a mental health program that could be just sort of put forward in settings where there are not a lot of mental health care available or accessible so we piloted this program last year in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan with Syrian refugees and so I was part of the research team that was doing the evaluation for the intervention so the sort of focus on the intervention was twofold we wanted to look at the way the intervention sort of worked in and of itself in reducing trauma related distress among people that took the program and then we also wanted to look at the sort of secondary step for that so see how as people sort of improved in their mental health outcomes how did that impact the way they related to their community so my research sort of broadly focuses on these themes of mental health and community well-being and then we sort of focused on it in this one case in Zaatari camp and the thing that has been really interesting to work on has been that as research has sort of started to focus on the fact that living through conflict living through forced migration has real this is very obvious to everybody who's in this has real world impacts on individuals and on their lives that's often not accounted for in the literature in research on conflict and on forced migration and so something that has been kind of shocking and looking through this work and working in this area is that a lot of the times there's sort of this idea that having these lived experiences and having them going through conflict and going through forced migration obviously impacts people a lot of the outcomes that people look at relate to sort of the economic factors or the institutional factors of the political factors and very rarely do they focus on the human factors so one big sort of focus of the research that I've been trying to do with my dissertation is sort of saying what what what do individuals need what do people need to support them through these transitions through the experiences that they lived with before conflict during conflict and after conflict so I think that the other people on this panel have much more sort of applied experience working with individuals working in the sort in the Middle East my my sort of research is sort of this more broader based theoretic approach so I'm happy to speak more to that and I'm really glad to be here with all of you thank you so much this um Aline what do you mind going next for hi everyone I'm I'm actually in Paris uh dealing with a brutal lockdown that's just been called so it's quite depressing anyways uh so I graduated from Tufts in 2006 so it's been a while that I'm uh I'm in the Tufts scene um my background so I'm Lebanese born and raised in New York and kind of classic Lebanese diaspora I've done the back and forth uh for a very long time between New York Beirut um spent a couple but many summers in Lebanon and I also um after Tufts I moved to Lebanon then I worked in conflict resolution uh human rights and then I became a journalist for a couple years so I was in Beirut during the Arab uprisings and I was covering a lot of what was going on in Syria uh mostly with the human rights angle so I think we all know what what happened there and Lebanon is uh the country that has the highest density of refugees in the world and now is grappling with a terrible socio-political economic situation as well but um so I'm actually here because I run Natakalem which is a social enterprise that's kind of quasi tech startup quasi I mean I would say it's much more of a social enterprise than a startup but the idea for Natakalem is a result of kind of my upbringing uh growing up in the US and speaking mostly French and English um as as as a kid and my Arabic has never been very good and I am sure many of you have taken Arabic and know how difficult it is and there's that dilemma like there's that discrepancy between MSA and the dialects and many Americans study and then they come and speak to cab drivers in very formal Shakespearean like Arabic so the idea for Natakalem was related to an observation that there was a need for language learners who are studying Arabic to learn dialect at an affordable price from abroad and at the same time I was looking at the situation for Syrians in Lebanon who for the vast majority do not have a right to work and will likely never have a right to work so really focusing on that community of middle-class educated Syrians who were basically stuck in Lebanon with no viable way to survive and and see a future so the the idea was very simple um it's an idea I had in in 2014 after I graduated from my master's uh at SIPA at Columbia uh which was to provide an income opportunity to displaced persons through the digital freelance economy by leveraging their access to technology because many displaced people today are connected and use their smartphones as lifelines and on the other end it could be people like us you know lots of humanitarians lots of young students who want to learn the language and so their tutor would become this displaced person who thus gets access to an income also a restored sense of dignity and purpose and the learner gets affordable flexible language practice uh because it's over over Skype or whatever virtual um medium you choose so that was five years ago um and since then so we're we just celebrated our our five-year anniversary at Natakelem and we've expanded so we we focused on Syrians early on in Arabic but we now offer about eight dialects of Arabic with refugees from Yemen Egypt Palestine unfortunately in the Middle East there's a lot to choose from sadly we also launched Persian with Iranian and Afghan refugees Spanish with Venezuelan and Central American immigrant refugees displaced persons the word refugee is a little bit complex and uh most recently we launched French with Francophone African refugees so we have a B2C model which means uh business to customer if we want to go the business lingo we do partnerships with schools and universities so I think the few of you have done Natakelem through your Tufts Arabic class um and then we also offer translation services which are another type of of remote work opportunity in the language sector that we identified as a means to provide income to displaced people so um from an impact perspective uh we've uh we've almost hit a million dollars in disbursement to displaced people and I'm not sure how I mean this is more of a humanitarian panel so you know in the social enterprise space you know you really look at these metrics they're very tangible metrics though um echoing uh what um Biz was just saying which is the psychosocial impact of Natakelem is actually very powerful because students and their tutors become really good friends and a source of human warmth and connection which I find really powerful and and we've heard from their testimony so I'll stop there and we'll happily answer questions later on great thank you I mean uh Georgie what are you mind going thank you hi everyone I'm Georgie I graduated from Tufts in 2015 um and I came right after that here to Amon Jordan which is where I am now as well um for the first three years that I was here in Jordan I was working for an INGO called Questcope and I was helping to lead and manage and grow a youth center in Zaatari camp in the north of Jordan which is home to um roughly 80,000 Syrian refugees um we ran a youth center in this camp alongside a number of Jordanian colleagues and then Syrian refugee colleagues themselves who were from the camp um leading educational psychosocial recreational programs for youth um and teenagers and young adults um so we had a range of sports programs art programs a big library computer lab um and I worked with that program for several years it's actually the same space where Biz and her colleague Mike were working a couple of years ago so I got to overlap with them and see the incredible um work that they were doing on the mental health program that Biz was also talking about um and so my role I played kind of many roles at that center but what we were really trying to do was have a program that was um kind of led and designed and managed by Syrian refugees who themselves were residents of the camp rather than having external people coming in um to manage our design programs and we found that a majority of humanitarian programs in the camp in my opinion unfortunately are managed somewhat externally um designs are made abroad and then come to fit into these authority context rather than having a much more localized kind of design process for a lot of those programs which also in my opinion hinders the ability of those programs to be as effective or as relevant as they could really be to the target you know community in the camp um so we really tried as much as possible um to to have it kind of being led and run by the Syrian team themselves we had a team of Syrian 45 Syrian refugees that worked with our program full-time and they were kind of the leaders and then we so myself and the Jordanian colleagues tried to be the back end support bringing in funding connecting them with external opportunities writing reports to donors etc but um trying as much as possible to have them at the home um and I also kind of reflected a lot during that time and since in my other positions here about um my role as an expat working in the Middle East um and working in Jordan specifically where can I provide an ad value where does my role stop where is my role limited where can a local person a Jordanian or a Syrian in Jordan um do a better job than I can do on something and so um that's something that I'm also happy to talk about in addition to my specific work anxiety uh now or afterwards in the breakout sessions um after finishing up with the ingo quest scope I switched over to do more research and analysis work so last year I was working with iMac which is another ingo here in Jordan um and I was leading qualitative research on the issue of refugee returns from Jordan to Syria and population movements in general so looking at the factors that would cause refugees to return from Jordan to Syria and the factors that would cause them to stay in Jordan in the host country um and so I was leading interviews with refugees across Jordan trying to get at the heart of some of these issues and factors um and compiling reports and data for uh UN clients in that case um and it was a really fascinating research project what we mostly found in a very brief term like in very brief terms was that safety and security factors are by far the most um kind of important and and the most heavily weighed by um this at least this set of refugees in Jordan that we were speaking to economic considerations factored into their decision making a little bit other things relating to health or education or access to services between Syria and Jordan um but on the whole like over 90 percent of the refugees that we spoke to were were not interested in returning to Syria at all in the near to medium term um pretty much in mainly due to safety and security considerations um and then currently I'm working on a different research project for a company called Integrity Global um still based in Oman and this research project is actually inside of Syria inside of northeast Syria so Derzorokha and Hasaka Governors um near the Turkish border mainly and we are looking at um community resilience and stability and what kind of is the baseline level of community resilience in those areas and then what factors are also needed to make those communities more stable um more able to stand on their own feet and most of what that relates to is essential services restoring water networks restoring electricity networks etc so I started off in the very kind of program management role and now I've kind of transitioned over to doing some more analyst roles and I'd be happy to talk more about any of that later on thank you great thank you Georgie and Andreas thank you for joining to the video started out and so if you'd like to introduce yourself now yes hi guys uh just to say that I missed some of the earlier speakers because there was a confusion with the hour so excuse me if I uh you know repeat some things or can't participate as effectively in the conversation so my name is uh Andreas um I come from Cyprus I was uh at Aft until 2002 and and then I moved to Switzerland where my family was based and I did let's say a tour of the some of the international organizations through a series of series of um internships uh of different duration in about six different organizations and at Aft I had studied economics and international relations so this was a reasonable path for me to take however I felt a bit disappointed or quite disappointed with the international system and the ineffectiveness or the the prolonged discussions back and forth to produce some resolutions that don't have so much uh impact in people's lives so I I was kind of had an ethical problem with that so I went into the private sector and I worked in a company called Village Camps that organizes summer camps for children mostly privileged children high-end families around the seven countries in Europe with different programs and I did that for 11 years as part of the uh management of the company and in 2015 um the Greek or the European refugee crisis uh had started and and that was around the time that I was quitting my job and trying to take some time off and move on to something else and so I happened to be you know watching what the entire world was watching the the arrivals by boats to the Greek islands uh five thousand seven thousand people on some days and um I said to myself what are you doing here why are you not there what are all these international volunteers doing there and I speak the language so I basically went to volunteer for a week in Lesbos I was part of the of a team that helped set up the support camp next to Moria the camp that recently burned down and and I was there just for a week but then I couldn't forget what was uh what what I saw it was you know the most powerful and but also the most uh horrific uh experience of my life so I went back to Lesbos for another three months until uh March 2016 and basically I experienced the full part of the the emergency response in uh search and rescue from the sea on the beach at the camps uh moving people with buses boats and the the whole the whole thing that was going on at the time chaotic chaotic uh conditions and dramatic situations throughout and and towards uh on the 20th of March 2016 when the EU turkey deal uh was signed and it was going to take effect um I I left Lesbos and then I started thinking that um Greece would become now not a transit country where people come and spend a week or so uh on their way to Germany or northern Europe it would become a host country and I I felt like I wanted to continue offering in this in this area and working with refugees uh so I am I set up a project that uh tries to respond to short term but also medium and long term needs of refugees and specifically we we have been working since June 2016 so it's been four and a half years at the Leona's refugee camp in Athens uh Greece uh that has 2500 people from many different countries the majority was Syrian but nowadays the majority is certainly from Afghanistan and but we have about 20 different nationalities of of people and um we cover basic it's a government run center so uh we had certain obligations let's say we run food distribution seven days a week for 2500 people uh and distributions of various hygiene items clothing so on and so forth this is at the beginning afterwards the food distribution was replaced with a cash card system that the families receive cash support in the meantime the main objectives of the project were around education and power man and you know creative engagement so we we uh just before the pandemic we were running 17 language courses classes per day for English, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Farsi, we were running a kindergarten with 80 children, football academies or soccer academies with Barcelona Foundation and about 15 different activities every day for women, children, for men, excursions, workshops, employability programs, support for uh social integration initiatives and about 20 partnerships with uh groups in Athens specialized on uh all the programs you can think of that we facilitated their access to the camp and work together to uh for them to have uh workshops inside but as much as possible outside of the camp and um yeah we've been supporting this one community this one location and the project helped make this camp one of the best uh in the country if not the best it was the camp where all the um Euro parliament members and ministers and the four heads of states as far as I've met have visited the camp as part of a showcase and um that was um a lot due to our work and it's something that we didn't uh like because they were hiding behind this camp and the way it looks to to to hide the the real problems and not excuse themselves with what they've done to the you know the funding that they've received which has been an enormous amount and and um we created a very close relationship with the community so we have their respect and the the love of the community and we don't want people to stand in food lines we don't want them to be independent on us or on the government for we we want to keep them happy keep them busy create a good atmosphere help their education help their employability have their next steps so that they can start rebuilding their life and move on to to a more permanent situation because we don't agree with the existence of a refugee camps but with the 200,000 refugees that are about now in Greece they are still absolutely necessary so we try as much as possible to provide this safety and be close to the community and unfortunately we had to deal with all kinds of medical emergencies suicides rapes of minors and all kinds of problems you can imagine but it's part of the job uh it's a grassroots volunteer organization uh with no staff members so in four years 1400 volunteers came through the project for different durations and yes we're gonna be there for as long as the conditions allow it the government allows us to be there and obviously at the moment we we shorten our activities by 90 percent we're just doing essential distributions and we cannot be gathering people together during the pandemic in a camp that is already very overpopulated um so there you go that's project and i'm happy to take any of your questions great thank you and i thank you andreas and the rest of our panelists um so now we'd like to open to q and a and so please as a reminder send your questions the q and a box like normally where the chat would be on zoom and while we're waiting i have a kind of a general question i think applies to many if not all of you about here's what how the role of smaller nonprofits or social enterprises kind of works along with larger like international NGOs or government aid bodies and maybe some of the challenges whether in research or like in the implementation of these projects some of the challenges and or collaborations that you've seen and experienced and however it would like to answer please just jump in can i go yes i don't hear you okay all right yes please all right uh as far as uh Greece is concerned there were 400 there are 400 NGOs and organizations active in the refugee crisis and then there is the government and on my from my personal experience i've i've met people and organizations of of different qualities and levels of interest and efficiencies and um and i prefer to work with grassroots small organizations because usually they are motives of being there are the right ones and it means that they they're they care more to do a good job as opposed to only uh you know worrying about the image or the salary at the end of the month and so unfortunately i have to say that my experience with large NGOs and the Greek government has been quite negative throughout and with a lot of corruption cases and just programs not functioning and programs being there for the wrong reason and salaries being five times higher than what they need to be and but i learned that there's always good people in every organization and if you can find common interest and focus on on okay you you're offering this you're offering medical psychological support education can we work with you on this one project and see how it goes and if it benefits the people you're helping then you should go for it i think and as long as you don't step over your ethics and principles in the process because we also had a lot of organizations tried to use us for videos and promotions and fake their existence in the camp and things like this really disgraceful things when it comes to the humanitarian field so we should never take advantage of the people we are helping and we we don't publish photos and photos of children and videos without the okay of the adults but never of the faces of the children for example and and we you know we we are the ones protecting the community from from this type of dangers and yeah that's my opinion great thank you is georgia lean if any of you would like to say anything or we can move on to another question um i did just want to add that i have had some similar experiences i think when i was working in saturday as andreus was mentioning um quest scope was definitely one of the smaller NGOs that was working in the camp and we there are over 40 organizations active in the camp so it is somewhat of a crowded humanitarian space in that regard um and we had mixed and in many cases negative um yeah perceptions of them through collaborating um i think that with a smaller organization you sometimes do have the ability to be closer to the ground level answering to fewer um management steps in the ladder there there will always be steps in the ladder but our steps and our ladder rungs kind of ended here in amon and with some of the larger organizations you have more rungs going up to brussels and going up to geneva and going up to new york especially with un agencies and i think that can really muddy the actual efforts and the impact that you're trying to have on the ground um at the same time i would caution against like a too much of a binary i think that we as a small organization had plenty of our own internal issues and politics that hindered our ability to do work sometimes and we also lacked capacity in some areas like uh for example security procedures and protocols and some of those kind of just basic things that should be in place for staff we were lacking because we were small and so i think it really does kind of go both ways yeah just to build on what george was saying i think that like the from the more research perspective of things like when you're thinking of the funding that's available for like impact evaluations or for like different programs a lot of the really big organizations have a lot of money but there's a lot of bureaucracy to be able to access those funds and so there's this way in which it's sort of like there are barrier internal barrier setups if you don't know how to navigate that system it's really hard to get that funding so like george was saying before it's like an entire job skill to be able to write a grant for us aid as opposed to a different like they have so many different ways of so many different documents you need but i think that one thing that has really stuck out is that i've worked on USAID projects with researchers who are very plugged into the ground and place of high priority on having collaborations and really making sure that there's sort of a lot of focus on the actual people that are being affected by the project and then there are people that sort of see it as part of their research agenda and just a way to get data and i think that you as a like in whatever capacity you're in it's part of your job to make sure that you are either part of a team that is prioritizing the people that you're working with or that you're pushing the if you've been brought on to a team that you feel like it's not doing that that you're pushing them in that direction and i think that like that so if you know there's a lot of resources available in the larger organizations but i think george is right the smaller organizations could be more nimble and can be more um there's a lot um yeah i think it's a balance in both in all different ways and i think it's about making sure that you sort of are clear on what your own sort of internal ethics um are and the ethics of the team that you're working with and making sure that you're sticking by that yeah i'll just echo what has been said um i also think unfortunate i mean the bureaucracy of major international organizations is i think the number one issue i also think um so i i represent a social enterprise so our goal is to be self-sustainable so we we spend what we make through our business operations right so not relying on donors who have their agenda and they're very often rigid implementation frameworks politicized uh implemented i mean anyone who studied syria we know where the aid has gone right which which parts of of the country have gotten uh humanitarian aid of course it's very complex but um you know yeah unfortunately there's limitations in each you know in in the big and small and the different types of models and i think that the harmony is when we can actually work all together across channels bring the large organizations to the table for what they're good at doing bring the smaller nimble ones to the table as well have more dialogue have more you know why are all the big large events always bringing just the huge players to the table why aren't there places for the smaller ones um you know because those can do a lot together so i think yeah unfortunately yet we do have um you know there are a lot of broken things about the large humanitarian organizations systems but i mean as we're seeing here on this panel there are still lots of smaller ones and and hopefully we can keep building all together um i think that would be you know the best uh because each each one has their um you know their advantages and different things they can bring to the table great thank you all we actually from an attendee we have kind of a question that relates a lot to what you said is as your NGO or enterprise grows how do you ensure the quality is being preserved for those receiving services if any would end would anyone like to answer i suppose also like how do you what are the challenges that as you grow or as an organization grows that emerge and how do you address those i'll jump in since i i'm my mic is open so i think you know we're talking about scaling right and how do you scale and preserve the depth of your impact and the authenticity of your impact and i do think that is the crux of the challenge right because doing something at a small scale is one thing but multiplying it is a whole other and i think unfortunately we live in a world where you know when you read reports you know there's always these massive numbers and it's like x amount of people impacted it's like what do you mean by impact did you give them a blanket wonderful you know so i think you know i think whether it's a social enterprise space or the NGO space unfortunately if we can also embrace small deep impact a bit more and give that space and and value it rather than this you know this constant drive for making it so big because you do dilute it at that time so you know with metakelem we're still relatively small you know so like we've worked with over 200 refugees that number doesn't impress most people but actually these refugees have been part of metakelem for five years they've been getting income on a monthly basis for five years that has sustained them and given them a sense of purpose um which is unquantifiable so i think um i think you have to scale slowly and strategically and you have to also do a bit of this is more of the startup mindset rapid prototyping you know you try small simple things see if it works but don't like i think a little bit the NGO mindset is like you want to go do this massive project upfront get that huge funding and then if it doesn't work you're stuck in this very rigid mindset and you're like oh no you know so many NGOs are like oh my god it's the end of you know the year i have this budget i'm gonna buy staplers you know like things like that and i think we need um more flexibility more patience more appreciation of smaller deeper impact and taking our time because you know if you study certain companies or NGOs that exploded really quickly um it's there has been damage done along the way like you know i'm sure some of you might be familiar with you know a couple of organizations that really grew quickly but then they had a lot of problems they had to fix along the way and you know i can give an example which is an organization i really respect and love and we actually work with them like the kiva had a very interesting journey if you look in in depth with the micro finance and what has happened so you know i think um scaling is one of the hardest things i think right you know launching a program is difficult itself like bringing it to life but you know in the social enterprise journey you know you you learn that you kind of have this constant slow growth and then the scaling part is much harder and you really have to think every step of the way and also i think just have things with them more of a you know how we're going into slow food mindset slow you know a slow growth mindset as well even though the goal of of course is to impact as many people as possible but with deep sustainable impact in my opinion great thank you and we have another question of how has the pandemic affected your work and your organizations and how have you dealt with some of the challenges that have arose from the pandemic a big one would anyone like to begin yep the pandemic has effectively stopped more than 90 percent of our program and we too we have a responsibility towards the several hundred vulnerable and sick and war injured people that are living in in the camp and so in fact before the the rules were implemented we took our own on our own initiative scaled down the program to the bare minimum and i think there is no question whether you need to prioritize your organization and what you offer and having a big team and using your funding or the the people you're helping with and like i'm rarely behind the computer you know i'm hands-on we're in a camp we we uh to share something that the previous person was saying about the scaling up like every company you it's a very tricky decision whether you grow your your organization or not and for you know we we feel like we know the children by their first name in the camp where we work and when we receive compliments even by big international organizations who say how about what you're doing here is really good you should grow it you should take it elsewhere you should you cannot keep that personal relation and that authenticity and however you can be fully open advise other groups and you let them use your models your resources because it's not an area where you should be competing with others you should be um working with others and yeah big decisions to make and i think covid it's a it makes the refugees at the camp where we work a lot more depressed some of them have lost their jobs the government has removed the the children from the greek schools in order to protect the greek families from covid and they have shut down the camp locked the camp and locked the people inside for a long period of time so you can understand that their life has has once again changed to the worst and but that's what groups like us do we are there to help them get through it in a very responsible way so until covid is is gone or managed everything needs to prioritize the health uh of the residents very thank you anyone else yes i mean thank you i'll just jump in because i have the opposite example sorry and george i'll be i'll be quick just because there's a number of hope in this depressing world and pandemic we're living in which is so interestingly for netakel um because and i wish i wasn't in front of a computer all day i'm very jealous andress but um so the funny thing about netakelum is it's completely covid proof and um while so many of our language tutors you know lost whatever other job they had on the side you know a couple of people you do things that are like in person uh which and you know everything shut down um obviously there was a boost in online activity and online learning so interestingly um during the you know in march last year when you know covid hit um netakelum actually saw a tripling of its language classes um so we had triple number of students signing up to classes and over time that reflected actually um a doubling uh for some of our language partners in income so you know that was like obviously a positive example and you know it speaks to you know the virtual realm and how that can sometimes come in and i'm not advocating for us converting to virtual i i love hugging people and being in person and the real conferences but you know that would be you know we were really um lucky to see that at least the people we're working with were able to get this because obviously refugees are uh gonna are extra vulnerable to crises like this uh and migrant people uh migrant uh you know displaced persons so so that's just i guess an opposite example of of how the kind of that virtual space has has you know had a positive impact on on the populations we're working with back to the negative side sorry everyone um we um have seen an impact just on the very kind of concrete and implementation and field level um kind of extra challenges for our field team inside of northeast syria who are actually doing the data collection on the ground um they're doing surveys uh large-scale community surveys across different communities as well as some individual longer interviews and some focus group discussions and so they really do kind of come into contact with hundreds of people over the span of a few weeks and i think that that really worries them as uh is understandable and um they are kind of being as safe as they can and social distancing but it's also difficult to social distance when you need to find like a safe and confidential space in which to conduct a survey and so we're encouraging them to stay outdoors as much as possible but when you're in a crowded marketplace how can you really um lead a successful and you know safe and confidential survey with someone in the middle of a crowded area and you want that someone to also be able to express their opinions uh very you know openly etc so this is just kind of like a zooming into a very kind of detailed level impact that has been difficult um for our field team specifically and then i think on the macro level it has also um because we're collecting data on stability and resilience it has decreased the feelings of stability and resilience as i think it has across the entire world this is not um unique to northeast syria but already northeast syria is facing a huge amount of issues um from the turkish incursion last year and lingering instability from that in the kurdish area um there are still there are still isis presence in eastern derazor coming and going and in certain areas there is a huge lack of infrastructure and basic services and so then you add the pandemic to that um sometimes people laugh outright at our survey questions though we've tried to phrase them in a very open way and but even just talking about um how do you feel that the stability level of your community is heading do you feel your community is becoming more or less stable i mean sometimes people actually um can't even believe that we're asking those types of questions so i think that it has uh just caused less stability or or destabilized as it has in in many areas um not just northeast syria great thank you and then i've had a question as well as more related to tufts about how do you think skills or not you developed or experiences at university kind of led you into your later interests and work and what are some of the most important skills that you felt like you learned early on in your careers i'll jump on this one um i think that the thing that tufts in particular the agile is very good at is sort of um providing opportunities and training to undertake projects in your undergrad career with um you know alums or through other organizations that sort of give you real-world practice and real-world experiences um that you can then go into once you graduate you're not starting from scratch you're sort of starting from this place where you have some sort of foundation of knowledge and and either field work or um sort of understanding of the the way that you know a job would operate or a or research would operate or anything um so i think that the one thing that was the most useful was while at the ijl sort of being encouraged to be not just sort of like in books and not just in the library but sort of actually be more um more hands-on and more applied and i think that the the ability to sort of get practice while also getting sort of like training and how to work ethically and safely is a really important thing that you can do while you're at university and sort of um a really good piece of advice that i got was make sure to sort of seek out mentors and speak with mentors and ask questions and be open about um the work you want to do and the work that you might not even know exists that you could do so i think that that's the thing that is definitely worth um pursuing while you're at university because there's you know you really don't get the time and the space as you do even though it feels like you have a lot of classes and midterms and all these things university is a unique period of time where you're able to sort of have um a lot of resources right at your fingertips and you can go to Heather and say like do you know someone that does this and she probably does because she is the best so um yeah i encourage you to sort of be proactive in seeking things out okay thank you i we have a more specific question related to that which is what recommendations would you all have for first years or i suppose for anyone in college interested in doing NGO ground work with refugees in the Middle East but are not taking arabic i mean i think there are many refugees who aren't arabic speaking right i just want to make but so i think there's other um you know i would just say um if you're not taking arabic and you want to work with NGOs and refugee issues i think that's all right but taking another language i think is a huge plus um having languages is such an incredible tour opener um at so many levels whether you want to work with refugees or you want to work in diplomacy or or in business even um so you know i for first years and for you know for those who only speak one language i i would i can't express how much learning a second language is is going to be life changing and career changing um now working i don't think arabic is the only language that that will be useful so i don't think you need to worry and i would say arabic is super hard and this is coming from the lebanese um who who heard like arabic at home you know growing up but um you know so you know there's you know there's Spanish there's French there's there's many other languages that are relevant to displaced populations um so you know you can really um it's it's okay if you don't have arabic and you want to work in this field i would say i would echo that um like definitely about the importance of languages whether arabic or other and i would also say that regardless of whether you're taking any languages or which languages you're taking and regardless of whether you're first year through fourth year um it's i think very critical to examine where like that ad value can be that you can provide as an expatriate staff or volunteer which i touched on a little bit earlier um and i think this is going to be um an always evolving process for you so i don't think that it's something you figure out once and you're saying okay this is my ad value that i can now provide as um an expat working in the middle east or wherever um i think and for me personally it has been a constant reflection and a constant process that i have to think through um some areas where i have felt i am able to provide something that my colleagues could not provide which is what i'm always aiming to do because i don't ever want to be duplicating efforts that a local person could be doing or taking a salary that a local person could be having um and so some areas where i've found that to be have been technical english writing um grant writing even though i don't like it it is occasionally an ad value um for a team that doesn't have native english speakers on it or native english writers on it um i have also found that being able to do some donor relations work and working with different types of donors and connecting whatever program i'm working with with these external opportunities whether through tufts or another network um is a huge kind of an area where i have found that i can actually make some kind of an imprint and then there's plenty of other areas where i found actually this is not really it's not going to be the best if it's me it's going to be the best if it's my colleague doing that and that was um like managing some interpersonal relationships on a team that i was managing like i actually didn't feel like i was the best person to manage some or to uh work on some of those interpersonal relationships among the team because there were also cultural dynamics at play that i was not fully understanding even though i have been here for five years and i think you know speak arabic and etc so regardless of whether you're doing language or not i think that this is something that really needs examination and i have met in my time here a lot of expats who have looked at that very deeply and critically and i have met several expats who have not ever given it a moment's thought and have thought no it's absolutely my and like i am entitled to work here and without really considering that and so i would encourage you or any first years or like i said any year at tufts to really think through that as well well thank you so much um to everybody who joined us today and to these wonderful panelists we're going to cancel the zoom breakout rooms because due to time constraints and we don't we know you guys have important work to do um and need to relax a little bit on this friday whether it's the afternoon or the evening wherever you're calling from but we did want to say that if other attendees have any questions that you can pass them out to that um that you can send them to the igl and they will pass them on and get you in contact um and again thank you so much yeah thank you all for coming and thank you to all the attendees for joining us as well thank you very much thanks for having us thank you bye bye