By Amber Cortes
CARE partner PARC (Palestine Agricultural Relief Committee) distributes 596 hygiene kits to displaced families in two shelters in Rafah, a town on the border with Egypt that used to have around 200,000 inhabitants before October 2023 and now hosts over one million people, crowded in a small space in harrowing conditions. Each hygiene kit covers the needs of a family of five during one month and contains a bath towel, soap, shampoo, laundry powder, toothpaste and toothbrushes, wipes, sanitary pads, and disinfectant. Rafah, southern Gaza, 6 January 2024. Photo: CARE
In her 16 years working with CARE’s Humanitarian Team, Camille Davis has never seen anything so dire as the situation in Gaza.
“And that’s because the situation is really so desperate and horrific,” says Davis, who is now the Senior Director of Humanitarian Resource Mobilization and Planning at CARE, an international humanitarian organization that delivers emergency relief and long-term development projects in 109 countries around the world.
“I mean, we’re six months into this crisis. There is mass displacement, we’re talking about most of the population of Gaza being displaced. And it is a really small area.”
Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world, with over 2 million people in an area no bigger than 141 square miles.
Along with the effects of mass displacement, like crowded conditions, low access to safe water and basic sanitation, there is famine due to limited passage of food and other essential needs across borders.
“It’s also a very young population, a lot of children, a lot of young people and children. So, the situation is just heartbreaking. People are already dying from malnutrition…mostly children.”
Despite the challenging operating environment and access issues, CARE is still active in Gaza—doing everything from providing lifesaving medical equipment, safe water, and other relief supplies, to support for maternal health and newborn care, like at their mobile health clinic in Northern Gaza where trained midwives helped deliver 100 babies in the last two months.
CARE partner PARC distributes hygiene kits to displaced families in two shelters in Rafah, southern Gaza, 6 January 2024. Photo: CARE
As one of the oldest relief organizations in the world, CARE has a long history of working in Gaza. Right now, CARE is one of a few organizations with extensive reach throughout the Gaza strip including in the harder to access North where there is active conflict, and Davis credits this in part to the fact that the organization has been working with Palestinian communities since 1948 and has established a network of trusted partners and vendors that they’ve worked with for years.
“To the extent that we’re making progress, it’s entirely because of these relationships and how embedded CARE has been with communities in Gaza for so long,” says Davis.
The situation in Gaza is bringing attention to the plight of internally displaced people, or IDPs, around the world.
An internally displaced person is someone who has been forced to leave their home because of violence, conflict, or natural disasters, and though they are forced to leave their home, their neighborhood, their village, their community, they are unable to leave the country and remain within its borders.
According to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, there are 62.5 million internally displaced people globally, which accounts for 58% of the world’s forcibly displaced population. Since IDPs cannot leave the country, they may not have the same protections as refugees under international law.
This puts many IDPs in the vulnerable position of either trying to leave the country or trying to survive and rebuild there while being trapped within its borders (during whatever conflict or disaster may be occurring).
For example, in Ukraine, CARE has reached nearly 1.3 million people since the crisis started two years ago. About 3.7 million people are displaced within the country’s borders, and hundreds of thousands are returning to the safer areas of Ukraine to try and rebuild their lives.
The ‘Your Support’ shelter in Lviv supported by CARE, hosts around 200 displaced individuals, helping them with nutrition and shelter, and wraparound support services like psychosocial support.
Leona in a shelter in Ivano-Frankivsk, two hours by car from Lviv. The 57-year-ol fled with her daughter from the Donetsk region to Western Ukraine. “The explosions made the whole house shake. My daughter and I slept on the floor in our apartment because we were afraid the windows would break. It was so cold, so we sometimes got up and started jumping up and down,” she says.Now, she manages a shelter in Ivano-Frankivsk. The shelter hosts up to 76 people, but many more are in need for a place to stay. “It is difficult if you have to say no to someone who just arrived at the train station. But we do not have any more beds at the moment,” says Leona. CARE and its partners support shelters for internally displaced people in Ukraine financially and with rehabilitation measures, furniture, and kitchen appliances. Additionally, CARE and its partners help with food, water, hygiene products, and other daily necessities. Hospitals and health facilities are supported with medical equipment and medicine. Photo: CARE
“Your Support” is much more than a shelter, says Davis. It’s about finding strength and hope in being together.
“It’s a place for displaced Ukrainians to celebrate special days together. They cook together they do handicraft workshops and, and just, you know, share stories about their life before the war and what they might be looking forward to.”
CARE is particularly interested in the safety and wellbeing of women and girls, who are at increased at risk of exploitation, sexual abuse, and starvation than their male counterparts in crisis situations.
CARE understands that when it comes to humanitarian assistance, it’s not one size fits all. Their initial emergency assessments include a Rapid Gender Analysis- a flagship tool for understanding the differentiated needs of men, women, girls, and boys in crisis, what risks they face, and what their needs are, so that humanitarian programs can be tailored to address those needs.
They also uphold the principles of Safe Programming to ensure that our humanitarian programs are appropriate and do not increase the risk of harm to program participants, particularly Gender-Based Violence (GBV). This means continuously monitoring these risks throughout the program cycle, building mitigations and controls into program design, implementation and closeout, thus reducing the likelihood of harm, exploitation and abuse.
“For example,” Davis explains, “in a refugee or IDP camp situation, we might build a block of latrines, but they’re not gender segregated, the paths to the latrines are not lit. There are no locks on the latrines.
“So even though we go in, and we’re providing the services, what we might be doing, not intentionally, is exposing women to and girls to gender-based violence, and we don’t want to do that.”
Habib (in green) receives a CARE package from a CARE staff member at an IDP camp. Divorced women face stigmatization due to their married status and CARE offers psychosocial support to them. Photo: CARE
When it comes to emergency preparedness and response in general, Davis would like to see a focus on resilience and anticipatory action in the global humanitarian sector and among the communities they serve.
“We are here to respond,” says Davis. “But by the time we’re responding, it’s already too late. We’ve lost lives, we’ve, you know, people’s livelihoods have been destroyed.”
Davis says investing in disaster risk reduction and anticipatory action is key. Like working with communities to come up with evacuation plans and early warning systems in disaster prone areas, and pre-positioning relief supplies ahead of time.
Though the cycles of war, conflicts and natural disasters will continue, Davis feels hopeful about CARE’s, and other humanitarian organizations’, presence in communities. Gone are the days of “truck and chuck,” where an organization drops in aid and then leaves.
These days, Davis says, “we are seeing a more deliberate attempt to truly first understand people’s needs. To listen to them and understand that communities are complex. I’m happy that we’re doing it better. We’re shifting power to local actors, instead of being, you know, Westerners that show up to save the day and then leave. We are helping to build resilience and respond better by empowering communities.”