Last word working against the logic of war

Seamus Enright


“Most of the time right now, my head is in the Middle-East. I’ll see something about Syria on the news, a bombing in the paper and I’ll straight away send an email, or get on Skype to contacting someone and make sure everything’s OK there.
“Then there’s the other side, when I look out my window, or step outside my door and I’m in rural Ireland. It’s stark, but a welcome contrast sometimes,” says international aid worker Noelle Fitzpatrick.
A native of Kingscourt, now living in Stradone, Noelle has for the best part of a decade and a half worked with various aid organisations in some of the most challenging humanitarian crises around the world. For the past two-years, as support and partner liaison officer with Trócaire’s aid effort in Syria, Noelle has held a watching brief on the seemingly endless bloody conflict raging in the Arab republic. Noelle plays a key role in coordinating the Irish charity’s emergency response programme there.
From a family of five, schooled in Kingscourt at primary level, and after at O’Carolan College in Nobber, Noelle continued her studies at University of Limerick graduating with a Degree in Insurance and European Studies.
She doesn’t consider her time in learning as “defining in any particular way”. That’s easy to understand given the context of what was to come.
With a stint working at the Office of the Insurance Ombudsman also failing to hold much grá, Noelle took the opportunity to travel, and believes the opportunity to sample different cultures, and philosophies offered a much more grounding education.
“You witness different value systems, and also see the huge disparities between rich and poor out there. We have it here in Ireland too of course, but it’s all relevant.” Upon returning, and sensing a need to shift direction, Noelle went back to college, to Dublin City University to study for a Masters in International Relations. A core aspect of this course involved development studies.
Noelle still struggles to explain exactly why her career path led to international aid work.
“I don’t know,” she says, pausing a moment to allowing the question to percolate further. “It was never planned that I’d go down that route... but for me, it was an obvious choice.
“I feel really strongly that we’re not meant to live in isolation. We live as a community, with other people, and all anyone wants is to have love in their lives. Some people are born where that maybe comes a lot easier. As people we have a shared responsibility to support each other. You see other people without, and when you feel that responsibility, you tend not to think about anything else,” she says.

Eye-opening
Third Level afforded Noelle time to spend spare time in different countries volunteering, like in Romania, with children at the Victor Babes Hospital for Infectious and Tropical Diseases in Bucharest, or experiencing first-hand the post-conflict return of refugees to a war-torn Kosovo.
To hang on a cliché, both were ‘eye-opening’ experiences, but “in different ways.” “Bucharest was an extraordinary experience with the children; their resilience, their capacity for life, even as they carried massive pain, massive afflictions. But how grateful they were for the small things we did, because these were children who would be tied in their cots.
“The supports just aren’t there for them, and the staff are stretched to their limit. They were doing their best, but there was just so much needed.”
Kosovo “was different”. Immediately post-bombing campaign, and as a member of a small aid organisation travelling in a convoy of ambulances from Tirana in Albania back across the border into Kosovo, she reflects on the imminent dangers at hand. “We were with refugees, some travelling in the back of the ambulances we were in, some simply walking on the road beside us. I remember them going up through the mountains, tractors with mattresses stacked in their trailers, others carrying whatever they could manage.
“I think back, of how dangerous that was. There were still a lot of mines planted around the place, houses still on fire, mosques destroyed, churches damaged to a certain extent. The level of fear, but also exhilaration because people knew they were going home.” Spending time helping people clear up the debris and rebuild the pieces of their shattered homes and lives, Noelle says she felt then, the importance of international aid assistance. “I really felt at the time, that for them to feel there was an international presence there was important for them. It meant there was some level of security for them, and also some sense of solidarity with the outside world. What we were able to do was very small. It will never be enough, but the fact you’re there with people, all you have is a few tins of tuna, but you share it...”
Aside from the obvious danger of working in such treacherous environments, Noelle accepts there are other difficulties and struggles one must face, and overcome to continue doing the job she does. For example realistically, nothing she or the NGOs do will ever be enough to relieve all the hardships.
Noelle ponders long and hard before answering: “If you start consciously knowing - we will never be able to do enough, but what we can do we will do well - being prepared to share a sense of solidarity, deliver a sense of care, you learn too that these things are critical to helping people to continue to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. The minute anyone goes into any of this thinking they’re going to change everything straight away and save the world, that’s the moment they should turn back and just walk in the opposite direction.”
The complication of humanitarian work is being able to detach work from personal life. “When you evolve relationships with people - see how they’re personally affected by a car bomb that kills or injures their friends, colleagues or family, or someone is kidnapped, it’s hard not to be too. But you have to distance yourself. At the end of the day, if you allow yourself to get too emotionally or psychologically drawn in, you’re no good to anyone. You have to find a way to maintain some kind of distance,” Noelle says. “That’s not always easy, and then again, if you’re too insensitive or too far removed, there’d be something wrong as well. In some ways you need that closeness, if only to know how to respond in such circumstances. Not for your own agenda, but for the needs of the people you’re working with.”
Working with Trócaire since 2000-01, part of the Caritas confederation of 165 Catholic relief organisations, Noelle was also involved with the Jesuit Refugee Service in East Africa (2004-07), helping develop a range of interventions to support displaced peoples in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Sudan- and from DR Congo, Burundi, Rwanda and Somalia.

Confusion
In her current role Noelle sits within the Emergency Response unit of Trócaire, primarily based at the organisation’s headquarters in Maynooth. However, she visits Syria and neighbouring Lebanon and Jordan every 10-12 weeks, observing the progress of various Trócaire funded projects, each headed-up by local partner organisations, and aimed at giving assistance to those most in need in the region. Without even going into how the encroachment of terrorist group Islamic State is impacting, Noelle states the factors that have led to the ongoing situation in the region are both incredibly complex - with a variety of factors from historical to social and political - as well as geo-political.
Arising from the uprising against the Assad regime during the Arab Spring of March 2011, the litany of narratives since played out have only served to confuse the outward opinion of what ordinary Syrian citizens want - peace and freedom.
“On the one hand you have world leaders saying, ‘Only a political solution, no military solution, is possible’. And at the same time they’re sending arms or supporting one or other of the factions. Ordinary Syrians are saying, ‘Leave us alone, stop fuelling the complexity, stop fuelling the war’. But the problem is that at international and regional level there hasn’t been any agreement made on what the position is. Its very hard to get actors around a table, international, regional and local actors, when you haven’t even agreed at any level,” Noelle says.
“There are millions of people inside Syria everyday holding the line for peace, putting their lives on the line working against the logic of war. It’s those stories, of heroism being overlooked. You get the sense now, from the media at least, that everyone in Syria is a terrorist and no one is not opting for violence.”

Privilege
Despite it all, it has been a privilege she says to work with people, many of whom themselves live first-hand with the fall-out and rigours of war.
“It has been an massive privilege to go sit with these people, and work and meet people personally affected by the conflict, who instead of curling up and giving up, have turned all their energies towards helping out in whatever way they can in one of these organisations.”
That privilege and sense of pride too, Noelle extends to her own nationally, who she identifies as punching way above its weight in terms of supporting the international aid effort. “I’d really like to say a big thank you to the people of Ireland, and the people of Cavan and the Kilmore Diocese, who have consistently been one of the top supporters of Trócaire Lenten Campaign. “As Irish people, our profound capacity for compassion, in reaching out to others on a human level and appreciating that, is something we shouldn’t take for granted. “Maybe it’s rooted in the missionary tradition, or our history as an island, or in our own conflict. I don’t know. But it is massive in terms of helping a community, a country, to feel they’re not forgotten, that they’re not alone, and that there are people out there in the wider world who do care and are doing what they can to help,” she says.