Greetings, everyone,

Thank you for your contribution to my campaign to help Yazidi refugees living in Greece. I wanted to send you an update about my volunteer experience and about this campaign.

NB: Before reading further, please be advised that my email discusses events and situations you may find upsetting to read about. 

During my time volunteering in Thessaloniki this summer, I met several Yazidi families living in the streets, many of them with babies and children. The organization I was volunteering with spent several weeks doing our best to help the families we met. 

On several occasions, we brought tents, sleeping bags, shoes and clothing, food and water to the families we met. On one occasion, I also purchased medicine and did my best to clean and bind the wounds on a child's foot that she acquired from walking barefoot in the streets. 

I spent countless hours attempting to find a home to rent where we could shelter some of the homeless families, but unfortunately the prejudice of local landlords led them to refuse my rental requests, even after promising to pay higher rent, to pay an additional deposit, to leave a credit card on file, to leave copies of our passports, etc. In the end, I could not find a single landlord in Thessaloniki who would say yes to allowing a Yazidi family to live in their house. 

Most of the families we met in the streets were there because they were trying to go with smugglers to the north of Europe. Essentially what happens in this process is that smugglers will take a group of refugees to a remote area near the border and then tell the refugees to walk in a certain direction, and that once they have crossed the border, they will be picked up by another smuggler who will take them on the next leg of their journey. More often than not, after hours of walking through rugged terrain, refugees making their way across the border on foot will be caught by police / border guards / vigilante groups, and (at best) arrested and bussed back to the city. 

After three attempts at crossing the border, the family with the newborn pictured in this campaign made it into Bulgaria, but unfortunately we lost track of them after that. 

Other families we met tried 4, 5, 6 times to cross the border, and continued to be arrested and sent back to Thessaloniki. This is obviously an exhausting experience, especially since many of the refugees making this trip were small children, women carrying babies, or older women. 

Since we were unable to provide a house for them, we occasionally tried to find an affordable room in a modest hotel, so that they could take a hot shower / do laundry / allow their children to sleep in a bed for a night or two after their exhausting experience at the border. As with finding a house to rent, it was extremely difficult to find a hotel that would allow them to stay in a room. Most of the time we were refused. A couple of times, however, we were successful and were able to provide a brief respite for a handful of families. 

In addition to the hardships that any homeless family would face, Yazidi refugees in the streets were particularly vulnerable to abuse by other refugee groups with ethnic and religious prejudice against them, by locals who resented the presence of all refugees (we were frequently shouted at by locals for helping them, and on one occasion a woman threw rocks at us), as well as by traffickers who have been known to target and kidnap Yazidis. 

In the end, most of the families we met decided to give up on their attempts to go with smugglers to the north, and decided instead to settle in Petra, a refugee camp that was established specifically for Yazidis. Conditions in Petra camp are notoriously bad, which was another reason why many people were avoiding staying in this camp, but with all other options closed to them, eventually it presented a better option than staying in the streets. 

Petra camp was recently in the news, as Amal Clooney, a famous human rights lawyer, recently made a visit to the camp and has decided to represent the case of Yazidi women trafficked by ISIS. 

You can read more about her case here: http://nbcnews.to/2coR6JV 

Now for a bit of bookkeeping ... 

During the month I spent volunteering this summer, I am certain that the cost of our efforts to support Yazidi families exceeded the amount of money we raised in this campaign; however, we – myself as well as several other volunteers – payed for these expenses out of pocket, and we never withdrew our funds raised from this LaunchGood campaign. 

At this point, I am now back in the States. LaunchGood and I have tried to send over the funds raised in this campaign to the organization I was working with, but they have not responded to our messages, and the money we sent to their PayPal account was returned. 

In the interest of total transparency, I wanted to communicate to you all about our options for what to do with this money. 

The first option is that I will withdraw the money myself, and I will distribute the money to the following three causes:

Firstly, I will make a donation to Yazda, an organization dedicated to advocacy and support for Yazidis. You can read more about their work here:

http://www.yazda.org/projects/support-yazidi-woman/

Also, many of you were moved by the photo of the newborn Yazidi baby sleeping in a cardboard box that I shared with this campaign. Her mother had delivered her in a municipal park two days prior, with no medical care. During my time in Greece, I met several women from various backgrounds living with their newborns in deplorable conditions and without adequate medical attention. You can view a photo of me holding 5-day-old baby Ahmad in the Oraiokastro refugee camp here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BH2HY_bj3id/

My friend Kelsey is about to depart for Izmir, Turkey, where she will be volunteering as a midwife to care for refugee women and their babies. As I saw firsthand, medical care for new mothers is urgently needed among refugees of all backgrounds, and I would like to use some of these funds to support her efforts. 

Lastly, I would like to continue humanitarian work in the future, and I am in the process of establishing a not-for-profit organization to serve as a container for future projects. My vision is to create a responsive organization with total transparency about the work that has been done, and the way in which donated funds were used, by sharing blog posts, photographs and fully reconciled financial reports. Doing so will also allow me to offer a tax deduction to everyone who contributes to my work. I would like to use a portion of the funds raised through LaunchGood as seed money for this effort. 

I realize that these three causes are not specifically what you donated money for, so the second options is that if anyone would like to request a refund, please feel free to reach out and request one. I will work with LaunchGood to process your refund immediately. You can contact me through the project page for this campaign on the LaunchGood website. 

If I do not hear otherwise from you by October 15th, I will assume you are comfortable with your donation being allocated to the causes listed above. 

Thank you again for your generous support!

All my best,

Amber Safa