What a workload these people must have considering how many refugees there are.
UN resettlement officers carry burden of weighing Syrian refugee distress
SAMYA KULLAB
BEIRUT — Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015 8:09PM EST
Last updated Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015 10:16PM EST
Ms. Murru is a senior resettlement officer with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR. She and her colleagues sift through thousands of case files of Syrian refugees, each one an abbreviated story of displacement and struggle. Lebanon hosts 1.2 million refugees; Western countries have pledged to take 12,600 of them this year through the UNHCR program.
That means her office is racing to match desperate family to willing host. It’s a calculus based on experience and on heart, a methodical weighing of the merits of people who seem equal in their suffering. “We work non-stop,” said Ms. Murru in a rare interview offering a glimpse into the inner workings of the agency’s office of resettlement in Beirut. “It’s a lot of responsibility to decide who’s in and who’s out.”
In the UNHCR’s Resettlement Handbook, Ms. Murru’s proverbial bible, the term “vulnerability” appears 19 times but not once is it defined. Implicitly, it refers to an individual’s inability to cope in an inimical environment. In practice, Ms. Murru scores the gamut of a refugee’s life, from health, housing, legal and financial troubles to experiences of trauma and violence to get an idea of where they stand on the vulnerability scale. But the UN criteria are only part of the equation; the respective conditions of resettlement countries is the other. To that end, she must be strategic when referring cases to embassies and managing the refugees’ expectations.
Continue reading at:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...cers-carry-burden-of-weighing-syrian-refugee-
UN resettlement officers carry burden of weighing Syrian refugee distress
SAMYA KULLAB
BEIRUT — Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015 8:09PM EST
Last updated Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015 10:16PM EST
Behind reinforced concrete blast walls in a Beirut suburb, inside a grim featureless office building, Angela Murru riffles through files under the flicker of fluorescent lights and evaluates the degrees of human vulnerability.
Ms. Murru is a senior resettlement officer with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR. She and her colleagues sift through thousands of case files of Syrian refugees, each one an abbreviated story of displacement and struggle. Lebanon hosts 1.2 million refugees; Western countries have pledged to take 12,600 of them this year through the UNHCR program.
That means her office is racing to match desperate family to willing host. It’s a calculus based on experience and on heart, a methodical weighing of the merits of people who seem equal in their suffering. “We work non-stop,” said Ms. Murru in a rare interview offering a glimpse into the inner workings of the agency’s office of resettlement in Beirut. “It’s a lot of responsibility to decide who’s in and who’s out.”
In the UNHCR’s Resettlement Handbook, Ms. Murru’s proverbial bible, the term “vulnerability” appears 19 times but not once is it defined. Implicitly, it refers to an individual’s inability to cope in an inimical environment. In practice, Ms. Murru scores the gamut of a refugee’s life, from health, housing, legal and financial troubles to experiences of trauma and violence to get an idea of where they stand on the vulnerability scale. But the UN criteria are only part of the equation; the respective conditions of resettlement countries is the other. To that end, she must be strategic when referring cases to embassies and managing the refugees’ expectations.
Continue reading at:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...cers-carry-burden-of-weighing-syrian-refugee-
