Sometimes you simply can’t make order from chaos. #vial

After much planning and preparation, today was the day we did the food distribution at Vial Camp. Many, many people had collaborated to fund-raise, shop and the pack the food. One dry food pack (rice, pasta, tomato sauce, sugar, mushroom sauce, tin opener, cooking oil, dates) and one fresh food pack (potatoes, courgette, lemon, onion, stock cube, spice, biscuits) for each container / tent, not a lot of food – but enough to prepare a few meals. Sounds simple yeah?

 

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I knew it would be difficult, but we had a plan…

Tent to tent distribution is usually most efficient, so we thought this would be the best way. As we are not allowed into camp, we had 2 teams of camp residents who would come to the cars and take the bags into the camp – tent to tent or container to container. Also, we had many people who could translate to explain the system.

Things did not go according to plan for a number of reasons, there are definitely lessons to be learnt, for instance: the people in the distribution team should have been given hi-vis vests to show they were conducting the distribution (visually it seemed that we were giving aid from the van – it confused things) and it would have helped if we given written information (translated into the different languages) the day before explaining how the distribution would work. At times tensions ran quite high with people frustrated at the system and the people running it.

I don’t know how to make order from chaos when it comes to Vial, there are too many people crowded into a camp which is equipped for survival only and not for living. This makes helping in a fair way nearly impossible. Now I sit and think of the people who missed out today and didn’t receive a food pack because the plan fell apart. I also think though that the people in Vial have 440 more food packs than they did yesterday.

Solidarity

Emma