As far as adventures go, this week’s move from Comox to Victoria isn’t the most arduous Julie Angus has taken on.
When she was still Julie Wafaei, she rowed across the Atlantic with future husband Colin Angus, just the two of them cooped up in an eight-metre boat for four months before touching land.
Then, after braving the sharks and hurricanes, they bicycled from Costa Rica to Vancouver. National Geographic named them the 2006 Adventurers of the Year.
In 2008, the newly married couple spent seven months cycling and rowing from Colin’s ancestral home to hers, from the northern tip of Scotland to her family’s olive farm in Syria.
That was followed in 2011 by Olive Odyssey, a National Geographic-sponsored sailing-and-rowing trip in which the couple, with new son Leif in tow, traced the ancient Phoenician olive oil trade route through the Mediterranean.
That journey was supposed to end in Syria, too, but 2011 was the year the civil war broke out — sucking Julie’s family, her aunts and uncles and cousins, into the conflict.
That’s why, even while up to her ears in packing boxes and oven cleaner as the Anguses move south, she is beating the drum for a Comox Valley physician’s humanitarian efforts. The Syrian refugee camp where Dr. Saren Azer volunteered has run out of life-saving medical supplies, and he is raising money to restock the shelves.
It’s a cause all too real to Julie, as she is close to the Syrian family her father left behind when he came to Canada at age 20. Some of her relations remain on the olive farm, but most are in embattled Aleppo.
“The war has devastated their lives,” Julie, 38, said Monday. “The kids haven’t been in school in two years. There are severe food shortages.” Tanks and guns are everywhere. One uncle was injured by a bomb blast.
“The kids have seen people killed. It’s unbelievable.” These are the relations — loving, well-educated, decent people — who welcomed Colin and Julie with open arms in 2008.
Julie is with the Comox chapter of the International Society for Peace and Human Rights, a non-profit set up by Azer in 1999.
Azer is a good story in his own right. He came to Canada as a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan in 1994, became a physician, then began volunteering at refugee camps abroad. That included travelling last October to the Domiz camp just into Iraq from Syria.
An internal medical specialist, Azer had just come off a busy night at St. Joseph’s hospital in Comox when reached Monday.
The situation at Domiz is dire, he said. The camp ran out of medical supplies two weeks ago. Built for up to 12,000 people, its population hit 40,000 when Azer was there and has doubled since then, 80,000 people — the same number as live in the City of Victoria — stuffed into tents in a two-square-kilometre patch of nowhere, 50 degrees in summer, snow in winter, never enough food or water. Sixty per cent of the refugees are children under 10 years of age. They’re dying, needlessly, every day. Authorities are overwhelmed; no one anticipated the scope and duration of the Syrian refugee crisis.
Right now, Azer’s goal is to raise enough money to re-equip the camp with 50 physician travel packs — suitcase-sized boxes, each stuffed with enough medicine for 600 treatments — by Sept. 30. Each pack, prepared by the charity Health Partners International of Canada, would contain $6,000 worth of medicine, but cost just $575 to buy. Shipping would bring the total cost to $39,000. More information can be found at peaceandhumanrights.org.
“No contributions are insignificant,” Azer said. “Sometimes it just takes two or three dollars to save a life.” A single dose of anti-biotics can mean the difference for an infant with meningitis or pneumonia.
Watched on television, Syria’s humanitarian crisis seems almost too far off, too foreign to our peaceful, distant lives, to be real. But for Saren Azer and Julie Angus, it’s painfully close to home.
