The Cobh lady who is speaking up for Syria’s lost children
IN LOOKS and voice, she’s definitely a member of the clan, but Ettie Higgins is a little different from her siblings. One did Naked Camera — Ettie is camera-shy.
“I hate having my photo taken,” the Unicef emergency specialist and Cobh native says. Her sister, comedian Maeve, made her name in the character of the desperate date-seeker on the RTÉ comedy show. Another sister, Lilly, has a burgeoning reputation as a food writer and broadcaster but, despite being adverse to the lens, Ettie says the similarities between her and her siblings tends to outweigh the differences: “We all love cake.”
In her current posting in Syria, there hasn’t been much time for confectionery, where Ettie operates in a country that has lurched from one disaster to another in a bloody war of attrition.
On a brief four-day break from her base in Damascus, Ettie will return to the country for a month before heading to a new posting in Juba, the capital of South Sudan.
Based in Syria since August 2012, the eldest of the Higgins siblings — there are eight — has visited scenes of humanitarian disaster, including Aleppo and Homs, shattered cities that sum up the transformation of Syria from highly developed country to war-torn wreck.
“It was a middle-income country,” she says, remarking how some parts of Syria now have electricity supply for just two hours a day. “With any war zone, to some extent life goes on. People still have to eat and find food. Parents still want to send their children to school.”
However, normality is in short supply. Ettie says everyone in this country of 22m people has been affected by four years of conflict.
“It’s not just the fear of the unknown or uncertainty over the future,” she says. “It’s just general exhaustion. Children you meet are absolutely exhausted... families are constantly on the move.”
“What we are trying to do is maintain basic social services that are there,” she adds. That means working with people at district level, with local NGOs. Education, water, and sanitation, upgrading sewage systems, and replacing generators are some areas that need to be addressed. Referring to Homs, a place often depicted in photographs as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, she says: “We have spare parts for electric control panels to provide water to 1.5m people.”
Since last October, when a polio outbreak was declared, 25 confirmed cases have come to light. Unicef has launched monthly information and vaccination campaigns to run until May, in addition to a programme of vaccination for measles. It is also trying to involve as many children as possible in the 800 school clubs around the country — places where Ettie says children can get simple items such as school bags and recreation kits but where they can also avail of psycho-social support.
“Last year, we reached more than 1m children with a back to school campaign,” she said. “But two million people are at risk of dropping out of school. We need to reach all these children next year.”
The imperilled nature of childhood in a warzone was brought home in the most brutal fashion last year by a heart-stopping photograph of dead children laid out on the ground in an area near Damascus following an attack in which the nerve agent sarin was used. Ettie says that, besides the horror of that episode, “there are tens and tens of thousands of children who do not make the front pages of the papers”.
“What we are there to do is to do our utmost to ensure that these children grow up healthy, educated and that they have some form of support to be able to deal with the trauma they deal with on a daily basis,” says Ettie. “An Irish person would not witness what they do in a day in a whole lifetime.”
She says she has heard numerous “heart-wrenching” stories but overall the experience has been anything but depressing. She recalls how one girl, “a tiny thing” who had been displaced out of Aleppo, approached her to ask if she worked with a particular NGO. “She said: ‘I heard this NGO was running classes and I really want to go back to school.’ All she wanted was to go back to school, and she had nothing but the clothes she was standing in. They are so courageous and so resilient — it’s very inspiring.
“It’s a privilege to be able to work in Syria at this time.”
Before this posting, Ettie spent two and a half years in Somalia and prior to that she was in eastern Chad (where she was described as “a witty and generous-natured Irish woman” by actor Ralph Fiennes, having explained the distinction between a refugee and an internally displaced person to him), and before that she was based in the Central African Republic, now the scene of an increasingly brutal conflict. She has also worked in Darfur and Zimbabwe — where she lived for a time as a child.
It’s all a far cry from the steep gradient and sea air of Cobh. “It’s what I have always wanted to do,” she says. Comparing international crises is an invidious undertaking, but Ettie will say that Syria is a “unique” case. “I think they have all been challenging and difficult but definitely Syria has been a significant challenge,” she says. The scale of the crisis is dramatic — Unicef has bought 14m doses of vaccinations, and reached 2.74m children in February alone as part of the programme to combat polio. Unicef has launched an urgent public campaign ‘No Lost Generation’ on behalf of 5.5m of children affected by the crisis in Syria as the third anniversary of the conflict approaches.
The numbers are stark: Since March 2013, the number of children affected by the crisis has more than doubled from 2.3m to more than 5.5m. The number of children displaced inside Syria has more than tripled from 920,000 to almost 3m. The number of child refugees has more than quadrupled from 260,000 to more than 1.2m and of these children, 425,000 are under the age of five. With the harsh winter in Syria, Unicef supported a large winterisation effort, providing more than 1m warm blankets, as well as more than 50,000 sets of warm winter clothes for children.
Ettie will be back on the ground as that unwanted anniversary on March 15 passes, and pays tribute to the continued assistance provided by people in Ireland to those caught up in a conflict that shows little sign of dissipating.
Unicef Ireland ambassadors, including Donncha O’Callaghan, Joe Canning, and Dustin the Turkey, will this week give up their own social media accounts to the campaign — one day for each year of conflict — encouraging their followers to sign the public petition for the children of Syria. See: http://chn.ge/1doHxRM
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