uh the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis by dan brown inferno bed number one eighteen month old girl with left lower leg amputated scared bed number two young man with leftover leg amputated still smiling bed number three seventy year old young lady rocket landed on her house she was pregnant lost the baby last hours left leg bladder injury clone us to pee lost her vision lost her hearing in one ear staring in the ceiling into empty space her husband only twenty years old never left her bedside for the last two months i see you bad one young man with bi lateral above the knee amputation with right hand injury iraq atlantic close to him and all that he remembers until he woke up in i c u a few days ago fold determination but in pain in agony i c u bed to twenty three year old male was by the air force security intelligence for several months the thugs who liquid on their cell floor which is very toxic fumes resulted immediate death of four of the prisoners he lost consciousness and was picked up last friday at the border the prison was liberated k eight point three bun three hundred cardio policy with fifteen percent recovering slowly after he finished his story he broke an agonizing cry which made everyone stop being determined that there's no way back spinal cord injury unit bed number one thirteen year old beautiful girl with ball through she old young lady was sniper bullet through her right temporal progressing slowly bed number four two year old old boy with a bullet through his right neck spinal cord hemorrhage recovering nicely shall i keep going synopsis of what these criminals of the regime are doing to our innocent civilians they have drifted genetically they don't belong to the human race when do we scream when do we become angry how long do we stay silent a message to everyone i know seeing is not the same as hearing or listening these are real people who lost everything if we don't stand by them now then i don't know when when it first started in syria and people started cross you know over the border you have to the camp which is the camp that everyone hears about and that was a camp that started out for five thousand people and each months it has progressed and ever since i've been going the numbers have mounted in march when i was there this last march it was a hundred seventy three thousand in this one camp which is the population of linwood this time when i went it was two hundred and twenty thousand people it is the largest refugee camp in the world these are people that are all living in tents it's in the middle of the desert very low water supplies low on everything but besides the camps we also have over two hundred fifty thousand refugees that are living in the city  of man and in outskirt lying areas these are the people that have their paperwork when they left home so they were able to intermingle with society but you know most people leave home thinking it's only going to be a month or two months two years later they have no money there's nothing the n g o s that are in the country are running out of money to keep people going totally it's very very difficult fifty percent of the population of refugees that are in jordan at this point are women and children and they are in dire straits i mean it's the stories that you hear every single day when we go when i mean we this last group of doctors was thirty four doctors that went in with me and what we do is we take medications from here that are donated from different organizations or people like yourselves who had somebody that's passed away they have medicines in their cupboards they don't need and so we take those of in these are just some of the kids these are our syrian numbers that we have but these are the numbers from may so these numbers are changing on a regular regular basis to it this is just showing you syria and the countries that are surrounding it so depending on where you live in syria is where you're going to run away to so if you're up in the north where i've lived it's in up aleppo you are close to the turkish border and so usually it would be about an hour to get up there because of the situation now there are different patrol people we have no idea who they are from day to day if they are military from the government or they are some rebel group that we don't know and there's so many different rebel groups around that you have to keep your paperwork on you continuously if you have a card they will stop you and you don't know if you're going to be killed if you're on the right side of the wrong side of the time if you're in damascus you can go off to lebanon if you want or you can try to make it to jordan usually from damascus to jordan it's a three hour trip but because of the conditions that are on net now those things can take you three four five days to get over to jordan most people travel late at night so they're just walking they walk with whatever they have if they've been injured they are carrying their injured with them and just going through once they get to the border the jordanians are after that border and they have a process of checking people checking their i whatever day need giving them some blankets some of autor and then they will if they have no paperwork they are taken on a bus and they are taken to one of the camps but once are interested in the camps they are given a tent blankets and some ration of food and water and that's it and then that will happen every day now if they have their paperwork with them they're allowed to go into the cities to try and find a place to rant to whatever they want they are usually able to pay rent for up to about three months most of these people after that they can't there's no jobs there's no nothing these are the people they're living in the cities we call them the you know that they're the forgotten souls because nobody goes after them none of the ngos go and try and find them everyone goes into of the camps only so our group goes into the cities and we hear about it from one person tells another person about it so you will have a room that is about a quarter of the size of this room and you'll have forty people living in it with nothing else just have this room they might be lucky if they have some mattresses or anything else that goes on if they are sick if they're older they nobody's there to take care of them they might just have it would be like an old people's home here in the states that is really behead nobody changing their diapers nothing you can come into these homes and you smell they cure and you smell everything and you try and do whatever you can for these people so most of the people are jordan has the highest number of the refugees that are coming into jordan you have a lot on the turkish border that go in but as you've read and really in the news it's been a lot of fighting on that border that's coming through it was it was controlled by the government one point then it was controlled by the rebels at another point there was a lot of bombing that went in which is on the border between now syria and jordan and so now turkey is having a real issue because they're running out of space also for taking people in lebanon is not really being that friendly with people because they don't want the same situation that happened with them like it happened with the palestinians so there is really not many n g o s that are working with them in lebanon at all most of them are sitting in the back out of valley area which is very close to the syrian border and those people have maybe tents but the water is really bad they're using water that they're washing and drinking and they're cooking in it so you can imagine right now with this you have dysentery you have typhoid you have yellow fever we have scale b s we have color all of these are pan am a demick portions of this point right now and with the weather conditions it's really bad this is our ratio which is now changed because we have it almost now is higher females than we do have males that are going in this is tell you about of zod today that you can see we'll just keep moving it through and you can see how it's expanded every month you know from from november up in five thousand to eleven thousand goes twelve thousand and the space just keeps going on all of these people all they have is just  live in that's it there's nothing else the conditions are very harsh in the winner a lot of rain and snow and they just were going to most of them just ran out of their homes with bare footed not having any clothing not having any shoes or anything so we were trying to get a lot of our first containers that when and was mostly clothing that we took in two people and now these this is a new camp that was just opened  back in january and these are what they call is these are containers almost like the shipping containers and those sort of credible in the summertime because it's so that and there's nothing in these containers they're just an empty space that you go into they it was done by the qatari government bathrooms that are not in the containers not and those are separate so what they have is they've built these so that you  have five hundred to a grouping and every five hundred will have two facilities of bathrooms and showers that take ten people in them that is it and all you can do is sleep in that in the home there's no kitchen there's nothing they just give it to you with blankets and you're lucky if we even give mattresses at all on these things it started out for five thousand people it has now been expanded to twenty thousand people and it still needs to expand again same thing and the kids have the worst portion of this thing because a lot of the groups are dealing with the medical conditions of the kids but no one is actually dealing with the mental issues that are going on the trauma the p t s d everything that's happening to these kids one kid that i saw that was five  i tried to get the kids to come out to play for my house and the mother said he won't go he won't leave at all of this room and i says why and she says well at the beginning of the  crisis he was always looking out the window and watching and seeing what was happening one day that he's out there he sees a truck pull in and what you have is the soldiers came and they have people in the truck and he saw father and uncle and some relatives the military started throwing the bodies out of the truck and then they ended up jumping out of the truck and they started chopping him up and this little kid was looking at it he's never looked out a window again you have so many different atrocities that i don't i can't even call these people animals anymore because i think animals have more decency than what's actually happening at this point in syria this is water that is being brought in on a regular basis as much as you can jordan is very poor country has very little water before we before this crisis the government would deliver water on a weekly basis to the different homes what happened now is that water is running so low when you have a million and a half people that have sort of come into your country  now the restriction is that its water is being delivered to time twice of once every two weeks so this is going to start causing problems between the jordanians and the syrians at some point when the east came in to jordan during the gulf war they came in with money and they were able to pay for things the syrians are coming in with nothing at all just whatever they can carry out of their homes and so at the very beginning the jordanians are very hospitable with them but at some point they say well we got jordanians at the same time and they're taking away a lot of our resources so we're not sure how long it's going to last before something really happens between the two groups these are the people at the entrance of saturday to come in it looks like a concentration camp in some ways you know the way you're just set up because once you get in you cannot leave they don't want you to run around the country since nobody knows who you really are and who you really support so the jordanians want to make sure that you don't have any of the government forces there some snuck in that said that they had deserted and some of the stories that you hear about the fires at the were started by some of the military people that went in on a number of the rapes that took place were also done in the camps by some of the military so what they've started to do is they have now a separate camp for the desert hers which they stay totally separate from the people because a lot of people here still have family in syria and they're very very scared of you know the family end up hearing about it at all and something happening to their families people waiting on the outskirts of the dugout border to try and get  in into jordan and you'll see it's just women and kids and the stories i think every time i go i have to come back here just to decompress because it's just to hear everything that's going on young kid that tells me his mom can't stop crying she's always crying a boy that tells me that he was had to rape his sister in front of his  family women that were raped by a nice being inserted inside them so that they just had there is nothing left of them totally people that just don't have a will to live the good of they're just not going to be sure what's going to happen we have so many amputees that the whole country is going to have to change you and the middle east is not known as a country for handicaps you don't have the handicapped ramps or bathrooms or anything like you do here in the states so when this country gets to be rebuilt it's something's going to after happen we're also as arabs or if there's something wrong or you're missing  or arm or something you know society usually says of well you're not a person anymore so we have to change that whole mentality of people so some of these young people that we visited in the hospitals they ask i'm i ever going to get married will i ever have a baby you know just normal questions that you have to deal with this is the spinal cord clinic and couple of the doctors and it's set up with regular ba you know there's nothing in there so we have been able to get hospital beds from here that have been donated we've been able to take them and so they can use and we've got some rehab equipment none of these people that we see are fighters at all these are all people that were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were hit by snipers the snipers hits the people between the fifth in the seventh bird of prey i've been told by the doctors which will  to making them paraplegic immediately and so they'll just never walk at all and we're talking about sixteen seventeen year old kids some of the kids i saw were a six month old baby that already had the legs amputated a three month old that had shrapnel in eyes and was told it was blind you know and we can just go on and on with some of this these are the ambulances that we ended up purchas we have people that come in and they drove the vans down into serious so we're right at the borders they come in it's very hard if you're from how many homes which is in the middle of the country which is really places that are being bombarded on a regular basis to be able to get in there because anyone we send and has been killed at some point so we've been able to find a way to get medicines in and that's been through the sewage lines there are people that are willing to go through the sewage lines and get the medicine through to get it into some of the hospitals the doctors that are working there are really risking their lives because the government is hitting  hospitals or ambulances or anybody or doctors you know they're pinpointing them because if they're helping the people this is the new spinal cord clinic and you can see we've gotten hospital beds for most of the patients at this  point we were able to rent this whole building out for thirty two thousand dollars for the full year so it was a great deal and so it is three stories that we have that's been set up for anyone with spinal cord injuries we have just set up a place for women in the first floor that we're helping survive and get going in that we supply them with materials and they do some of the handicrafts that you'll see inside and we pay them five hundred fifty jordanian dinars a month which is about four hundred dollars and they are real feeling proud that they can go and say that they're working and helping the families instead of having their hands out and trying to just get money from being out in the street or selling their bodies we have a lot of prostitution that's taking place in my frock which is a village that is about an hour outside of jordan that in april we found one hundred eighty seven prostitution homes and that's in an area where you've never had prostitution that you know in times of war a lot of things take place that you just don't expect to take place at all there's a lot of families in that that are actually selling their daughters not selling them but it's you know getting them married at a young age of thirteen or twelve or fourteen where they don't really know but they figure that's the only way they can protect their kids from rape at all that's taking place in the country this is our our warehouse here in buffalo where we have the donations that people bring us from medical supplies we had hasbro toys donated to eleven thousand toys to us status in jordan so we are officially in jordan so anything we do now makes a lot easier that we can partner with a lot of the bigger organ stations move and this is all donated you know we don't pay for any of this stuff at all the warehouse space is donated a lot of the shipping containers we have a company in los angeles that is actually donated a lot of the it's like we pay for shipments and then the give us one free so it works out really well for us all the people that work with my are going ization are hundred percent volunteer so one hundred percent of the money that's given is all being used for the refugees totally just one of the children i think the children are the ones that break your heart the most the once you go in you cannot stop keep going back  the doctors are you know are always crying when they see this i mean it's these are just innocent souls there's no reason that anything like this should happen to him these are next generation and we have no idea what they're going to be like what's going to happen to them i lived under bashar as father's reign when i lived in syria from seventy three up until eighty four and i spent two weeks in their jails i know what it feels like my ex husband spent a year in jail at that time and this is the time when he came in and he leveled the town of homes totally and killed ten thousand people it hasn't you know his son is worse than the father by far joe way and there's a woman here in the back she ends up making these incredible dolls and so she brought these dolls over and on this trip i took a lot of we mail in our container and some i took with us and we went out to the different villages and the raggedy ann dolls were the biggest hit from the adults to the littlest kid everybody wanting this little rag it again and it was a little less about this eye and then she had i'm a different levels and stuff and you know so we're just looking for anything like that because it's like if you could imagine you know oklahoma city and the tomatoes that took place and you know people losing everything but we're in the u s so we can document in you can give it in syria there is no documentation once you've left there you have no way of proving who you are and these kids are your kids or getting passports or getting anything so we can't even bring the most serious cases like we did in iraq where we could bring him here in syria it's different we can't bring these kids to the u s because they have no paperwork the u s will not allow the men we can't get their paperwork at a syria you know the you  the middle east does not have adoptions like you have here so we can't even bring the orphans or do anything for these orphans because a looks like they were going to be selling them so we're trying to open an orphanage or a place that you can put these orphans until we can find some extended family somebody rather to help them out this is a situation that i can't see ending very soon i mean it's something that's going to really stay around quite a bit you know with our government and richard will talk about this more since i'm supposed to really stay away from politics with n g o s status with the government here  i that comes in and questions me about the work that i do and then the jordanian government also questions everything that i do at the same time of working with sirius so i'll leave that to reconsider to talk about at all but i think i just really want to thank you all for being here it's beautiful weather out there it's great that you're interested we need to get the word out more about syria i think this is so many people that have left it in the back and it's not they're in the news much anymore you know but it's still going on and people are suffering every day and we have three two to three thousand people crossing the jordan syrian border on a daily basis and when you have a population of twenty three million people in syria and we already have a million a half in jordan three point five million people that are displaced in the country that are just living under trees or hallways or wherever else they can and i got still lots of family there that i i talked to but they're having a hard time but they don't want to leave the you know nobody wants to leave their home if they can stay in it because one should do it's everything is robbed it's you're not sure you're going to get out of the country you're not sure if you're going to die on your way out and especially if you're older person you know they say how can we live if we end up believing you know we can live for a month or two months but we can't live for two or three years in nobody has that kind of money sitting in in savings or whatever of that savings it's in a bank that the you know the government has so we're sort of left here