Vox Meditantis

21st September 2011

The lorry’s wing mirror catches fragments of the Syrian border as we lurch through another checkpoint – armed men with tired eyes searching for God knows what amongst our humanitarian supplies. Ten days since the world remembered its wounds from a decade past, and still we cannot learn to heal them.

I sit amongst crates of medical supplies destined for Aleppo, watching my reflection fracture in the truck’s grimy windows. How fitting. Everything seems broken into pieces these days – Libya crumbling as Gaddafi clings to power like a drowning man, Syria bleeding whilst the world wrings its hands, Afghanistan still swallowing our young men whole after all these years. The radio crackles with news of protesters camping in Manhattan’s financial district, as if camping in parks might somehow fix what decades of greed have wrought.

They call me an aid worker, but I feel more like a scavenger picking through the debris of civilisation. Each refugee camp, each bombed hospital, each mass grave – they reflect back our collective failure to choose peace over profit, compassion over conquest. The locals here eye me with suspicion, and rightfully so. What business does a Western woman have offering bandages when her own governments helped tear open these wounds?

This morning, as I washed my face in a cracked basin of murky water, another volunteer asked me that peculiar question: “What things give you energy?” I nearly laughed – a bitter sound that would have startled the camp children. What gives me energy? The same thing that drains it, I suppose. Rage.

Rage at watching mothers bury children whilst politicians speak of “acceptable losses.” Rage at seeing soldiers – barely more than boys themselves – return home broken in body and spirit, only to find their own government cutting their benefits. Rage at the endless cycle: we bomb them into democracy, they resist with suicide vests, we call them terrorists and bomb them more thoroughly.

The irony feeds me like bitter bread. Yesterday, news broke that America’s military will finally allow homosexuals to serve openly – progress, they trumpet, as if permission to kill for one’s country represents the pinnacle of human advancement. Meanwhile, the same government maintains its torture facility at Guantánamo Bay, that monument to our moral bankruptcy.

I watch my face distort in the truck’s side mirror as we hit another pothole. Perhaps this is fitting too – to see ourselves warped and ugly, as others must surely see us. We arrive bearing medicine and clean water, speaking of humanitarian aid, yet our bombs continue falling elsewhere. We are walking contradictions, mirrors reflecting both salvation and damnation.

The young Syrian translator beside me speaks of his brother, missing now for three months since the government forces came to Deraa. His eyes hold that particular emptiness I’ve seen too often – the look of someone who has witnessed their world torn apart by men in distant capitals playing chess with human lives. He trusts me enough to translate, but I see him watching, calculating whether this Western woman might somehow betray his confidence to authorities.

As the sun sets through the dusty windscreen, casting orange light across the refugee encampment ahead, I think of those protesters in Wall Street, convinced that democracy might still function if only they shout loudly enough. Such naive faith in systems already corrupted beyond repair. The mirror of history shows us the same pattern repeated: those with power wage wars, those without power suffer the consequences, and those of us caught between comfort ourselves with small acts of charity whilst the machine grinds on.

Tomorrow I shall distribute antibiotics and water purification tablets, patch up the wounded, hold dying children whilst their mothers keen with grief. I shall do this work because someone must, because rage without action is merely self-indulgence. But I harbour no illusions about changing anything fundamental. We are all reflections of a broken world, and broken mirrors only show us fragments of truth.

The truck shudders to a halt. Another checkpoint, another opportunity for armed men to demonstrate their power over the powerless. In the wing mirror, I watch a child peek out from behind her mother’s skirts, curious despite everything. Perhaps that is what truly gives me energy – not rage, but the stubborn persistence of hope in places where hope should rightfully have died long ago.

Even if that hope makes us all fools.

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The early Syrian uprising and its humanitarian fallout frame this entry’s world, where protests that began in March 2011 met violent repression and spiralled into civil war. In 2011, demonstrations in Daraa, Damascus, and other cities were answered with mass arrests and live fire, prompting displacement within Syria and the first refugee flows to neighbouring states. By 2012, large camps like Za’atari in Jordan opened as the conflict expanded and front lines multiplied. International involvement deepened over subsequent years, including interventions by Iran and Russia and a U.S.-led campaign against ISIS after 2014. The war devastated health systems, displaced millions, and reshaped regional politics.

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