Welcome to 2024

 Happy New Year! 

 

We hope that you had some good time over Christmas, and have started 2024 well. It turns out that New Year is a bigger celebration than Christmas in Aleppo, although we celebrated as well as we could on Christmas Day. We opened presents, and Steve cooked a fantastic lunch, and we spent the afternoon in a café with 20 others playing silly games.  

 

 

 

Our amazing colleagues, Ahmad, Ammar and Hasan, helped us to move from the hotel into our new apartment a few days before Christmas, and we are enjoying the new-found space. The apartment is huge! It belongs to a family who left Syria 11 or 12 years ago (during the war), and it hasn’t been lived in since, so we have found some very out-of-date food in the cupboards, and a lot of dust. But it has almost everything we need – a lovely kitchen crammed full with crockery and pans etc., a cosy (cow print themed) living room, 3 good bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. There’s also some fancy rooms like a formal salon and dining room, but we don’t use them so much – there’s some impressive chandeliers. It has been a really good shift into more of a ‘home’ setting, with lots of normal things like cooking and doing our own laundry. It’s funny what you miss!  

We have begun learning the lessons of Syrian electricity: 

• 1. 12pm-12am, the local generator is on which gives us 10 Amps (enough for lots of little things, or 1 big thing such as heating the water for a shower) 

• 2. 12am-12pm, the battery is on which gives us 1.6 Amps (a few low energy lights) 

• 3. Unknown 2 hour slot in the day, the mains power is on and we switch on EVERYTHING 

 

It’s an education, and we have messed it up a few times and found ourselves with a drained battery and several hours before the power goes back on. But it still feels quite fun to be living here! We have an excellent supermarket 5 minutes walk away, and a whole new neighbourhood (with lots of cafés) to get to know.  

 

In terms of Medair, we are almost halfway through our one year’s contract. Steve is in the groove as Project Coordinator, managing the people who are overseeing the 4 programme areas: health, shelter, WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) and cash assistance. I am enjoying managing the Logistics Officer, HR Assistant and Finance Assistant, and supporting the MEAL Assistant whose manager lives in Damascus. MEAL (Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning) is a very interesting part of our work, whereby we can engage with the community before, during and after our activities to see if there has been any change. It also helps us improve the way we work, to ensure good quality practices which are evolving.   

Last week, I went to visit one of the villages outside Aleppo where the water tower has been affected, and water cannot be pumped up to the tank. Instead of drawing from this reservoir and using gravity to draw the water down into homes, the villagers are using a pipe at ground level which does not have the pressure to reach every home. By repairing the water tower, an additional 100 households (1,000 people) will have access to clean water at home.  

 

My colleague, Aida, and me spent some time chatting to some of the residents about the lack of water, and what the repairs will mean for them, and it was really special to listen to them. One of the improvements will be in child health – lots of the children suffer with diarrhoea because they are using unclean water, and the repaired water tank should make a big improvement. It is lovely to be able to get out and see what the teams are involved with - projects which will make a real difference to peoples' lives.

 

Steve and I are heading out in 2 weeks for our next break – a week in Cyprus, and 2 weeks in the UK, and we are counting down! We really hope you are doing well, and look forward to seeing some of you later this month. 

 

With love, 

 

Lindsay & Steve