The Re-foundation Project

As we approach the one year anniversary of my parents trip to Iraq.  I wanted to post this video, and share the story of a woman named Hoha.  My parents have received permission from both women (the translator and Hoha) to share this video. There are children playing while the video is being recorded in the background, so there is a lot of background noise.

Baran, Hoha’s daughter is still missing.  Hoha was able to contact her once since this video was taken, when Baran was able to get her hands on a cell phone.  It is our hope that Baran is still alive, but Hoha has not been able to contact her since. Here is the picture of Baran that Hoha showed my mom.

After seeing this video I sat down with my mother on several occasions and asked her to share more about Hoha and the other women she meet.  Here is a transcript of one of those conversations.

Can you tell me where you first met Hoha?

It was in a fenced off construction site that had been abandoned and left half finished.  There were six blocks with five family groups.  There was a gate around the construction site, and she lived in one of the housing huts -many of the families lived in makeshift sheds on the site.  It was my first experience meeting with refugees. Our group went there to distribute food.  All the children came running out to play, so some of the group was playing with the kids, and some of the group was looking over food papers to distribute food. I stood back a little with Ed, because it was my first time there. Hoha came up to me speaking Kurdish holding a picture. She was crying and I didn’t know what to do.  I felt very helpless. I called our translator over. The translator said that she was from the Shingal Mountain Region, and that she is Yazidi. She had four sons killed and one daughter taken.  She is looking for her daughter. She showed me Baran’s picture and I started crying.  Hoha said that she had tried to take her own life, but that there were 9 other children that needed her. She was trying to find Baran and buy her back from ISIS.

Wow.  Can that happen?

Sometimes. Sometimes the families can buy a woman back from ISIS, or pay to have her smuggled out, and sometimes ISIS actually will just release the woman. We meet one person that happened too.  (I will write about her story in a future post.) Actually the system they have in Kurdistan makes it very easy for families to be reunited.  The government keeps track of what is provided to each refugee by family name.  In the construction site Hohawas living in each family had an outhouse, water and food papers, and one line of electric provided by the government. A lot of the refugees had cellphones, obsolete phones by our standards, but they could use the electricity to keep it charged. So if Baran escaped and used her family name there is a good chance for her to be reunited with her family.

Was this experience typical for you?  Did refugees often come up to you and tell you their stories?

People often came up to me because they felt I looked Kurdish, but this was not usual for visiting the sites.  Often the children came running to greet us, but most of the adults hung back.  The term refugee is different there too, they prefer to use the term displaced person. But overwhelmingly, when people saw us there regularly, and heard that we were from America, they shared their stories with us. It gave them hope that people from other places would come to help them, and hear the things that happened to them. They wanted their stories shared. 

During this conversation, Mom spoke with me about visiting Hoha on other occasions and some other stories which I will transcribe and post on here later. I apologize to our readers that I have to separate the stories like this. Please keep Hoha and Baran in your thoughts and prayers.