Heating Oil for the Poor

Heating Oil for the Poor

Or: A little bit is at least better than noting...

 Iraq is one of the countries with the largest oil-reserves worldwide - but otherwise thousands of IDPs in Iraq even don´t have any heating oil to get a warmed up shelter during cold and rainy winter days and nights.

Just a few hours before leaving Iraq once again and travelling back to Germany, i made - knowing, that it would only be a very, very small gesture - the spontaneous decision to do what i was able to do and invest 150 $ to provide heating oil to at least some families.

I was thinking about some yazidi families that have to spend already the third winter in simple tents and windy shelters, as they did not find place in orgenized camps.

But it should turn out very soon, that this plan was absoultely unpracticable. A friend told me: If you are going to deliver heating oil to ten families in a place, where 100 families live, this will cause a lot of tensions among the people there. So better wait until you will be able to provide oil ta all the families there and give the ten bottles of oil to poor people in another place, where it will cause less tensions.

The oil was ordered, there were only some hours before I had to leave and go to the airport… So I asked myself, what to do now?

Of course, I had been offered to cancel the ordered oil, but that was not, what I intended to do, as then noone would have any help. So I finally decided to distribute the 10 bottles, each filled with 22 liters of heating oil, to poor IDP families in Alqosh.

The first stop was a former school building in the center of Alqosh´s old town, where six extremely poor IDP families live. Some days before I had visited them for the first time with the members of a local NGO that were distributing some Christmas gifts to them, so I knew, how needy they are. And I was quite shocked, when members of that families told me, that during more than two years they had not been supplied with heating oil from anyone – a sentence I should hear repeatedly on that Dec. 30 of 2016.

Its just too many IDP families that are depending for 100% on help from outside, as they have nothing (they lost everything, when they had to flee ISIS in 2014) and also have no chance for earning an income. Of course, especially the churches and many organisations d a lot of great work in supporting those people. But they can´t cover all the needs, that´s the problem.

So it is especially old and sick people, that suffer during winter time, as their health gets worse and their situation turns from bad to more bad with every month passing by…

It was only a small help – but I know, I have been able to bring at least a little bit of joy to some of those people (also I know that 22 liters of heating oils are only enough to provide warmth for some few hours). But I hope, on my next visit I will be able to refill the bottles (we asked them to give them back for refillment) and maybe, with the help of other people, be also able to provide more suffering people with heating oil.