As World Help prepares for World Refugee Day on June 20, we are urgently working to increase the awareness of innocent victims of violence, war, and displacement. The Syrian refugee crisis is the largest in the world today . . . and not enough is being done about it. Violence has claimed the lives of more than 93,000 people—several estimates put the death toll well beyond 100,000—while the world watches on, unsure how to respond.
The following is an excerpt from an article by Johnnie Moore featured on Fox News addressing this humanitarian crisis. Moore is a World Help board member and a Vice President of Liberty University. He is also the author of Dirty God: Jesus in the Trenches.
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With the help of World Help — an organization founded by Liberty University’s first graduate, Vernon Brewer — I went into the heart of the Zaatari camp on Jordan’s border with Syria to investigate opportunities to serve.
I’ll never forget what I saw there.
Almost everyone I met had bullet wounds and scars.
Perhaps it’s what I should have expected being in a place like that … in a time like this.
The white, wind swept tents went as far as I could see, and then there were the children — thousands of them – running aimlessly, everywhere. Almost all of the white tents had faded to a shade of brown as dark as the sand they were pitched upon, like the faded hopes of the families whose lives had been destroyed by a war they didn’t choose.
These rudimentary conditions provided the only available shelter for the nearly 200,000 Syrian refugees living there, and I could taste their despair. Pain was atmospheric, even omnipresent. Everyone had lost someone, most of them had lost everything, and no one had any hope of having any hope to speak of.
It all seemed unreal to me until a Syrian man came to our fortified pick-up truck and started banging wildly on the window.
For a moment, I had no idea what was happening, and my heart started throbbing in my chest. The animated man was screaming something in Arabic.
