CAMDEN, Maine — As with many people in America, Camden mom Alison McKellar’s heart breaks when she watches the news about the hardships in Syria.
But unlike most people, McKellar is working hard to do something to help — and she wants to get the word out to Mainers that helping Syrians can be a lot easier than many think. For more than a year, she has been collecting items on her Mechanic Street porch that will be useful for Syrians and hauling them to New Hampshire, where volunteers with the nonprofit agency NuDay Syria fill massive shipping containers that are sent overseas.
“I’ve learned that doing something is a lot better than doing nothing,” McKellar, an animated 31-year-old, said this week. “I’ve tried to get as involved as I could. Sometimes I think, oh, I’ve probably tapped out the midcoast area. But then I get more and more stuff donated.”
This week, the items collecting on her porch included a wheelchair, plastic bags of stuffed animals and several bicycles. In McKellar’s backyard storage area, there are boxes packed with winter clothes, medical equipment and reams of recycled boat shrink wrap, which the Syrians use for shelters or in the makeshift hospitals. A hand-lettered sign on the picket fence in front of the house directs passers-by to drop off nonperishable food, winter coats, buckets and “anything to keep warm.”
How did a regular mom from a small Maine town get involved with a country and problem so very far away? Though McKellar said she has been interested in international development and aid work for most of her adult life, she had never really connected to the Middle East. But that changed when she read news stories and saw photographs from the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2011. The images from Syria, in particular, stuck with her, she said. That’s the country where demands for democratic reforms were met by a fierce crackdown from the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
“This was doctors, children, university students in the streets, fighting for democracy,” McKellar said. “I found myself reading a little bit more, and a little bit more. I found myself cheering them on.”
She followed along on social media and through the news coverage by CNN as the crisis in Syria escalated, and saw that more and more nongovernment agencies were calling it the worst humanitarian situation since Rwanda, or even since World War II.
Islamic State militants hold territory in Syria and civilians have been caught in the crossfire of the complicated conflict. According to a Reuters news agency report this week, the war in Syria has killed about 250,000 people to date. Four million people have fled Syria and almost twice as many are displaced inside it. Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have been arriving in Europe, part of the biggest migration crisis to hit that continent in decades.
“Oh my gosh, this is so clearly the crisis of my generation,” McKellar said. “When something is the biggest crisis in the world, and people are dying, everybody has to do a little more.”
Still, while she was learning more about the issue, she didn’t know how she could help. Until she was asked about a year and a half ago to speak about the conflict in Syria to a class at Camden Hills Regional High School, that is.
“The students said they’d like to send diapers and clothes to refugee camps,” McKellar recalled. “In my head, I rolled my eyes. They don’t know what I know — these organizations don’t want to mess around with in-kind donations.”
But she humored the students and did a Google search to see if anyone was collecting items for Syrians, and up popped NuDay Syria, run out of Nadia Alawa’s home in East Hampstead, New Hampshire. McKellar reached out to see if the registered 501(c) organization was for real.
“I was incredulous at first,” McKellar said. “But they said they’d be delighted to accept donations from high school students.”
The conventional wisdom in international aid is that it is inefficient to send goods overseas. But Joel R. Charny, a vice president at InterAction, an alliance of large U.S.-based relief and development organizations, told the Boston Globe in May that direct aid to Syria can make sense “if the stuff is usable and needed, and they can guarantee it gets to vulnerable people.”
They can, according to the website for NuDay Syria. Contents of each container are easily worth $100,000 or more, and the organization has a valid export license allowing it to send nearly 60 of the containers overseas so far. Most of the containers are sent to Turkey. From there they are picked up by Alawa’s team of Syrian activists, who empty the containers into trucks and bring the shipment inside the war-torn country.
But there would be nothing to send without the help of people like McKellar and her growing band of Maine-based volunteers, Alawa wrote in an email sent to the BDN.
“Alison is a pleasure and dynamo and we love what she contributes to NuDay Syria,” Alawa said. “She has been joining nearly each of our humanitarian containers every month since she first reached out, and even more importantly reaches out into her community and humanizes Syrian mothers and children … she is innovative and personal in her approach to making new contacts and thinking outside the box to get meaningful donations.”
One of the ways McKellar has done that is by looking around midcoast Maine to find unusual items that might help struggling Syrians. Her husband works for a local yacht services provider, and she was familiar with the heavy-duty plastic shrink wrap that protects fancy boats from harsh Maine winters. In the spring, most of that material is destined for the dump, but McKellar wondered if it might be useful in Syria. It is, she quickly learned.
“Often they come right off the boats in the perfect shape to be a rain shelter,” she said. “They might cover hospital beds. They might use it for the walls of a hospital. It’s been one of the most-requested items.”
Local boatyards and yacht owners have been generous in supplying her with the plastic, which is most helpful if it is in good condition, she said.
Other folks in the community also have surprised her with their generosity, including hospital workers who have brought unneeded equipment and a firefighter who dropped off retired turnout gear.
“That stuff is really, really needed,” McKellar said, describing the situation in Syria as akin to a medical crisis and war happening inside an endless winter camping trip. “Everything is useful.”
Susan Silverio of Lincolnville said she heard McKellar speak about Syria this spring and decided to start volunteering.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to have a meaningful way to relate to persons in Syria who are suffering such extreme hardship at this time,” she said. “The repurposed shrink wrap project especially interests me. Ordinarily it would go to our landfills, but with a jolly team of volunteers we can prepare it for use in Syria to shelter a family or provide sanitary surfaces in medical clinics.”
As strangers and friends alike rally to the word-of-mouth call to help Syria, McKellar said she has been humbled by the people she has met on her porch.
“I think I have to have the greatest network of kind, generous people around,” she said. “I get so much more out of this than I’ll ever give back.”
What’s needed:
Warm clothes, school supplies, nonperishable food items, medical supplies, retired EMS and fire gear, diapers, buckets and hygiene supplies, among other items.
A more complete list is available on the Maine Syria Relief Facebook page.
Monetary donations help pay for shipping expenses, which average $6,000 per container.
Alison McKellar also is seeking storage space in midcoast Maine for some items. For information, visit facebook.com/MaineSyriaRelief?fref=ts or call McKellar at 386-956-1530
Where drop-offs take place in Maine:
79 Mechanic St., Camden.
The Animal House, 15 Coastal Market Drive, Damariscotta.
The Animal House, 11 Main St., Suite 9, Westbrook.