When the Taliban moved on Kunduz, Afghanistan in September 2015, 21-year-old Sayed HaMed Mosawi and his family fled to a public park in a neighboring town. They huddled together on a tarp as insurgents stormed schools and hospitals, set fire to the United Nations compound, and eventually raised a flag over the city in victory, shouting: “Death to America! Death to the slaves of America!”
The family returned 16 days later to find their neighborhood riddled with bullets, smoke still lingering in the air. A neighbor told them armed men were looking for Mosawi.
Mosawi is a gregarious young man with expressive brown eyes, meticulously styled hair, and a sharp wit. He was an English teacher by profession, and the Taliban was accusing him of training people to serve as translators for the United States’ military.
He felt dizzy, imagining every creak and pop outside his home to be soldiers coming to fetch him. As soon as he could find a working electrical outlet to charge his phone, he messaged a friend — a 30-something British woman he had found in the “people you may know section” on Facebook a few months prior. He asked her to help him practice his English, and soon, they were video chatting three or four times a week discussing everything from favorite foods to deepest fears.
“I need to get out of Afghanistan,” he told her.
A few days later, she committed to send him $1,100 for a visa and a flight to Iran.
MMosawi became one of some 60 million people to flee their homes that year. The number has since risen, making today’s refugee crisis the largest since the United Nations started tracking seven decades ago.
But scale isn’t the only thing that makes this moment in humanitarian history unique.
In the regions that turn out the highest number of refugees — Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia — Facebook use is skyrocketing. With powerful translation apps, the only thing that now separates a person dodging mortars in Syria from one zapping a microwave dinner in New York is a friend request.
For thousands of refugees like Mosawi, this has translated into direct aid from regular people — stay-at-home moms, real estate agents, dentists, hairdressers, marketing specialists — hailing from screens in Europe, the United States, Australia, and more.
Some of these laptop humanitarians, like Mosawi’s friend, were drawn into the refugee crisis on social media. Others got their start volunteering in makeshift refugee camps on the Greek islands. When they returned home, unable to get the suffering they’d witnessed out of their heads, they set up Facebook groups to coordinate ongoing aid efforts remotely, where refugees can easily find people empathetic to their plight.
Some nonprofits have attempted to formalize this work, but for the most part, the community delivers aid casually, like neighbors helping neighbors. They help refugees get in touch with the coast guard when dinghies start flooding in the middle of the Mediterranean. They raise money for medical operations. Perhaps most often, they offer a sympathetic ear to people who desperately need to be heard.
“We can’t promise to solve all their problems,” one volunteer said. “But we can promise that they will not have to face those problems alone.”
UNHCR spokeswoman Laura Padoan labeled this brand of humanitarianism “new and innovative,” praising it for pumping much-needed monetary and psychosocial support into an overwhelmed, underfunded aid system.
“It sends a strong signal of welcome and solidarity,” Padoan said.
But, as is bound to be the case in any large movement without a discernible leader, the volunteers’ work is ad hoc and uncoordinated.
Sometimes efforts are duplicated or money is wasted. Sometimes untrained volunteers, unprepared for the depth of trauma these refugees face, spiral out of control, losing life savings, homes, and relationships. Sometimes refugees get hurt.
IIt was a Tuesday in September. Rehanna Flowerinjannah sat in her living room, bare feet tucked underneath her on a well-worn couch, stitching together pencil cases for a charity fundraiser. Flowerinjannah is a single mother of four working part-time at a sewing factory a couple hours outside of London. She’s petite with a big Julia Roberts smile that, in public, she veils with a traditional Muslim niqab. While she worked, she kept her laptop open to Facebook on one knee, and her phone queued to WhatsApp on the other — just in case a refugee reached out for help.
Her phone buzzed.
An 11-month-old with hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid in the skull that can cause brain damage if left untreated, needed to travel from the Syrian city of Idlib to Turkey. The girl, Warda, had a shunt inserted into her skull to drain the fluid, but it had become infected and the local doctors didn’t have the proper equipment to operate.
Flowerinjannah fired off a series of questions:
“Where are they now?”
“What exact help do they need?”
“Have they got permission to come to Turkey?”
When Flowerinjannah was satisfied the case was legitimate (based mostly on a photo of the paperwork and a gut feeling), she typed up a short description on a Facebook page she helps run called “HOPE: Help Other People Evolve.”
Before posting, she paused, waffling over a photo of Warda wearing a daisy crown around her enlarged head, smiling. “I usually like something more distressing,” she said. “Fundraising is all about wrangling emotions.”
Nearly as soon as the post went live, the manager of a small Scottish nonprofit commented, offering to coordinate aid delivery on the ground. From Australia, an ICU nurse volunteered to write up the child’s story for an online crowd funding campaign.
Meanwhile, Flowerinjannah privately messaged a doctor she knew in Turkey to get more information: What portion of the medical care would the family be responsible for? Would the family need to hire a translator?
An immigrant from India, Flowerinjannah has always been plugged into international affairs. She put on bake sales to raise money for Palestinian relief as a child, and, as a young mother, loaded her children into a buggy to march against the Iraq War. When she heard reports of mass drownings in the Mediterranean, she searched Facebook for firsthand accounts of attacks in Syria, messaging the authors to ask: What is it like to live in a war zone? Why do so many want so desperately to get to Europe?
Once she heard their stories, she had to help.
“I’m stuck in my house, but I can do something online,” she said. “I can speak languages. I can coordinate.”
Flowerinjannah said she has helped more than 200 boats cross the Mediterranean safely, all by tracking refugees’ location via WhatsApp and notifying the coastguard if something went wrong or the line went silent for too long. (These days, the majority of her cases are medical like Warda’s.)
She pours 30-plus hours a week into remote refugee aid. She connects with the refugees by monitoring over 100 Facebook groups with names such as “Help4Refugee Children,” “United Humanity,” and “Supporting ALL refugees, when & where it is needed most.” There, volunteers planning to visit refugee camps ask for logistical advice, refugees post their stories, and everyone shares lots of crying emoticons and virtual hugs.
FFacebook volunteers like Flowerinjinnah have done everything from recruiting pro bono legal counsel, to securing prosthetic limbs, to raising money for sundry items such as phone credit and diapers.
For instance, Lynda Elliott, a consultant from England who goes by the alias Ruby Reina, once managed to find shelter and food for a homeless refugee in Belgium in less than 24 hours.
In Provo, Utah, thirty-five-year-old Adam Paul Steed once helped a group of political detainees in Syria’s Hama Prison gain their freedom via Facebook Messenger. A refugee he’d met while volunteering in Greece had given his contact information to the prisoners’ lawyer. He sent Steed videos of the deteriorating condition of the prison. Human rights watchdogs alleged the president had previously hanged more than 13,000 such detainees.
“Never felt a situation where so many people’s lives depended on something like this,” Steed wrote on Facebook, alongside a screenshot of the video.
Steed forwarded the videos on to the The Independent and The New York Times, which put pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to ultimately settle the matter humanely.
Online volunteers — fully aware they’re operating in a legal gray area — also help refugees without proper immigration paperwork cross borders, either by lending an ID to purchase a train ticket, mapping out a route, or footing the bill for transport.
When it looked unlikely that Mosawi would get asylum in Iran, his British benefactor sent him another $1,300 so he could hire a trafficker to take him to Greece. She was living on government welfare at the time, and had to take a part-time job to get him the money.
Mosawi met the smuggler in a parking lot at 4 a.m., caught a van with blacked out windows to the base of the Zagros mountains and hiked over the border to Turkey, trudging past the frozen, dead bodies of other migrants.
In the middle of the Mediterranean, the raft’s engine gave out. They were rescued by the coastguard.
NNot everyone appreciates the wildly unorganized style that characterizes laptop humanitarians’ efforts.
To Lynda Elliott, there seemed to be a lot of people — thousands, perhaps — who were interested in helping. Yet, she was dismayed to see that refugees’ posts were often met with simple “clucks of sympathy.” Plans to help were dropped as volunteers became wrapped up in their own lives, which is, she argued, “quite dangerous if you’re talking about people who are suicidal or self-harming.”
And there were ethical concerns. It was nearly impossible to verify refugees’ stories from hundreds of miles away. For instance, Elliott was once horrified to discover that a homeless refugee she had raised money to shelter wasn’t homeless at all. She worried about the cavalier way some volunteers spread the photos and personal details of vulnerable people around the internet. Sometimes, she felt the aid offered was inappropriate.
“You get people sending refugees used underwear and stilettos,” she said. “Then there’s the people telling them, ‘Sew up your lips and go on a hunger strike.’”
So she decided to recruit a dedicated team, design training materials for volunteers, establish a workflow, write standard operating procedures, and work up a grant proposal. She called the organization Refugee Buddy Network.
Every member of the Refugee Buddy Network is vetted to make sure there are “no racists or fascists,” Elliott said. There is a moderator overseeing every conversation to make sure everything stays civil and legal, and they use stock photography to protect beneficiaries’ privacy.
Steed founded another effort, a registered nonprofit called WALY, short for “We Are Like You,” which connects U.S. mothers with refugee mothers on WhatsApp, with the sole purpose of fostering friendships (American mothers can send up to $150 to the refugees per month, but it’s not required). There is always a translator on the line to facilitate the conversation, watch out for abuse, and screen for serious mental health conditions. If needed, the translator refers refugees to trained counselors.
But the stakes are often high, and even with these added layers of protection, the work can be morally complicated and emotionally wrenching.
Greece’s Hellenic Coast Guard acknowledged, over email, that some tips from remote watchdogs had resulted in successful rescues. However, it doesn’t exactly appreciate volunteers’ efforts to aid refugees attempting to cross to Europe by sea. People have a 1 in 50 chance of dying during the trip, and officials argued relief workers encourage human traffickers to stuff the boats more recklessly by creating a false sense of security. Putting a middleman between the refugees and emergency response teams also resulted in a “loss of precious time,” the agency complained. More often than not, volunteer information was “incomplete, erroneous, or deferred,” leading to “serious malfunctions.”
On several occasions, coast guard officers accused Flowerinjannah of smuggling people to Greece and grilled her about how she knew the refugees needed help.
“I lied and said my father-in-law was on the boat,” she said. But she suspected some of the people who were feeding her tips were colluding with human traffickers. Eventually, last April, she quit helping with boat rescues, noting, “It’s too political.”
VVolunteers often find themselves talking refugees through trauma, economic hardship, separation from family, uncertainty and depression. Such camaraderie — a listening ear, an encouraging text message — can be a vital form of aid, said Nathalie Severy, a mental health advisor with Médecins Sans Frontières. It is particularly important because, while researchers estimate one in three refugees suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, only a small percentage have access to professional mental health services.
The emotional labor, though, can take a toll.
Steed used up all his savings paying rent for a refugee family in Turkey. Eventually, he had to choose between supporting them and paying his own mortgage. He moved out of his house, started renting out the rooms on Airbnb, and took up residence in a bus.
Elliott put so much energy into her refugee work — sometimes clocking 18-hour days — that it cost her her job. When a refugee she’d been chatting with went silent after informing her of plans to get a boat to Italy, she said she became completely burnt out. Her doctor called it “secondary traumatic stress.” It mimics the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and is common among people who work closely with victims of trauma.
She’s traveling now, trying to heal. She’s not sure when she’ll be well enough to work again. “I’ve taken out loans to do refugee work,” she said. “I’ve lost my job. I’ve had to borrow money to pay the rent because I’ve been too unwell to work. I’ve lost a lot.”
She paused, emotion welling in her throat. “But this has been the best thing I’ve ever done.”
WWarda’s doing fine now — smiling pretty for the camera again in a red lace cap. Flowerinjannah, with help from her team spread across the world, was able to raise $1,125 so the toddler’s father could take her to a hospital in Hatay, Turkey, hire a translator, and buy food and diapers.
Now that she and her father are safely back in Idlib, the volunteers have started raising money to buy specialized medical equipment for the Syrian American Medical Society Foundation so children like her can get surgery without traveling to Turkey.
As for Mosawi, he was granted legal residency in Greece this past June — nearly two years after he left Afghanistan. In August, he got a paid job as a Farsi translator for the international NGO Samaritan’s Purse.
Everyone at the office calls him “California” because he wears his hair in a man bun and says things like, “My life is freaking amazing!” He spends his afternoons at the gym lifting weights and jumping rope. On weekends, he hits the beach and does backflips off the rocks.
He still hasn’t met his Facebook friend. But he counts her as one of the most important people in his life. “If she was not there for me, I would still be in Afghanistan — maybe dead,” he said. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to thank her enough.”
