Visiting Refugees

After church today we were able to make ourselves useful to UNHCR by driving around to different kindergartens where refugees from South Ossetia, Gori, and the Kodori Gorge are being housed. The forms document everything from how many families are there, what kinds of medicines they need, how many beds they have, etc.

The major problems here are not food, water, heating, or shelter... thank goodness. But there are almost no beds, and everyone from kids to elderly people are sleeping on hard wooden floors without blankets. Also, there are almost no cooking kits. In each of the five kindergartens that we visited, there was only one gas stove for between 47-103 people. There is plenty of food, but no refrigeration, so fresh food goes bad and dried food can only be cooked in limited quantities. There are 600 shelters in Tbilisi right now in these conditions.


These are the only two beds in a room sleeping 20 people.







This collection of cushions is the only sleeping set-up in a room of nine people.






People in the shelters described horrible events. This seventy year old woman, from a Georgian village near Tskhinvali, told how Russian military helicopters and planes chased down every single fleeing vehicle and shot it up. The residents of their village escaped because they fled a little bit later. She described a Chechyen mercenary knocking down a woman holding a child, and systematic destruction of Georgian houses and villages.



In one of the shelters, where most of the people are from Upper Svaneti (remember I mentioned Kodori Gorge would get taken out in an earlier post), there are two elderly people who are 94 and 95 years old. Presumably they have lived their whole lives in their mountain villages, now forced to take shelter in a decrepit apartment block in Tbilisi in their twilight years.








This family is from a Georgian village near Tskhinvali. They escaped with one bag. The pile of clothes behind them has been donated by the government and local people.

I'm probably the most depressed today of any day in the last two weeks.... there is so much suffering here. The looks in these people's eyes... I think that most of the adults understand that pretty much everything they had has been wiped out, and there is an active ethnic cleansing of Georgians from South Ossetia. Actually it's a Georgian province, there have always been more Georgians there than Ossetians, who are relative new-comers to the region. There were many mixed villages, and the ethnic differences were minimal according to these witnesses. I don't know what to say, it's horrible, especially for the older people who don't have the energy to start all over again with nothing.

Only 15 years ago, Georgia had 250,000 or more refugees from the Abkhazian civil war, all of them 'cleansed' from Georgian villages in Abkhazia (they were about 75% of the population I think). Today, Abkhazia is still virtually empty, disregarded by the world, and used as political leverage against Georgia by Russia.