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Sick Enough for Resettlement
Nida Mariam / 20 March 2008
He left all their medical records behind when, fearing for his life, he fled with his family from Iraq to Cairo.
Abdul, once a blacksmith in Iraq, is one of many Iraqis who traded off his belongings as the price of his life. He sold his house and car to pay ransom to his kidnappers and bring his wife and his four daughters to the safety he thought would be Egypt. Today, scrambling around the clinics of greater Cairo getting health tests for his ailing wife and his sickly six-year-old, Abdul is still paying, and it’s money he doesn’t have.
His youngest daughter was diagnosed in Iraq with a kidney problem. Ultrasound before her birth revealed abnormally large kidneys. Congenital disorders such as this one--UN-reported legacies of depleted uranium employed by US and UK forces during the Gulf War--are cited by a doctor at Caritas as the second most common health problem she sees among Iraqis in Cairo. Caritas is the agency that provides medical care for refugees who are registered at the Cairo offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
But funds for these Iraqis are limited, informs an UNHCR employee. “Many of the Iraqis are coming with severe chronic diseases…[which] need long term medication and treatment, and this is not possible in Egypt. Medication in Egypt is very expensive and the budget of the UNHCR is very limited, so we can only cover the person up to 8000 L.E.[less than $1500] per year. This,” she admits, “is nothing.”
Even the amount which Abdul Rahman can get as an UNHCR-recognised refugee, he does not receive. “We have no more funds to give you; we have run out,” a Caritas employee informed Abdul Rahman when he went for his second bi-monthly instalment of financial assistance. Living in a city approximately 100 km from downtown Cairo, Abdul Rahman finds these trips trying. He waits in a crowd at the clinic, only to be turned away.
Before he was kidnapped from his home in Iraq, Abdul Rahman lived well; he drove his four daughters to school. Now, with no legal access to work in Cairo, he has come to depend on the kindness of friends to get by.
Besides her kidney condition, his daughter has heart trouble. His wife’s health—details of which he expressed reserve in disclosing, is deteriorating. With no recourse to regular visits to the doctor but with extensive experience with his family’s medical history, Abdul Rahman has taken to prescribing the pills himself.
While getting accepted as citizens in another country is unlikely for most Iraqis living in the limbo of Cairo, refugees like Abdul Rahman who have difficult medical cases that cannot be treated in Egypt stand a slight chance of finding a new home. Families with severe medical distress can ask a Caritas doctor to write a special application for resettlement in another country. “We write a one-page report to the UN,” informs a doctor at Caritas. “But this is not easy for us and not easy for the UN,” she adds.
And not easy for those waiting for new homes, either. Countries prefer strong and healthy immigrants and tend to lean away from seriously ill refugees that might burden their medical systems. With only four countries accepting Iraqi refugees through the UNHCR system, successful applicants remain limited.
With no call back from UNHCR after he first registered in July 2006, the future of Abdul Rahman’s family remains unknown. Doctors in Egypt have been unable to detect the problem with his child. Having taken her and his wife for another series of medical tests, he will submit the new reports to another doctor at Caritas and apply again through UNHCR.
When Abdul Rahman sleeps, his mind is preoccupied with getting himself and his family out of here. The question is: are they sick enough to get resettled in a new country?
