Thank you very much for the question.
As you've heard before, I think it's important to distinguish between the two general settings of where people have moved to: one is formal camps and the other is informal settlements. Those two situations present distinct health challenges. I can give you the World Vision example.
We operate in the Sulaymaniyah governorate in the Kurdish region of Iraq through a World Health Organization grant that allows us to provide front-line health services both to IDPs who are in informal settlements or who have taken over a hospital—where I was on Sunday—or within camps.
In camps the key concern is overcrowding. A key concern is that you have tents meant to be for one family, and now because of the rapid influx you have two, three, or four families in very confined spaces. That in itself presents an increased risk of transmission of diseases, hygiene. Out of that comes building of latrines as a key concern.
But also a key concern is that with this influx of this large number of people, you have a shortage of qualified staff within the Kurdish region. There are struggles as displaced people out of other regions of Iraq have moved into Kurdistan and are having difficulties practising. For example, World Vision's front-line staff have made a very targeted effort of employing internally displaced people who have medical qualifications. That's a very concrete...we hear this often in Canada around accreditation of credentials.
I can give you the story of a hospital that I went to in a town called Qalat Dizah, which is up over two mountain passes away from the main city, where around 800 individuals have taken over an abandoned hospital. You have rooms that were essentially former hospital rooms where there are only washroom facilities to the floor, and now you have children sleeping on the floor because there hasn't been an initial impact.
It was really heartbreaking to see up to eight, 10, or 12 children in a space that is meant for three or four individual beds. Children often come to those places with pre-existing conditions. Those people are difficult to register so we can provide them with health care. World Vision is able to go there three times a week with a small mobile clinic. You need to be very versatile as a service provider to be able to get to those people on a very quick mechanism, because often they move unannounced, if you will, from one place to another, so tracking down these folks is very difficult.
I think that's all the time I have.