Where do I start? I work as a full-time settlement coordinator and I assist Yazidi refugees. My job was to assist the privately sponsored Yazidi families and the wave of the GARS who came in. We're now assisting them. The families that have come in are all broken families, young mothers with lots of young children. We're constantly getting calls from extended family members back home who are left in refugee camps. There are hundreds of thousands of Yazidis struggling in refugee camps in Turkey and Iraq today. Well over 3,500 Yazidi children and women are still held captive by ISIS.
One of the biggest projects that we're working on right now is to work with all levels of government to reunite some of these families. For example, I'm dealing with a family right now who is here with a stepmom and three step-siblings. About a year ago, she found out that her 17-year-old brother was alive and had managed to escape ISIS and was actually bought back from smugglers for $14,000 U.S. We put forward an application forward in the hope that the government would reunite these siblings. The application was rejected. It was rejected because they need the signature of the parents. Well, the parents are missing and probably dead. So these are the things that need to change for this specific population. When we say “broken families”, these are families in which, for the most part, a lot of people are missing. So with family reunification, when we say we need to amend the definition, we mean it needs to be not just parents and siblings. We need to expand that. We need to include aunts and—