When most people go
on a winter getaway, it's to lounge on the beach at some exotic resort,
but Roy Ralph takes a slightly different approach to getting away from
it all.
Ralph recently
returned from Dohok, Northern Iraq, where he spent three months working
with Samaritan's Purse helping internally displaced people of the
region.
“It's still rated as the most
dangerous country in the world,” Ralph said, adding he could hear the
air attacks on ISIS positions in Mosul some 40 kilometres away.
This is not the first time the
retired engineer has ventured to far off lands. He has been to Haiti
several times, Japan after the tsumani and other disaster areas.
When he completed the disaster
assessment and response team (DART) training through Samaritan's Purse,
it opened up a variety of doors – all leading to a disaster or war zone
of some sort.
Ralph said when he was asked to go to Iraq, he jumped at the opportunty with the full blessing of his wife, Olive.
“I like adventure and since I
retired, I have been doing this sort of thing,” he said from his
Westside home Monday, two weeks after returning from the Middle East.
“I always had a nomadic spirit,
so I jumped at the opportunity. It is the sort of adventure that is
exciting to me. I'll go anywhere there is a need.”
Ralph helped
distribute much-needed items to people living fleeing the violence of
ISIS, including 50,000 winter jackets, 300,000 pairs of shoes, 40,000
blankets and many more items needed to survive the harsh Iraq winter.
Samaritan's Purse paid for all of the items plus the 30 tons of food that was distributed while Ralph was in the region.
“Our focus was to help the one
million people who were forced onto Mount Sinjar by ISIS,” he said,
adding the people were trapped on the mountain until Kurdish forces
managed to secure an escape route.
But once out of the war zone,
people had to find a place to live and hunkered down wherever they could
in temperatures that dropped below freezing at night. Many people lived
in unfinished buildings or whatever accommodations they could find.
“There was in excess of 200,000 people living in tents,” he said.
Because he was there from
November to January, Ralph had the opportunity to hand out shoeboxes
filled with gifts collected through Operation Christmas Child.
OCC collected some 13 million
shoe boxes this year and gave them to children in war zones, disaster
areas and areas of tremendous poverty around the world. For many of the
children, the shoebox will be the only give they will ever receive.
In Dohok, a city of 80,000
people, Ralph stayed in a rented house, and while there were no car
bombings or armed conflict in the immediate area, danger lurked around
every corner.
“We were at risk of people
kidnapping us and selling us to ISIS,” he said, adding they had to
constantly change their schedule and the route they took to the
distribution areas to make it harder for any would-be kidnappers to
determine a pattern of when and where they would be.
Ralph said ISIS was operating in the city “in a covert fashion for sure.
“Danger was all around you. We
knew we were in a war zone, but we didn't worry about the danger. We
were there to help people and we went about doing out duties.”
The closest the war came to Ralph was three kilometres when allied bombers hit an ISIS convoy in a nearby mountain.
At 67, Ralph said he plans to keep going on trips as long as possible and will be returning to Haiti in two weeks.
There is also a chance he could return to Iraq in the fall.
