{"id":61235,"date":"2013-07-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-graduate-helping-syrian-refugees-in-jordan\/"},"modified":"2013-07-11T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-11T00:00:00","slug":"uri-graduate-helping-syrian-refugees-in-jordan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2013\/07\/uri-graduate-helping-syrian-refugees-in-jordan\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 graduate helping Syrian refugees in Jordan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tWarwick native director of nonprofit group Mercy Corps<\/p>\n

KINGSTON, RI \u2013 July 11, 2013 \u2013 Imagine living in a tent with a handful of household items, surviving on a few buckets of water daily and relying on donated food to feed your family.<\/p>\n


\nThis is the world for 120,000 Syrians living in Za\u2019atari refugee camp, a former patch of desert in Jordan that is now the country\u2019s fourth-largest city, home to men, women and children fleeing a civil war that has claimed the lives of nearly 100,000.<\/p>\n


\nWorking to help the refugees is Robert Maroni, a 溏心vlog免费B站 graduate and Warwick native who is country director in Jordan for Mercy Corps, a global relief organization.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cIt\u2019s an absolute crisis,\u201d says Maroni, in Rhode Island for a few weeks to visit family. \u201cMost people cross the border with just the shirts on their backs. They can\u2019t work legally; they have kids, no food, no clothes. It\u2019s a huge undertaking to ensure their basic needs are met.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nThe refugee crisis in Jordan is worsening by day. Already one of the most water-strapped countries in the world thanks to a decade-long drought, Jordan is seeing its water supplies dwindle even more with the influx of refugees. <\/p>\n


\nSome aid workers worry that tensions between Jordanians and the refugees could escalate with the summer heat. What\u2019s worse, the two-year war in Syria shows no sign of ending, with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the rebels digging in. <\/p>\n


\nTo escape the bloodshed, a staggering number of refugees cross the border every day: more than 3,000, most of them on foot at night to avoid being shot and carrying nothing more than a knapsack of belongings, if they\u2019re lucky. Some 600,000 refugees are already in Jordan, and observers speculate that hundreds of thousands more could cross if the war drags on for years.<\/p>\n


\nFood and housing can be airlifted in, but not water. Maroni and his team of 100 local and expatriate staff workers are managing 10 projects, including a $20 million project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to refurbish Jordan\u2019s failing municipal water system. <\/p>\n


\nIn the Za\u2019atari camp, the organization has also built a modern pump station and chlorination system capable of providing clean water to 65,000 refugees a day. A similar water system is being built by Mercy Corps in a new refugee camp under construction in the central-eastern city of Azraq.<\/p>\n


\nMercy Corps has also drilled two deep wells up to 1,800 feet to reach underground reservoirs. <\/p>\n


\nBut water is not the only focus. <\/p>\n


\nMercy Corps has built seven playgrounds in refugee camps and trained Syrian refugees to be child care minders. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cA lot of the kids have seen really awful stuff that they should never see,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery time I go to the camp I go to the playgrounds and pick up some of the smaller kids and hold them and play with them until I see a smile. You can tell they really yearn for attention. Providing a little bit of happiness to the children is definitely the \u2018feel good\u2019 part of my joy.\u2019<\/p>\n


\nMany children, he says, have witnessed horrible acts: \u201cTheir villages have been blown up, their houses destroyed. They\u2019ve seen people getting shot. They\u2019ve seen death and destruction. They\u2019ve seen the ugly side of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nRaised in Warwick, Maroni attended Toll Gate High School and graduated from 溏心vlog免费B站 in 1987 with a bachelor\u2019s degree in biology. He ran his own construction company for several years, but longed to work overseas.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cI always had a passion for traveling,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d do a project, then take a couple months off, put on my backpack and travel. I met some interesting people during my trips, and I started figuring out how to transition to live an interesting life overseas and help people.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nHe had no experience working abroad, so, in 1993, he joined the Peace Corps. He spent two years in the Western African country of Cameroon, teaching woodworking and building a habitat for chimps and baby gorillas. He spent a third year in the West Indies, teaching carpentry to teenagers.<\/p>\n


\nAfter the Peace Corps, he obtained a master\u2019s degree in sustainable international development at Brandeis University. <\/p>\n


\nBy 1997, he was working in Rwanda, rebuilding villages for Hutus returning from Tanzanian refugee camps to a country ravaged by genocide. From there, he moved to Eritrea, where he coordinated an HIV prevention project from 1999 through 2004 for Population Services International, a nonprofit group based in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n


\nMaroni joined the nonprofit Mercy Corps in 2004, working as country director in Zimbabwe. He helped children orphaned by the country\u2019s HIV epidemic and improved water supplies in rural villages. For the last 3\u00bd years he\u2019s been in Jordan.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cIt feels good to help people \u2013 absolutely,\u201d says Maroni. He and his wife, Nadia al-Alawi, and their two girls, ages 10 and 12, live in Amman, Jordan\u2019s capital. Maroni met his wife in Cameroon while she was backpacking through the area.<\/p>\n


\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been overseas together since 1997,\u201d says Maroni.<\/p>\n


\nNot long ago, Maroni was talking to a high school friend from Warwick, Jim Nash, about the refugee camp and told him that the children have no toys. <\/p>\n


\n Nash reached out to his employer, Hasbro, Inc., in Pawtucket. Mercy Corps\u2019 need fell within Hasbro\u2019s giving guidelines and a short time later the company shipped 11,000 games and toys, including Mr. Potato Head, Transformers and PlayDoh.<\/p>\n


\nDestination: poor Jordanian youngsters and the children of Za\u2019atari.<\/p>\n


\n Pictured above: Robert Maroni, a 溏心vlog免费B站 graduate and Mercy Corps country director for Jordan. Maroni, a Warwick native, is helping Syrian refugees fleeing a civil war in their country.

\nPhoto courtesy of Robert Maroni<\/p>\n


\nMercy Corps is helping 19 million people worldwide recover from disasters, build stronger communities and find their own solutions to poverty. Since its founding in 1979, the group has provided $2.2 billion in assistance to people in 114 countries.

\nFor more information, visit www.mercycorps.org.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warwick native director of nonprofit group Mercy Corps KINGSTON, RI \u2013 July 11, 2013 \u2013 Imagine living in a tent with a handful of household items, surviving on a few buckets of water daily and relying on donated food to feed your family. This is the world for 120,000 Syrians living in Za\u2019atari refugee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61237,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}