“Sad, grieving, anxious – these are the emotions of these Yazidi, Syrian, and Kurdish people. They fled from the Iraqi boarder in the wake of ISIS advances and are now sheltered here in the city of Duhok.” Tim Myrick, was just fifty miles away from Mosul, the ISIS capital city, offering medical care for some of the 800,000 refugees in Duhok. His clinic: the home of a local official who magnanimously opened his home.
Tim Myrick – recipient of the 2013 INMED Award for Compassionate Service To Humanity – observes, “Their lives in these encampments is excruciatingly difficult: out-of-control chronic diseases, limited diet, oncoming winter, boredom, and total insecurity about their futures.” Then Myrick smiles, “but to their credit these people suffer from very little obesity!” His voice becomes again more somber. “Their plight is quite similar to the Somali refugees whom I cared for in Kenya, for whom the political circumstances and solutions are extremely complex.”
But while such solutions are in process, compassionate professionals like Tim Myrick are providing both compassionate humanitarian aid and an example for us all to follow. Interact with faculty of his character at the next INMED International Medicine & Public Health Hybrid Course, offered five times in 2016. “Americans tire quickly on hearing of foreign wars and international anguish. Instead of ignoring we would do far better to engage.”