In 2016, touched by the Venezuelan immigration crisis in the north of Brazil, which had begun to be more intense, Fraternity – International Humanitarian Federation (FIHF) send the first group of humanitarian servers to Boa Vista. So, in the month of November of that year, the Roraima Humanitarian Mission was born.
From then to now, it has been five years of uninterrupted activity in the humanitarian response to the Venezuelan people. Throughout those five years, different stages slowly occurred, and Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF), for it had been a pioneer in this response, participated in all the phases, and continues to work in improving humanitarian aid.
Stage 1 – Emergency Assistance (November/2016 to March/2018)
On November 2, 2016, the first group of humanitarian servers arrived in Roraima to diagnose the situation in Boa Vista and provide emergency assistance. In that period, there were many people in the streets or living in public spaces, without any kind of help. The first steps were to mitigate hunger by collecting donations locally and preparing food, treating or referring more serious cases of sickness, and coordinating local partnerships at a governmental and non-governmental level to expand possibilities for assisting the immigrants and refugees.
One of the places where the greatest number of people were concentrated in the capital was the Passarão Market. The refugees and immigrants lived in quite precarious situations, with little food, terrible hygiene conditions, weakened health, living on alms and, in addition to carrying the trauma of a forced migration, they faced a growing wave of xenophobia. These were times of emergency, and the first teams of humanitarian servers promptly responded. Through coordinating solutions with local partners, in December of 2016, the first humanitarian shelter of Brazil was founded – the Pintolândia shelter, in a gymnasium of a neighborhood with the same name. This shelter came from the partnership between Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF), the Setrabes (State Department of Labor and Social Welfare) and the Civil Defense of Roraima, and the people living in the Passarão Market, both indigenous and non-indigenous, were voluntarily sent there.
This event represents a key milestone and opened the doors so that Brazil could develop one of the most successful humanitarian responses in the whole world, today serving as an example of sheltering refugees, on a planet where the number of forcibly displaced people is growing constantly growing, be it through armed conflict, climate events or social crises.
After going through the experience of carrying out a shared management of the shelter with the Setrabes team, in 2017, Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) was contacted by the UN Agency for Refugees (UNHCR) and received the proposal of continuing its work in the shelter as the implementing partner of that agency. The entry of the UNHCR in the humanitarian response brought a series of benefits, for it added not only the know-how of an institution that worked with refugees all over the world, but also had the budgetary input of international donors so that the conditions of the response could be improved.
In this phase, the Roraima Humanitarian Mission was expanded to Pacaraima, a city on the border with Venezuela and the entry point for the Venezuelan migration to Brazil. A township with a low number of inhabitants, historically easygoing, Pacaraima was experiencing an urban chaos of enormous proportions, with people living on the streets, an increase in criminal activity, outbreaks of infectious diseases, and receiving assistance only from some local religious entities up to that point. Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF), this time in partnership with the UNHCR, participated in the founding of the second humanitarian shelter in Brazil, the Janokoida shelter, which was destined for the indigenous refugee population that was concentrated in the region.
As the Venezuelan crisis was experiencing an unprecedented increase in forced migration, the commitment of Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) to human dignity caused it to participate in the founding of and taking on the management of yet another humanitarian shelter, again in a gymnasium in the capital of Roraima, in the Tancredo Neves neighborhood. Taking on the name of the neighborhood, the shelter came as an alternative for the creation of a space dedicated to the non-indigenous population and another dedicated to the indigenous people, thus preserving the cultural specificities of the assisted groups. With the opening of the Tancredo Never shelter for non-indigenous people, the Pintolândia shelter was kept only for the indigenous population, a characteristic that it still maintains.
In spite of the efforts, the demand for shelter was exponential in proportion to the capacity; the number of people on the streets grew daily, the refugees walked hundreds of kilometers to reach Boa Vista, but on arrival, they could not find assistance. The Venezuelan immigration crisis transformed into a national emergency, and it was from the Brazilian government that an initiative emerged that brought about the second stage in the humanitarian response in Roraima: Operation Welcome.
Stage 2 – Expansion of the Shelters (March/2018 to May/2021)
With the growing Venezuelan migratory flow into Brazil and the various ills that arise resulting from a humanitarian crisis, the situation transformed into a case of national emergency. This scenario caused the arrival of UN Agencies to the region and an intervention of the Brazilian government, a joint initiative of the Ministries of Citizenship and Defense, coordinated by the Humanitarian Task Force of the Armed Forces, and called Operation Welcome.
During the period in which Operation Welcome began, there were already three shelters in Roraima, and Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) managed all of them in partnership with UNHCR. But it was a difficult time; the shelters had begun to be spaces accessible to crime, the demand for shelter was very great and the infrastructure of the shelters showed up as insufficient. In this sense, the input brought by the Armed Forces as representatives of Operation Welcome was fundamental, because it added a significant budget to the humanitarian response, an impressive logistical capacity worthy of military organizations, an abundance of labor skilled in erecting emergency structures, and security, both for the beneficiaries of the shelters and the humanitarian workers.
This whole set of circumstances placed the work that was being carried out in Roraima on a different level. It was at this point that the Brazilian humanitarian response to the Venezuelan immigration crisis came to be known internationally as Operation Welcome, joined by 100 organizations, between governmental agencies, the UN System of agencies, non-governmental organizations and religious institutions. In a few months, the State could rely on more than 10 humanitarian shelters, triage posts specializing in the emitting of immigration documentation, targeted health care and various parallel initiatives which provided support for the Venezuelan refugees and immigrants.
During this impulse brought by Operation Welcome, Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) took on the fourth shelter, called Nova Canaã, with a non-indigenous profile when it opened. It was in this phase that the institution slightly shifted the profile of its work, supported up to that point exclusively with the volunteer labor of the group of humanitarian servers connected to it for a long time, and began to also hire new collaborators to take care of the growing demand that the improvement of the humanitarian work demanded. The teams that worked in the shelters were gradually enlarged, and with this, they were able to take care of more and more situations that emerge in the daily routine of a refugee camp and provide a more and more qualified assistance.
In 2019, with the emergence of the Interiorization Program of Operation Welcome, which provides support so that the refugees and immigrants are able to restart their lives in a dignified way in other Brazilian states, Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) was invited to take on the management of the Transit Shelter of Manaus (TSM), a space dedicated to providing housing for a short time for the Venezuelan volunteers of the Interiorization Program, who were waiting to board air transportation in the capital of Amazonas.
In September of that year, the Roraima Humanitarian Mission experienced a new expansion, encompassing yet another space and another state in the work it was developing. The management of the TSM was again conducted in partnership with UNHCR and as part of Operation Welcome. A whole new logistics had to be set up and challenges overcome to establish the foundations for work in the city of Manaus.
The beginning of 2020 brought an unexpected situation for all of humanity: the covid-19 pandemic, which spread throughout the world, with Brazil being one of the most affected with the virus. To experience that situation in the humanitarian response was more than a challenge; it was a really big battle, because it represented an emergency within the emergency, a crisis within another crisis.
As a response to the pandemic, a very important structure was set up in Roraima for combating the coronavirus, called Protection and Care Area (PCA). The PCA could be described as a large campaign hospital set up by Operation Welcome, with the support of various institutions and the government of the State of Roraima, which made a difference in the treatment of covid-19 cases. Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) also supported this great enterprise, providing humanitarian servers for voluntarily acting in the struggle against the pandemic. Inevitably, beneficiaries of the shelters contracted the disease and even died as a result of it, but in percentage terms, the index of sheltered people affected was way below the average of the Brazilian population, showing the success of the work carried out.
At the same time as the Roraima humanitarian Mission, other activities of Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) had a positive impact on the response to the Venezuelan crisis. Through a partnership established with the Sphere Association, Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) became the focal point of the Sphere Handbook in Brazil and Portugal, and translated the Handbook into Portuguese through the work of its affiliate, Irdin Editora. Training on the Sphere Standards, offered by the Training and Development team to humanitarian servers and other institutions, brought an enrichment to the quality of the work developed in the field.
In mid-2020, with the success of the Interiorization Program and due to the closing of the terrestrial border with Venezuela, some shelters were closed. In this phase, Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) remained with the management of just the indigenous shelters, a population with which it had been working since the beginning of the Mission in 2016. From then, it began working on specializing in this humanitarian response with indigenous refugees, which increased throughout 2021 and arrived to a total of 5 shelters, adding up to more than 2,000 indigenous people of 5 different ethnicities, mostly being Warao as the greater number, and E’ñepa. This specialization work brought about the creation of the first Indigenous Shelter Management Manual, released in 2021.
Also, during 2020, Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) began to develop the first Livelihoods projects that went beyond the indigenous handicrafts, which it had already been fostering since the beginning of the Mission. The pandemic was a hindering factor in this line of work, but in the second semester of that year, results began to appear. Courses were offered in the SENAC-RR for indigenous and non-indigenous people, besides courses in the Livelihoods Rooms staged in the shelters. These first trainings were the embryo of the Lasting Solutions Sector.
Stage 3 – Building Lasting Solutions (May/2021 to the present)
The great challenge of any humanitarian response throughout the world is to find alternatives for the socioeconomic insertion of the refugees into the host community, so that in this way, they are able to free themselves from welfare and rebuild their lives in a dignified way. This is one of the reasons why some refugee camps are more than three decades old, and there is the prospect of a forcibly displaced person spending more than a decade living in temporary structures.
If on the one hand, in Brazil we have a case of success with the Interiorization Program of Operation Welcome, which has already given more than sixty thousand Venezuelans the chance to restart their lives in other regions of the country, on the other hand, the migratory flow continues to grow and more and more people cross the border, looking for better living conditions. This scenario caused the humanitarian response as a whole to focus on the path of Lasting Solutions, which in the case of the Roraima Humanitarian Mission, is already in the third stage of the response – after the emergency assistance in the first years and the phase of the expansion of shelters, now the focus is on creating opportunities for the refugees and immigrants to be able to restart their lives in the Brazilian society.
Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) is experiencing this new challenge in quite an intense way, keeping in mind that the public with which it works is not a target of the Interiorization Program of Operation Welcome, because of the cultural specificities and the Brazilian legislation for indigenous peoples. This panorama makes the building of Lasting Solutions for the Venezuelan indigenous refugees more complex. Some people have already been living in the shelters for more than 4 years, and still do not have a concrete perspective in being able to restart their lives in a dignified way. To remain indefinitely in welfare is not a rational alternative.
The first initiatives of Livelihoods developed by Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) at the end of 2020 brought about the creation of the Lasting Solutions Sector. The work done by the Sector grew, and the longed-for project of having a space dedicated exclusively to the education and training of indigenous people materialized in a building beside the Jardim Floresta shelter, this shelter having been taken on by the institution in December of 2020, with an indigenous profile. In May of 2021, the inauguration of the Indigenous Cultural and Training Center (ICTC) occurred, which for the institution represents the milestone of the third stage of the Mission.
Since its inauguration, the ICTC has been the stage for a series of activities focused on the beneficiaries of the indigenous shelters. The space has a multimedia room, a computer room with 10 computers, an industrial kitchen, a medicinal herbs garden, rooms for the production of shoes and handmade clothing, an office for indigenous translators, meeting rooms and a library. Several courses have already taken place there, such as learning Portuguese, IT for young people, good practices in working with food, a workshop on making shoes, workshops on dressmaking, firefighting, entrepreneurship, room-cleaning, as well as important meetings involving the indigenous leadership and the representatives of the institutions who are active in the humanitarian response or public authorities.
There is the perspective that the ICTC may be able to open to the public in the future as a space for selling the products and services of the indigenous refugees. In this sense, entrepreneurship has especially been encouraged, elements being brought in so they can develop quality products and can competitively enter the market. The partnership with other institutions which are also invested in the building of lasting solutions for the refugees has been extremely valuable in this goal being achieved.
Far from being close to the end, the third stage of the humanitarian response has only just begun, but the way it is unfolding is very promising, both for Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) and for other institutions that work toward this end, as well as the Venezuelan refugees and immigrants, especially the indigenous ones, who can glimpse on the horizon the hope of one day leaving the shelters and rebuilding their lives. But besides Roraima, the work developed in the north of Brazil will serve as a foundation for future projects which are being developed for implementing in the new missions of Humanitarian Fraternity (FIHF) on the European and African continents, through its affiliate, Fraternity – International Humanitarian Missions (FIHM), where working with Education in Emergencies, Humanitarian Ecology and Training Centers for Development is being planned.
