I believe that I should leave for Beirut on Thursday, said forty years old Vanja Crnojevic, who has been the head of the Swiss humanitarian organization “Borderfree” for five years.
In 2015, she left a secure job at a Swiss union and decided to help the afflicted population around the world. So far, the “Borderfree” has implemented various humanitarian campaigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Serbia, Northern Macedonia, Greece and Lebanon, Avaz news portal reports.
Once a refugee herself, this exceptionally brave woman chose helping others as her life path. Together with her team, she has been helping Syrian refugees in Lebanon for a while, and it is estimated that there are about two million of them there.
On that Tuesday, when the explosion happened, Vanja and the organization’s volunteers were supposed to be in Beirut to help the refugees.
”Everything I saw after the explosion was shocking, and since the hotel where we were staying was quite close, I was sure that we could have been among the victims ourselves. However, we did not have a flight and we postponed our departure ,” Crnojevic states.
She points out that immediately after the catastrophic explosion, an appeal was published for help to the endangered residents of Beirut, and the funds could be paid via SMS messages.
The situation with the coronavirus has made everything even more complicated for us. Back in March, we were supposed to go to Lebanon to build a mobile clinic to help refugees and to hire doctors. Now everything is much more difficult. We cannot simply get on a plane and go to help people, no matter how much we would like to,” Crnojevic points out.
