As refugees stream out of Syria, half a world away in Atlanta David Gazashvili sits in his spare office, trying to plan their lives.
Where will they sleep? How will they eat? Get medical care?
Gazashvili has answers, or some, anyway.
He is deputy director of emergency and humanitarian assistance for CARE. This fall, the relief charity is celebrating the 20th anniversary of moving its global headquarters to Atlanta.
Fit and shaved bald, Gazashvili radiates affable calm, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Star Trek franchise. “I think I have a kind of a high stress tolerance,” he said.
Two years ago, the “Arab Spring” that swept despots from power in Tunisia and Egypt sparked protests against the Syrian regime. A brutal government crackdown followed, and then a civil war that continues to drag on. Now the Syrian government stands accused of nerve gas attacks against civilians. Some rebel groups have been accused of human rights violations as well.
Refugees keep streaming out. The count has just passed 2 million, according to the United Nations. CARE works with other charities and agencies to provide them with housing, supplies, clean water and medicine.
Jordan’s Zaatari camp houses more than 100,000 and is now the fourth largest city in Jordan, according to the U.N. Many more refugees live scattered among the Jordanian population, in apartments and abandoned buildings.
Seven new camps are being built: five in Turkey and one each in Jordan and Iraq. Gazashvili has spent months this year in Jordan helping open a major new camp, Azraq.
Gazashvili started working with CARE in 1993, after nearly becoming a refugee himself. The country of his birth, the Republic of Georgia in Eastern Europe, descended into civil war as the Soviet Union disintegrated.
Gazashvili and his wife, Tina, lived in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. But his ethnic heritage was Ossetian, and South Ossetia was one of the regions trying to break away from Georgia. Paramilitary fighters terrorized civilians on both sides, according to Human Rights Watch.
The Gazashvilis’ neighbors stopped greeting them, even though Tina is an ethnic Georgian. People were getting threatened and killed. “They knock on your door, they say, ‘You have 24 hours to leave,’” he said.
He and Tina decided not to wait for the knock; carrying a toddler daughter, they moved out of their apartment and in with Tina’s parents. He was fired from his city job as an engineer. The Gazashvilis considered leaving the country altogether.
In the end, they decided to stay, and the ethnic tensions gradually ebbed.
A couple of years later, when another conflict broke out, involving a different ethnic group, he went to work for CARE. He started out as a driver, but soon moved to a job verifying that food meant for ethnic Georgians who had fled the breakaway region was not being diverted to black marketeers.
Here he was in the mountains, in abandoned schools turned hostels, handing out food and supplies to people who might, not long before, have persecuted him.
“I didn’t think of it that way — from oppressor to oppressed or something,” he said. “Everybody suffered in those conflicts. CARE didn’t differentiate between people of different ethnicities. … That’s the principle I liked and I followed the rest of my life. I believe all people are good.”
An engineer by training and by temperament, Gazashvili moved up the ladder at CARE. He’s lived in five countries and traveled through many more. He’s coped with the aftermath of horrific events: the massacres in Sudan, the earthquake in Haiti.
“Obviously it is stressful. It’s very stressful,” he said. “When there’s no infrastructure, everything is broken and you see so many corpses on the street.
“The first time I went to a refugee camp in Sudan it was so stressful, I felt like always crying. I could not eat for two days.” One of his colleagues had to be evacuated. “She just lost it.”
He lives near the Little Five Points area with Tina and their son and daughter, a GSU freshman and a graduate of a college in Tbilisi. He spends a lot of time in meetings, dealing with bureaucracy. But sometimes he gets to talk to the people on the ground.
He recalled one Syrian woman he visited in February with local CARE colleagues. She was living with her children in an apartment in Amman, the capital of Jordan.
Their one-bedroom apartment was “very empty,” he recalled, “nothing in it but a few mattresses. Foam, on the floor.” She served them tea on what dishes she had.
The woman spoke Arabic, which Gazashvili does not — he speaks English, Georgian and Russian. So while the local case managers talked to her, occasionally translating for his benefit, he mainly watched.
Her story had echoes of his own: At home in Syria, her family had watched teen-aged boys they knew disappear, one by one. She had a teen-aged son. They decided to get out.
When the conversation began, Gazashvili said, the woman was tense. But as the hour-long visit progressed, he could see her muscles relax. She started to smile, and to talk openly.
Sometimes, “simply by talking, you relieve their trauma,” he said. “They feel they’re being heard.”
Gazashvili and his wife acknowledge that his work, easing the stress of those far away, sometimes creates stress for their own family.
At first, Tina said, she found this life difficult, but she has grown used to it. “It’s good,” she says. “He helps people. He’s happy he helps people.”
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