4Basra

It appears that Scrooge is alive and well this Christmas, only now he’s an airline executive.

4Basra is slowly building a small team of enthusiastic and highly-qualified volunteers, and in the past week or so we were set something of a challenge for the New Year.

22 children with congenital heart defects, each with a parent accompanying them, need to travel by air from the southern Iraqi city of Basra to Amman in Jordan on 5th January, 2007, returning on 7th January.

Aged from 6 months to 14 years old, the children will travel onward from Amman to Damascus in Syria, where a French doctor will assess them with a view to bringing them to France for essential treatment later in 2007.

Due to the security situation in Iraq, air travel is the safest way of ensuring the children arrive in Damascus.

Believing I and one of my volunteers in particular would be able to get an airline to help us with this humanitarian effort, I promised our NGO partner that I would do all I can and went about contacting various airlines in the Middle East.

Airserv, a small charter airline based in Amman, promptly responded to me. However, their small aircraft can only safely accommodate about 22 passengers. Secondly, a return trip would cost $10,000 – and this is with them only covering their costs. The flight would also involve one refuelling stop in Baghdad.

Rather optimistically it turns out, I believed a larger airline who fly directly between Basra and Amman would be able to accommodate all of our passengers.

With Christmas fast-approaching, time is not on our side, but I thought that the flip-side of this might be that an airline might be willing to donate some tickets or let us purchase some at a reduced cost.

At the moment, the situation is not looking good. I have resorted to hurriedly emailing a corporate donor I was planning on approaching later in the New Year, to see if they would be interested in supporting this effort financially.

More news after Christmas….if any readers know of an airline, company, private jet owner or someone else who might help or might like to pay for an airline ticket for a child – or if you have an idea that might save the day and rescue Christmas and New Year for these children and their parents, please get in touch.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas.

One of Britain’s most respected journalists, John Humphrys writes passionately in The Spectator (registration required) today about the merits of small ‘kitchen table charities.’

The organisation’s website is a model of clean design and concise content.

 

The lack of blog posts over the past few weeks is due to a number of factors, but rest assured I’ve been far from idle.

However, the blog seems to have come under attack from spam comments. Nearly 900 in the past 24 hours…I’m urgently awaiting something called an ‘API key’ in the hope that this will put an end to them.

In the meantime, I’ve been busy transferring data from an old computer to a new one (with the help of Eoghan, the 4Basra web designer – thanks!), freelance writing work, meeting with Oxfam Ireland (more on this soon) and assembling what I hope will be a small team of volunteers (stay tuned).

The 4Basra volunteers and I might have something of a New Year challenge on our hands very shortly as well. More details before the end of the week.

And finally, a fellow blogger might be interviewing me in the next few days as well.