I was making breakfast with my family the morning I got the call to say Air France had gone on strike and my flight that afternoon to Damascus was being rerouted and my departure time moved forward. I was traveling to Syria with a small group connected with the United Nations Association of Seattle. Our purpose: interview Iraqi refugees, talk with Syrians about the impact of this massive increase to their non-working population and discuss the human effects of this troubling war. Waffles forgotten, it was a mad dash to the Spokane airport in order to get to Seattle for a standby flight and make the new and confounding connections. My rocky start was nothing compared to what our Palestinian friends and translators regularly endure-hours standing in lines and innumerable difficulties at various borders just to travel within the Middle East.
My journey had began the moment I decided to make the trip to Syria. Apprehension set in for my family and myself as I would be traveling to a foreign country with war tearing at its borders from without and domestic tensions rising from within. Among other things, I am a physician, wife and a mother of two active-minded teenage children. It was the out-spoken questions and opinions of my children that forced me to be honest about my reasons for going on this venture. "If practicing medicine isn't your primary intention, then what will you do there?" they asked. The easy answer for my husband and kids was that I was hoping to take the opportunity to overcome a media-driven understanding of a culture essentially unknown to me and to explore the true circumstances of suffering the Iraqi people have endured. Twenty years as an emergency room physician helped shape my deeper answer to my family. I was going to Syria because the human circumstance intrigues me and people never fail to surprise me. Humans are so amazing; at the same time wonderful and awful, resilient and weak, clever and stupid, courageous and scared out of their minds. I never want to become complacent or feel like I've seen it all. That was why I was going.
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Karlene Arguinchona - An emergency room physician at Sacred Heart hospital in Spokane for the past twenty years, Karlene serves on the board of the Krista Foundation. As the granddaughter of a physician who served with Mother Teresa in India for many years, she values opportunities to utilize her medical training and skills to volunteer overseas in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa.
