817: The Cavalry Is Not Coming

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When you realize that help is not on the way, what do you do next?

Prologue: Saddam Sayyaleh’s job right now is trying to get trucks filled with aid into Gaza and he knows it’s nowhere close to what’s actually needed. (10 minutes)
Act One: Tim Reeves runs a hospital in rural Pennsylvania, and he’s trying to do something that is so hard to do and that he knows is completely up to him. (11 minutes)
Act Two: One of our producers, Nadia Reiman, talked to officials who work in the asylum and refugee branches at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. They gave her a window into the immigration system under President Biden that you don’t usually get. (32 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
0:05.4	If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, this American Life.
0:10.0	org.
0:11.0	Saddam Sayale begins each day with a 6 a.m. walk around Cairo. It's the only 30 minutes of his day he gets to himself,
0:18.0	before emails and meetings and the chaos of his enormously stressful job begins.
0:23.3	His job, right now he's in charge of getting trucks filled with humanitarian aid into Gaza during
0:29.6	the current war.
0:31.6	He does this of a big American nonprofit called an era that sent aid into
0:34.6	Gaza for decades. But since the war every day there are bottlenecks and
0:38.8	logistical challenges with all the different governments and agencies and
0:42.0	militaries and aid groups
0:43.2	involved. I talked him at the end of a very long day of this and I don't know maybe
0:47.6	this is a sign of his diplomatic skills. He seemed so calm, so chill that I could not ask him about it.
0:55.0	Maybe that's just a facade, but...
0:58.0	It is... It is a facade?
1:00.0	It is.
1:01.0	I had to tell you, like, I learned the hard way to hold myself together. I think I'll break down after things these are, but now I can't.
1:11.2	So I'm keeping it. I'm keeping it together.
1:14.0	I talked to Saddam twice, just before the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and then during the
1:19.1	ceasefire.
1:20.1	I was interested in talking to him because the stakes of any pause in fighting
1:23.5	seemed so high for aid workers like him. Before the ceasefire, so little
	...

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