The volunteer team is made up of Dr. Roberto Raimann, Dr. Felipe Hodgson, Dr. Manuel Mendez, Dr. Pamela Vergara, anesthesiologist Dr. Claudio Ricke and Dr. Andres Leiva and OR nurse Gabriela Villagra.

After screening more than 90 children on their first day in Gaza, they have started operating on children at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis in the neglected southern Gaza. This is the third mission from Chile to Palestine 2013 and the seventeenth since 2008. Chile is the second most active country in sending volunteer surgery teams to Palestine through the PCRF.

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On June 7th, Deena Al Seer from Khader village near Bethlehem celebrated her 6th birthday in the Huda Al Masri Pediatric Cancer Dept. Staff, patients and their families joined the girl to help make her day an enjoyable one, despite suffering from Thalassemia Major. This is the first party organized by the PCRF under a new fund to help bring some happiness to the children in the dept. who celebrate their birthdays while undergoing treatment. All of the children received presents and had a cake. 

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WEST CHESTER — A little more than a year ago, as shells exploded around her house in Damascus, Rawan Mubarak ran with her family for shelter in another house – not an uncommon escape plan for civilians trapped in Syria’s civil war.

Shrapnel flew from a shell and tore into Rawan’s torso and right arm. When she awoke days later in a local hospital, parts of her intestines and stomach had been removed. And her arm was gone.

“I didn’t see it,” she said in Arabic. “I cried. I got sad.”

In the past year, though, Rawan completed third grade and relearned how to write, color, shower and – yes – even send text messages and shoot baskets left-handed.

Now the 9-year-old girl is on the verge of receiving a prosthetic right arm thanks to several individuals and organizations in Greater Cincinnati.

Rawan is the first child injured in the Syrian civil war brought to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center by the new local chapter of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. It is a self-described non-political, non-religious nonprofit, founded 20 years ago in Kent, Ohio, that provides expert surgery and humanitarian aid to children and families in the Middle East – primarily those from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Its other offices are in Saida, Lebanon, and the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the central West Bank.

Other Palestine Fund children are brought free of charge to other U.S. cities for donated medical care. The first Cincinnati chapter child, a boy, 1, is at Children’s for esophageal reconstruction. An 11-year-old boy is coming from the disputed lands for treatment of severe burns. The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund covers all of a child’s expenses. Doctors and the prosthetic company here are donating goods and services.

Rawan Mubarak, 9, of Damascus, Syria, plays with Adam Falah, 14, of West Chester, whose family is hosting her while receives medical treatment. LEFT: Rawan plays with a stuffed animal in her room at the Falah home. Photos by Amanda Davidson/The Enquirer

More children are expected to come from Syria. Its civil war, which started in March 2011 when that nation’s Arab Spring revolts turned bloody, has led to the deaths of more than 80,000 people, some 500 of them children, according to the United Nations. An estimated 260,000 Syrian refugees, more than half of them children, are in camps in Lebanon. The Palestine Children’s group sends medical missions to those camps.

Source: Cincinnati.com

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