June 16th Mission Blog Post

We left our hotel this morning and went to the Malki/SCM Children’s Center, the trauma center that we opened last year. The kids were there to greet everyone when we arrived, and so was our resident local doctor, Dr. Shafik. The volunteers on the mission wanted to play with the children, so they got started on face painting, which was a big hit. The kids wanted a Syrian flag or their names or names of parents or friends and family that were killed. One of our nurses noticed a child, about 7 years old, that stayed away from the group. He had no expression, no smile, just aloof from the rest of the children. She tried to get him to interact but with no luck. It turned out that he was one of the newer students that has been coming and he had lost his brothers and sisters in a missile strike.

We left the center and headed to our new clinic in the Salt region of Jordan. The mayor of this small village has allowed us to use the school building to work out of. After arriving we all started to unpack and set up different rooms for the pharmacy, general medicine, pediatrics, ophthalmology, dental, and a space to handle humanitarian goods. Our team saw a total of about 300 patients. The dental team examined 53 patients and half without electricity. One of the dentist said she had to do 7 extractions on an 8 year old. Glasses were handed out to 47 patients. We also distributed 500 diapers, 250 cans of baby formula, lots of toys, crayons, pencils, pens, play dough, clothes for children and adults, paints, coloring books, and balloons.

While the medical team was working a couple of the humanitarians started working on making a sand box for the Malki/SCM Center. This will be used for sandplay therapy, a method of treatment for traumatized children.

The people were mostly from Deraa in Syria and we had a mixture of Syrians and Jordanians that had inter-married. The mayor of the village had gotten the locals to make us huge trays of mansaf (traditional Jordanian dish) made from rice, yogurt, lamb, and nuts on top. This was a nice surprise after a long day – 9 hours of work, non-stop!

Off early tomorrow for another clinic.