DAY 2 – Rehab Mafraq

We have started receiving pictures from the medical mission now underway in Jordan. The group has seen over 1300 patients in the first 2 days and the link below is for the photo album on our Facebook page. A more condensed gallery is also posted below if you do not have Facebook access.

Please help us to continue helping the refugees in the region. They are not receiving many of the services they initially were able to get because of drained resources in Jordan, an overwhelming and unrelenting need, and lack of funds. We do what we can to provide some medical care, food baskets, and mental health care. Please click on the donate now button and help the refugees. Thank you Samia El-Moslimany for sharing your photos with us!

Facebook Album for Day 2 – Click Here

We would like to thank everyone who helped out with our clothing/soft goods drive last month. All the efforts and donations really paid off. We broke the record at Value Village for the amount of donations and received a check today for $2842.40! You donated over 14,000 pounds of clothing, bedding, accessories, towels, etc!

The money raised will be used for our upcoming medical mission to buy supplies, medications, baby formula, etc. Thank you all for your efforts, and keep going through your closets! We are going to have another drive next month. I know it is a high bar to surpass, but if we can get even close to what was brought in with the last clothing drive, it is a huge help!

Next Drive Ends April 15, 2015

If you want to be involved in the next drive, consider your children’s schools, your church or other civic group, or even just around your neighborhood. We have plastic bags and flyers we can send to you to hand out – if each child and their family in a class of 25 fills just 2 bags, at an average of $4 per bag, that is $200 we can use to buy 6 families food for a month, or 40 cans of baby formula. In exchange, you get to clean out the clutter from closets, drawers, bathrooms, garages, kitchens, and more!

Collect the bags, and bring them here to our office, or we can arrange a drop off time at the Value Village we are working with here in Seattle. We will close the drive on April 15th. Contact Brenda in the office or by email at brenda at salaamculturalmuseum.org for the details and to sign up to help.

If you live outside of the Seattle area, but would like to do a clothing drive in your area, contact Brenda and she can put you in touch with the coordinator at Value Village to find the closest one to you and set up the details for your drive.

Thank you again to everyone who donated, keep that spring cleaning going!

One of the things we do to help as many people as possible is coordinate with other organizations. In Jordan, we have a warehouse that keeps all the goods we send over by container – all of your donations of clothing, blankets, medical equipment, etc. What we don’t have is a large staff and fleet of trucks to deliver the donations where they are needed all the time. Some items, like the food packages, are distributed from the warehouse, but sometimes we need to get them to a different location to distribute. Some items we take with the mission teams and distribute them then, but that is only every couple of months, and our mission vans are pretty tightly packed with supplies and mission volunteers.

In order to get more of these donations out to the people in need, we work with other local organizations in Jordan who come and take the donations to a camp or village they work with and distribute the items there. We ensure the organization is legitimate and know where the items are going, so we know they are going to people in need. We have posted some photos before of two other organizations picking up a truckload of goods from the warehouse but didn’t really explain what was happening, other than the donations were being distributed.

The pictures in this post are of two Jordanian organization  – Umm Rassas and the Orthodox Church of Madaba – picking up a load of clothing and supplies and taking them to another town where they will be distributed to the local population of refugees. The refugees are Syrian, Palestinian, and Iraqi. Umm Rassas distributed the goods to 400 families and the church distributed to 100 families.

This particular load of donations came from the Maram Foundation of Houston, TX. They loaded a container and we split the shipping cost with them to send it to Jordan and are storing the items in our warehouse there until they are distributed.

This is the second time this year that the Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon have been hit hard by the severe winter weather.  During the first two weeks of January 2015 extreme weather conditions for the region hit hard with high winds, and freezing cold in the evenings. Heavy snowfall has collapsed tents, forcing the refugees to find other shelter, which is hard to do.  After the snow started to melt there was flooding of the tents and the portable buildings that were put right on the ground.  The refugees lost a lot of what meager belongings they had that were ruined by the water, including mattresses, clothing, food, etc. Some of that was replaced from NGOs and volunteers, but certainly not all.

February came along and the cold weather returned again, with snow and ice and high wind conditions.  Tens of thousands of refugees are living in the camps and other in makeshift shelters across the region and they are not able to keep their families warm.  Some have kerosene heaters, but with the high winds and the snow collapsing the tents, it is very dangerous.  We have had numerous reports of children being burnt by kerosene heaters in the tents.

We sent two containers from Seattle in late December, one of which arrived and was distributed; the other one has not arrived yet due to the delays caused by the labor dispute at the west coast ports. We have received word that the second container should be arriving by the 27th of February, but a third container we just recently filled has been sitting on the dock for the last two weeks due to the dispute.  I am not sure when the labor dispute will end and the container will be loaded on a ship and on its way to Jordan, but once it does it will take about a month to get to Jordan if there are no more delays.  Rita is leaving on March 13^th for another medical mission and could really use your help with funding to buy the needed goods there for the families affected by the recent severe winter weather.

A lot of you have sent us donations of warm clothing, but they are stuck at the port and we need to get items to keep these families warm.  Fuel for heating will be purchased for the families to keep them warm in the evenings.  Solar powered lanterns have been ordered so the kids can read and do some studying at night instead of sitting in the dark (the sun goes down at 5:30pm). We also want to buy them some books and school supplies. All of these items are stuck in transit. We also want to buy them food at $31 for a month’s worth of food for a family of 5.

If everyone can just reach deep into their pockets again, you can help us help the refugees who are in dire need right now.  Rita will take the cash with her and purchase these items in Jordan and we will post pictures of what we have purchased and how we were able to distribute it.

Please go to our web site www.salaamculturalmuseum.org and click on the donate button now.

Thank you.

SCM Team

Two of our past mission participants, Omar and Jasser Kassab from Switzerland, took some of the paintings done by children at the children’s  center while they were there, framed them, then auctioned them off in Switzerland. They created an NGO called Syrian Refugee Crisis to collect the funds. It was a huge success and they raised a large sum of money which they then donated to the Malki-SCM Children’s Center. Thank you Omar and Jasser!