Humanitarian Charity

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) operates their teams all over the world wherever people's lives and their health are in jeopardy as a result of political instability, refugee situations, civil wars or other human-detrimental conditions, including natural disasters such as earthquakes or torrential rains leading to massive flooding, leaving migrants exposed to deprivation and risks to health.

Doctors Without Borders has its teams working in Syria, amidst the conflict, in small towns and in cities where it is felt that the teams can be reasonably safe and enabled to conduct their healing and life-saving procedures on behalf of the civilian populations under threat from both the regime's attacks and those of the undiscriminating rebel militias.

These teams open up small temporary clinics in the hopes of providing maternal-child health care, treating children and pregnant women. The country's own medical system has been understandably devastated by the two years of unrelenting conflict and destruction of infrastructure. Basic health care is lacking for a desperate population caught between warring factions.

Doctors Without Borders face a shortage of routine vaccines, of antibiotics, pain medications. Let alone protocols for chronic medical conditions like diabetes, anaemia or epilepsy. Before the onset of the conflict it was standard procedure that pregnant women would have their babies delivered in hospital. It has now become standard for women to deliver at home, often without help if anything occurs out of the ordinary in childbirth.

Vulnerable children are routinely sent for their nighttime safety from shelling to sleep in caves nearby their towns where the cold, damp conditions prevailing there increases risk of pneumonia and other respiratory conditions. Children living in refugee camps for internally and externally displaced, suffer winter conditions of exposure to cold and damp living in tents and suffer perpetual colds and fevers.

The medical teams work in place for as long as they can be assured they may do so with relative safety. They are able to tolerate being shelled several times weekly, hoping to remain unscathed. When the attacks accelerate in frequency they understand it is time to evacuate, to remove themselves and move on to areas which are less frequently under fire.

Having to do so, leaves them feeling dejected and miserable, being forced to leave the anxious and the ill, deprived of both standard and emergency medical treatment and procedures that help make their lives just a little bit more tolerable. The medical teams, in reluctantly leaving, have hopes that they will be enabled to return once the situation becomes less violently volatile.

Many of the village residents who have already perhaps left their own villages under more frequent bombardment, have nowhere else to go, and remain there, hoping that salvation will eventually arrive through a cessation in hostilities. Leaving them free to return to their home villages, free to live once again in peace and security in a country rent by dire tribal and sectarian misery.