Palestine Children's Relief Fund

International Maxillofacial Team Continue Program in West Bank

2012-05-16T10:40:50Z

On May 4th, an international team of doctors from North and South America returned to Salfeet Governmental Hospital to continue to provide complex maxillofacial and reconstructive surgery on Palestinian children with facial deformities. Led by Chicago-based surgeon Dr. Khaled Abughazaleh, the team included Dr. Juan Carlos Lopez Noriega from the University of Mexico, Prof. Fernando R. Sandoval from the University of San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador, New Jersey-based surgeon Dr. Imad Tamimi and anesthesiologists Dr. Paul Meyer from Iowa and Dr. Hussein Abu Khudair from the King Hussein Cancer Center in Amman, Jordan. Also volunteering on the mission was Dr. Aziza Nassar, who is studying in Ecuador. All of the members have volunteered several times in the past few years to treat children in Palestine with cleft lip and palate malformations, as well as mandible defects. The PCRF also hosted a lecture at Yasmeen Hotel in Nablus for over fifty doctors and nurses from all over Palestine with the team on April 26th.

The mission was partially sponsored by The Smile Train, and supplies and equipment generously donated by AmeriCares and MAP International/Ethicon. The team will return again in the second half of 2012.

Six Palestinian refugees have maxillofacial surgery in Jordan

2012-05-14T14:13:06Z

On April 26th, six Palestinian refugee children from the Gaza (Jerash) refugee camp in Amman had surgery at the Islamic Hospital to correct cleft lip and palate-related birth defects that had hindered the patients ability to properly communicate verbally. The operations were performed by Chicago-based surgeon Dr. Khaled Abughazaleh, Ecuadorian surgeon Dr. Fernando Sandoval, and Jordanian surgeons Dr. Ammar Subaihi and Dr. Nabell Shehada, with the mission partially supported by the U.S. charity The Smile Train, and a donor in Kuwait. The patients. aged five to sixteen, were provided corrective surgeries at no expense to their families.

We are happy to work with an internationally-recognized charity like the Palestine Childrens Relief Fund to give these children a second chance at speaking properly, commented Bilal Askar, spokesperson for the Islamic Hospital. Part of our mission at the Islamic Hospital is to provide discounted medical services for charitable cases such as these. Although we have limited resources, it was a great experience hosting this medical mission and we hope to support PCRFs work in the future.

French hand surgery team completes Jenin mission

2012-05-12T19:15:12Z

On May 5, Dr. Vincent Travers, a hand surgeon from Lyon, France finished a week of hand surgery and training for local doctors at the Jenin government hospital in the northern West Bank. Joining him was an OR nurse, Veronique Drugeon. Dr. Travers has worked in the West Bank in the past and was sponsored on this mission by the PCRF as a way to provide extensive care for patients with hand injuries. There are no certified hand surgeons currently working in the West Bank. Eighteen patients had complex surgery, while over fifty had consultations for free. In addition, a day of lectures was also provided in Jenin by Dr. Travers.

On the road to recovery in Sharjah

2012-05-08T16:17:57Z

These children have been given a chance for a normal life thanks to relief fund

Sharjah A three-year-old boy has been given a new lease of life after he underwent surgery last week to correct a congenital anomaly that left him with his intestines outside his body.

During Tareq’s recovery at University Hospital Sharjah, his mother Faten Abu Farha, 34, told Gulf News about the shock of learning that her son was born with the condition, and the difficulty they faced in receiving medical attention in their hometown of Al Jalameh — a small agricultural town of 2,000 residents north of Jenin, Palestine.

“When Tareq was born there were only nurses in the delivery room and the doctor was one hour’s drive away. When the doctor saw my son, he said the survival rate of children born with this disorder was less than three per cent,” explained Abu Farha yesterday as she lay in the hospital ward comforting Tareq, who was experiencing discomfort after the surgery.

Support

With the help from the UAE Chapter of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), which is supported by Shaikha Jawaher Bint Mohammad Al Qasimi, wife of His Highness Dr Shaikh Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah, Tareq’s journey to get the medical support he needed had a happy ending.

Tareq, she said, had always wanted to be a football player but due to his condition he had to take the utmost care at all times and was unable to indulge in sports. “When he was born, we travelled for his first surgery and the doctors put skin on top of his intestines. So even though you could not see it, there was a large bulge over his stomach,” Abu Farha recollected. The surgery was carried out by Professor Hussam Hamdi, vice chancellor for the Colleges of Medicine and Health Sciences and Chairman of Division of Surgery at University Hospital in Sharjah.

“The problem in this case was to create a space to accommodate the abdomen and repair the effects, and so we used a type of mesh to support the abdominal wall.

The post-operative care is of great importance in this complicated operation, which was two and a half hours long,” said Prof Hamdi, who said Tareq was recuperating well and was expected to be discharged by the end of the week.

Dream for the future

However, this is not the only surgery that PCRF presented to the University Hospital in Sharjah this week as 12-year-old Heba was operated on to remove nearly 100 kidney stones.

“Heba also has thalassaemia that affects her red blood cells, leading to sickle cell anaemia, and she also has an enlarged spleen and an enlarged liver,” said Prof Hamdi.

Prior to Heba’s surgery, she had to undergo two blood transfusions before her gall bladder and kidney stones could be removed.

Heba, who is from Jenin, plans to be a doctor when she grows up and dreams of helping other children. She has suffered from her condition for almost nine years.

Doctors have given her the all-clear and Heba is required to continue monitoring her red blood cells and take a daily dose of vitamins until she reaches adulthood.

Pediatric surgery mission from University of Mexico treats children in Beit Jala

2012-05-07T15:11:51Z

On April 28th, Prof. Pablo Lezama Del Valle, chief of pediatric oncological surgery and pediatric surgeon, Dr. Andrea de Icaza, both from the University of Mexico, and Dr. Paul Meyer, anesthesiologist from Iowa, completed a ten-day mission at Al Hussein Hospital in Beit Jala. Eighteen children had complex operations (including one day of surgery in Ramallah Hosptial) and over seventy had screenings and consultations. This is the third major surgery mission to Beit Jala Hospital in 2012 by the PCRF, the same hospital where we are building Palestine’s first public pediatric oncology department.

Chilean pediatric urological surgery team treats dozens of children in Nablus

2012-05-03T22:49:48Z

On April 26, a three-member team from Chile completed a week of pediatric urological surgery on Palestinian children at Rafidiah Hospital in the West Bank town of Nablus. Returning on his second mission was surgeon Dr. Jose Sepulveda Cuevas, who was joined by anesthesiologist Dr. Paulo Carrasco Gacria, both from Hospital Clinico Magallanes in Punta Arenas. Also joining them was Assistant Professor of pediatric surgery from the University of Chile, Dr. Renato Auugusto Acuna. Forty-five children had complex surgery by this team, and over one-hundred had professional consultations and medical exams. This is part of the ongoing cooperation between the PCRF and the Pediatric Surgery Society of Chile, and the plane tickets for the mission were sponsored by the Palestinian Federation/Bethlehem 2000.

2nd Pulmonary mission to Palestine from Italy treats children

2012-05-07T19:14:50Z

On April 25th, two pulmonologist from Meyer Pediatric Hospital in Florence, Italy completed a mission in which sixteen Palestinian children with rare airway deformities had treatment at Makassed Hospital on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. Dr. Lorenzo Marabile and Dr. Roberto Baggi brought with them special bronchoscopic equipment to provide training and experience to local doctors. This was the second mission in 2012 from Italy in this area of treatment, and it is the only such program for Palestinian children in the occupied territories.

For the life of Yahya

2012-04-30T18:43:22Z

BRIAN FEULNER FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

This is not a story about geopolitics. This is a story about a boy.

But because the boy is Palestinian, his story is intertwined with geopolitics. The boy was born terribly ill. He got treatment, for years, at an Israeli hospital, financed largely by the Israeli government. And when Israeli doctors felt they couldn’t perform the complicated surgery he needed, they turned to Boston Children’s Hospital, and to a group of mostly Jewish benefactors.

They came together, across borders and boundaries, to save a boy — but they were also well aware of the statement they were making. Politicians posture. Prejudices form. Bombs drop. Walls go up, literally and metaphorically. And even so, on both sides of an intractable divide, there are human beings searching for connection, eager to take part in an act as individual and meaningful as helping a child.

Yahya Masalma is six years old and gregarious; he makes friends effortlessly, loves to sing and play guitar, and until this winter, he was profoundly ill. He was born in a village on the West Bank outside Bethlehem with a genetic condition — a blocked urethra — that caused his kidneys to malfunction.

His parents knew that local hospitals didn’t have the capacity to treat him. They tried to pay people to move him to Israel, where he could get better care. Much of the money went nowhere.

“At the end, I had to just carry the boy, without money, without anything, and just go to the hospital in Israel,” Yahya’s father, Ahmad Hassan Masalma, told me in Arabic through a translator, earlier this month. Yahya was 15 days old when he reached Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. The hospital treated him for free.

Yahya continued going to Shaare Zedek for six years, receiving dialysis three times a week, the care financed largely by the Israeli government, with the Palestinian Authority paying for some medication. To ease the complication of the border crossing, Jewish volunteers often carried him across the line, as they did with other Palestinian patients, Masalma said.

This went on for years. But after relentless poking, Yahya’s veins had clotted, one by one, and doctors were down to their last blood vessel. They couldn’t continue dialysis. He needed a kidney transplant.

Finding a donor was easy: Yahya’s father, Ahmad, was a match. But the procedure would be unusually complicated. All those years of dialysis and clotting had left Yahya’s blood pressure low. In transplanting an organ, the critical issue is getting enough to blood to pump through it. Yahya’s new kidney would need as much blood as his heart currently pumped out every minute, or the transplant would fail.

Doctors in Israel were worried, and gun-shy. Another group in Israel had recently performed a similar operation under similar circumstances — a Palestinian child whose care was financed by Jewish donors, a story that would excite the Israeli press — but the surgery had failed.

So a doctor on Yahya’s team started seeking technical advice. One of the people she contacted was a doctor she had studied with years earlier in Boston: Dr. Michael Agus, director of the critical care program at Children’s Hospital.

Agus described the outlines of the case to Dr. William Harmon, the chief of nephrology at Children’s, and Dr. Heung Bae Kim, director of the hospital’s pediatric transplant center. Children’s had performed 27 kidney transplants the year before, and the doctors seldom balked at a challenge. “We like to take difficult cases,” Kim told me.

“I basically said, well, send him here, we can do it,” Harmon recalled. “That’s when he happened to tell us that, ‘oh yeah, he’s Palestinian and he has no money.’ ”

Children’s has a history of treating international patients, with working with outside organizations to fund their treatment. Yahya’s case would require more groups than usual. Agus began by contacting Combined Jewish Philanthropies, a group he knew through his work on the board of a Jewish day school. Zamira Korff, CJP’s senior vice president of development, reached out to a donor she thought could act quickly: real estate developer Steve Fischman, who swiftly joined with his son, Ben, and his business partner, Steve Karp, to pledge $25,000.

Korff also got in touch with Randy O’Brien, the daughter of Ray Tye, the late Jewish philanthropist who had founded the Ray Tye Medical Aid Foundation to finance medical care for needy people worldwide. The foundation donated $100,000.

Meanwhile, Harmon reached out to the Ohio-based Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, which enlisted local volunteers to take care of the Masalmas while they stayed in Boston, and to provide prenatal care for Yahya’s mother, who was three months pregnant.

Most of the donations came together within two days, and more would come. Doctors reduced their charges. Genentech donated medication. The pitch, to everyone, was simple, Agus said: A Palestinian boy has reached the end of the medical line, and “the only thing standing between him and a reasonably healthy life is some fundraising. Unsaid was how incredible it is to be able to cross these uncrossable bridges with human connection and medical care and saving a life.”

But that message came through, Korff said. “Whatever politics may be going on on the ground and whatever conflict there is, we pride ourselves in being able to rise above it.”

Yahya and his parents arrived at Logan Airport on Friday, January 13. They had left another son, a three-year-old, with relatives in Jordan. A team from Children’s met them at the airport and took them to the hospital, where doctors and nurses were surprised at how energetic Yahya was, given how close he was, technically, to death.

They fed him a meal of chicken and rice and took him to dialysis, where he settled in comfortably; he was used to the process, and easily distracted. “It’s impressive what an iPad can do,” Harmon said.

The operation was scheduled for two weeks later, but doctors weren’t sure it would happen. Ahmad had a past medical complication that could have made him an ineligible donor, but doctors decided to bend the rules. Yahya needed a complicated anesthesia technique to keep his blood pressure as high as possible.

But the doctors moved forward, and Kim described the surgery matter-of-factly, in that way surgeons have of making the incredible sound blasé. The father’s kidney was removed at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Kim walked down the street to pick it up, carried it back to Children’s in an Igloo cooler, and sewed it into Yahya.

On the recovery floor, Yahya’s new kidney made urine almost instantly. The boy woke up and asked his mother for a banana, something he hadn’t been able to eat when he was ill.

On the10th floor transplant unit, Yahya became known as “the mayor.” Courtney Loper, the nurse practitioner who coordinated his care, said that when she stepped off the elevator, she could often hear him singing. He slept in a little room marked with a Berenstain Bears mural, but he often wandered to a nearby playroom, where he would clunk out tunes on an electric keyboard, strum a guitar, and sing, loudly and terribly.

When I met Yahya this month, he had been transferred to Yawkey Family Inn, a Victorian mansion in Brookline that houses families of Children’s patients. His vascular issues had left him with a swollen face, which gave him the look of a middle-age man, grafted onto a small child’s body.

He was striking poses in the lobby, trying to grab a photographer’s camera, sitting down every few minutes to scribble, with stubby fingers, in a Disney coloring book. At one point, he nestled in his mother’s lap and lay down his head, as if falling asleep. He had picked up a fair amount of English over three months in Boston, but spoke to me only once, when prompted to name the person he wanted to meet before he went home. In a high-pitched voice, he chirped, “Obama!”

A meeting with the president was not to be. The doctors at Children’s, acutely aware of geopolitics, knew the family should return home before Yahya’s mother gave birth. They were concerned at one point when Yahya’s parents balked at going back, until they figured out the reason: the Masalmas were worried that their son’s medical care would cease.

By the time I met Ahmad Masalma, he was reassured: The Israeli doctors had promised to pay out of their own pockets, if they needed to. “He grew up with them,” he said. “They felt like he’s one of them.”

Americans, he said, had been equally supportive. “I was greatly surprised when I met the people of the United States,” he told me. “Very respectful, they respect your privacy, very kind. I can’t say anything different for the people of Israel. They’re just as nice. I have to admit that they did their best for us.”

Masalma was reluctant to delve into issues of war and peace: “You don’t interfere in politics, you stay away, you have a good life.” Still, I asked him whether Yahya’s story had changed things in his village, altered perspectives about the Israelis across the border or the Americans overseas.

“I’m sure it affected them positively,” he said. “But there’s always the red line. There’s always the red line.’’

Yahya, who returned home earlier this month, doesn’t understand the meaning of that line. He has grown up in a world where strangers are universally kind, where borders are virtually meaningless, where people go to heroic measures because they can.

What does his story mean? What does it foretell? For geopolitics, probably nothing.

But for one boy, it means everything.

Goodwill Journey – 132 days, 22 countries, one cause.

2012-05-16T20:40:48Z

WHAT IS THE GOODWILL JOURNEY?

132 Days, 22 countries, over 60,000 km’s, solo motorbike journey following large part of the old Silk Route through the Middle East to Central and South East Asia, taking off April 2012 from United Arab Emirates and ending in Singapore.

Wissam Al-jayyoussi a Dubai based Entrepreneur and philanthropist will embark in his journey in support of the creation of the first ever freestanding pediatric cancer centre in Palestine. A project instigated by the highly respected non-profit organization PCRF (Palestine Children’s Relief Fund).

All trip costs are being fully met by Wissam himself so all funds raised goes directly to the cancer centre project.

The Cause

Beit Jala Pediatric Oncology Department

Support the free-standing pediatric cancer centre at the Al Hussein Hospital in Beit Jala, Palestine, which is being established by The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) to provide medical and surgical cancer care for children requiring longterm treatment and support. Funds raised for the center through cooperate sponsorships and personal donations will go entirely towards equipping the cancer center with medical equipment and critical supplies, as well as cater to the maintenance of the facility on an ongoing basis.

THE TARGET

The Goodwill Journey has committed to raise AED 1,000,000 for the cause. Make a donation today by visiting the Goodwill Journey Firstgiving Page - Donate Now

Dubai-based musician’s new single raises awareness, funds for PCRF

2012-04-28T18:51:43Z

Inspired by the PCRF, Malika Omar recently completed the recording a new single for the sick and injured children in need.

“On seeing the impact of the hard work of the PCRF volunteers and their associates on the children in need, I felt I wanted to show my commitment to, and support for, the kids in some way. I believe I can express myself best through music, so I put pen to paper and wrote down my words of support to the children, but the words could also be someone expressing love and support for a friend, companion or loved one going through difficulties too. My goal is to inspire everyone to remind themselves of the humanity that still resides in what has become a dark world; by doing the best you can for those less fortunate or those in need of light in their lives. Especially with regards to children, because they are the future.”

The single, New Hope, illustrates Malika’s new-found interest in lyric-writing and singing for the first time. She has performed on piano in the past, but this will mark the first time that she will also sing, all to show her support for the children assisted by the selfless volunteers of the PCRF. The song was recorded by ace American-Dutch music-producer-duo Joshua F. Williams and Reiner Erlings and sponsored by Dubai-based fashion brand Meher & Riddhima. The song is now available for purchase via iTunes, CD Baby, and Amazon. 60% of all download sales will go to the PCRF. Buy it today! iTunes | CD Baby | Amazon