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11 November 2007. Ten year old Aida spent most of her childhood silent and alone in a field shepherding her family’s goats until she began attending a school sponsored by CARE. Aida cannot hear and her mother, Rahma, says that after just one month at the school, the change in her daughter “is the difference between earth and sky”. “She had no interaction with anyone beyond the family. But now she sees other children, she responds and she laughs,” Rahma says. Aida’s hearing was damaged when she was two years old and suffered a fever in the middle of the night. As in many remote Palestinian villages, there were no medical facilities and the family had no way of traveling to the nearest town for help. It’s a familiar scenario in the West Bank and Gaza where some 50 percent of people live in poverty on less than US$2 a day, putting health care and a nutritious diet beyond their reach. Rahma tried sending Aida to the local school but as for many children with learning difficulties and other special needs it was a frustrating experience. Aida’s development stagnated while her classmates forged ahead so Rahma, a mother of five, stopped sending her daughter to school. With no alternative care, Aida spent the next five years either in the field with the goats or at home with her family. Since attending the school, run by the Local Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled in Bethlehem’s Dheisheh refugee camp, Rahma says she no longer feels “gloomy” about Aida’s future. “Even her attitude and communication at home with the family, with her brothers and sisters, is different,” she says. Each month the Committee receives 60 to 80 requests for assistance from people in the Bethlehem area who have hearing, speech and learning difficulties. It teaches its 120 pupils, aged five to fourteen, the standard curriculum and each year 20 to 30 of its graduates are reintegrated into the mainstream school system. “People with special needs should meet all types of children,” the Committee’s director and founding member, Amad Odeh, says referring to the benefits of the integrating children with special needs into the wider community. The Committee first formed because “people with special needs were looked at in an inferior way and labeled as crazy and often kept at home or out on the streets,” says Mr Odeh. “We found a lot of cases of people locked inside the home and a lot worse when we began knocking on doors looking for people to help,” he says. Many of the people are children from the refugee camp, a drab, concrete housing estate confined to one square kilometer of land with 12,000 residents. CARE’s Grant Support Specialist, Brian Block says living in refugee camps can be stressful. "You have small rooms and apartments stacked on top of one another. They don't look like other refugee camps like in Darfur because they have been there for almost 60 years. There are privacy issues because you can hear what's happening with the neighbours. There's no room for a park and that's why the Dheisheh committee's playground has to be on the top floor of the building, not on green grass under a blue sky," Mr Block said Dheisheh gives children the chance to play in a safe area and release the tension, Mr Block said. "A lot of the learning difficulties are connected to psychological problems which are part of the problem of living in highly populated areas. Attention deficit disorders are common among the children in the camp," he said. Dheisheh also builds the children’s confidence and encourages them to be independent. The Committee’s work began as a conversation between five high school friends about how to help people with disabilities in 1987. From their one room operation inside the crowded Dheisheh refugee camp, the Committee’s transformative project is now housed in a multi-purpose facility and runs a school, a library, a safe play area and a community outreach program. The Committee also runs support programs for parents who are often as isolated as their special needs children. Nuha, the mother of nine year old Mahmoud, whose brain was damaged when he was deprived of oxygen at birth and who has been at the school one month, says she can now leave the house. “The minute I stepped out of the home there would be 40 to 50 kids running after him because he would beat them up and scream at them,” Nuha says. “Now his speech is better and he has a better attitude. Now I can leave the house because I can leave him with his father and the other children,” Nuha says. “He talks about his new friends all the time,” she says. “I feel optimistic that he will learn a vocation and that he will find a good job in a factory and that he will cope in the future.” While the Committee is busy building hope in the community, Mr Odeh is growing anxious about the rising demand for their services. More people are looking to them for assistance as a result of the severe economic downturn. “One of the financial coping mechanisms was for people to sell their wife’s gold and jewelry but that’s been exhausted,” Mr Odeh says. In the past year, the Committee has provided care packages containing toothpaste, toilet paper, diapers and other sanitary items to 500 needy families. In the first 10 years, the Committee relied on local financial support to provide its services. But the escalating poverty has forced the Committee to seek external support. CARE International in the West Bank and Gaza, with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has provided assistance of approximately US$104,032 to the Committee to help improve the quality of life and living conditions of children with special needs including hearing, speech, learning, and physical disabilities. The Committee received the grant under the third phase of the Emergency Medical Assistance Project (EMAP). Funded by USAID with a total budget of $30 million, the overall aim of EMAP is to maintain the health and well-being of Palestinians, affected by violence and the harsh economic and social conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. CARE is providing support to the Palestinian health care system in the procurement of essential medicines and supplies to the Ministry of Health and to non-governmental organizations providing health care. EMAP offers operational funding to selected NGOs and rehabilitative centers.  |