On the Road with the Mobile Clinic in the Refugee Settlements in Lebanon
Cap Anamur has been involved in Lebanon since 2016, in the Syrian refugee settlements in the Sidon area. There, we ensure medical care for the Syrian families. With a mobile clinic, we offer consultation hours at individual residences.
During consultation hours we treat up to 100 people a day
A medical team will provide initial care. If necessary, we organize transportation to cooperating health care facilities to ensure continued care.
During this process, families in need of further support are also identified. This is because the economic situation in Lebanon has been getting more and more catastrophic for years and the number of people living in absolute poverty is constantly increasing.
Therefore, Cap Anamur now supports 2,000 Syrian families with food parcels. These are mostly widows, single women or families of day laborers who have not been able to work for a long time due to the prevailing economic crisis.
Help for Syrian children with physical and mental disabilities
In addition, the mobile clinic allows us to identify children who need physical therapy treatment in our physical therapy practice. Since 2018, we have been treating children with physical and mental handicaps there. Up to 20 boys and girls are treated daily by two physiotherapists according to their needs.
Most recently, our board member Boris Dieckow was on a project visit to Lebanon and reported on our projects:
“Especially in the physiotherapy practice, you can see how important our help is and that it also reaches the children. It is small and laborious progress that the children with physical and/or mental disabilities make during their therapy: practicing walking, learning to speak. This is not a situation where you press a button and everything is fine again. When you see our local staff doing this work, with what dedication and tireless energy they put in, when you talk to them and hear about the children’s stories, when they tell you about the painstaking progress they have made in the last few months, you know that it is not in vain. And it’s not work that can be over tomorrow.”
The living situation of Syrian families in Lebanon is catastrophic
These treatments are particularly important because in the settlements the living conditions are very difficult, especially for children with physical or mental disabilities. They cannot be provided the space in which they can receive appropriate care from their parents or relatives. We usually also organize the transportation of the children to our therapy facility.
“When you then go to the camps where these children live, see the conditions under which they spend their childhood, you know how difficult it is what we do,” Boris Dieckow reports about the living situation of Syrian families in Lebanon.