01 April 2008
Program Improves Living Standards for Disabled Palestinians
USAID-funded outreach program helping West Bank children with special needs
West Bank -- Three-year-old Mohammad shuffled on his hands and knees across the bare concrete floor to tug on his mother’s hem and point to the door. With a smile, Taghrid Aburubb greeted the two physical therapists from the Beit Al Musineen Medical Center in Jenin. They come every week to massage the limbs of her two children and keep them supple. Both siblings were born with cerebral palsy, and their sister recently died from complications of the same disability.
Inside the Aburubb’s cinderblock home, a knee-high charcoal stove smoldered away in the corner of the kitchen. It was the only means for this Palestinian mother to heat her two rooms in mid-February, yet it felt colder inside than out on the wind-whipped onion fields near Jalboun village, 14 kilometers from Jenin.
The two health workers from the clinic kept their jackets on and seemed oddly relieved when they noticed that a smashed window and cracks in the masonry let in outside air. Fresh air reduces the family’s asphyxiation risk from the old-fashioned brazier.
Sawsan, a thin 12-year-old, huddled on the floor cushions, watching her breath form little clouds and waggling her hands. She performed all the stretches and exercises with enthusiasm, just like her little brother. If Mohammad gets an operation on his Achilles tendon -- which would cost 8,000 shekels, or roughly $2,000 -- it is likely he can learn to walk without assistance.
“His surgery is urgent; the longer it’s delayed, the more problems the boy will have,” said his physiotherapist. Negotiations are under way to find a repayment scheme for the operation.
For his elder sister, there is no such quick fix. The therapists work hard to prevent any further deterioration in the Aburubb children’s muscles and tendons. They give nursing tips and psychosocial counseling sessions to Taghrid, who also must care for three other lively children.
“We plan to modify their home for wheelchair access,” said Irene Siniora, a grants officer for Care International, the agency that implements this U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded outreach program for isolated Palestinians with mobility problems and children with special needs. Taghrid usually must lug the children around the unpaved roads of her village without help, so they rarely leave their two rooms. Sawsan is growing too big to ride in the stroller that was donated by the clinic.
“When our son was born, it turned out he was our third baby with cerebral palsy, and my husband never got over the disappointment,” Taghrid Aburubb explained. “He’s emotionally exhausted.” Deep depression followed and the family’s resources became stretched. The father, a day laborer, could not hold down a full-time job even if unemployment were not rife in this district. He suffers back pains because of a ruptured disc and his vision is impaired.
The family receives help as part of USAID’s three-year, $30 million Emergency Medical Assistance Program (EMAP) for Palestinians. Among its activities, EMAP provides support to eligible local organizations to improve the health and living standards of the disabled in the West Bank.
This particular scheme for 296 beneficiaries centers on a USAID-assisted clinic, which houses a therapy center plus bedrooms and a dining hall for about 50 geriatric patients who cannot be cared for at home. Children with special needs and the elderly share the same building, and some of the same equipment. USAID has installed an elevator to the clinic’s top floor, where occupational therapy and physiotherapy sessions are held; the ground floor is devoted to a day care center.
Run by an established local charity, the clinic employs certified staff and caters to needy patients around Jenin. According to Mohammad Yihya, the chairman of Beit Al Musineen, “Jenin is one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the Palestinian Territories.” The clinic’s medical team travels to 19 of the surrounding villages in the northern West Bank, an agricultural belt now blighted by underemployment.
Health workers find it encouraging to see that some birth defects can be overcome through determination, even in a family struck by financial hardship and solely supported by a 20-year-old son’s wages. Of their 11-member family, both Rahmeh, 15, and her brother Hamzeh, two years younger, were unusually large babies, weighing almost 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) each as newborns. Now they suffer from limited mobility because their shoulders were damaged and paralyzed during birth in a Jenin hospital.
After intensive occupational therapy, Rahmeh says, “I feel happier; I can comb my own hair and dress myself.” She attends school with students her own age and envisions a career as a therapist herself. Her mother beamed at these grown-up aspirations. “With hard work and some help, it will happen, God willing,” she told Siniora on a recent home visit. “You are keeping our hopes alive.”
