International (Page 57)

Looking around Azraq refugee camp, in Jordan’s north-eastern desert, life seems peaceful, if rudimentary. Children run and play in the camp’s streets, parents shop at the central supermarket, and social and religious activities are growing as refugee families re-establish connections with neighbours. Some Syrian residents can be seen with crutches or other medical equipment, recovering from lingering wounds or long-untreated chronic illnesses.

Despite contracting Ebola, many patients in West Africa are recovering from the virus and returning to their lives with joy and a bit of fear due to stigmatization.

Mamadou and Patricia share their journey to recovery and reintegration into their community.

Patrice Gordon, a British Columbia nurse practitioner and Red Cross delegate, is currently working at the Red Cross Ebola treatment centre in Kenema, Sierra Leone. She writes:

Yasmin sits in the paediatric ward of the Red Cross Red Crescent hospital in Azraq refugee camp, holding her two-month-old twin boys as they cough and wheeze. She appears calm and composed as she rubs the back of first Nadim and then Mohammed Nur. Both boys have developed an infection in the airways that lead to their lungs. The twins were born in Jordan days after Yasmin, 28, crossed the border as a refugee with her husband and two children.

The Round-up offers a weekly sample of what our sister Red Cross Societies are working on around the world.

As Typhoon Hagupit swept across the Philippines this week with millions of people bracing themselves for the storm’s onslaught, Jiferson Cueto was among the hundreds of specially trained Philippine Red Cross volunteers stationed in areas yet to be hit by Hagupit.

“It is my job to save the sick. It is my job to take this opportunity,” explains a Sierra Leonean nurse working at the Red Cross Ebola treatment centre.
 
While the Red Cross continues to mobilize support and call for trained healthcare personnel from Canada and elsewhere to respond to the Ebola outbreak, local staff and volunteers from affected countries in West Africa are playing important roles.

Nawaf was three years into a challenging five-year bachelor’s degree in computer and information engineering in Damascus when the ongoing Syrian conflict forced him to put his dreams on pause. His family had already fled the country some 18 months before, but Nawaf, 24, and the oldest of seven siblings, stayed behind.