Blog from Mission Participants – Day 2 of Mission

This morning Omar drove to the ancient Roman city of Jarash, located around 50km north of Amman, very close to the Syrian border. While media mainly reports about the thousands of refugees in massive camps, at least as many Syrian refugees fled across the border to strand somewhere in the north of Jordan, like in the city of Jarash and its surroundings, where the concentration of Syrian refugees has reached around 40% in some villages.

Mobile Clinic Station No 1
The house of the mayor of a little village in the outskirts in Jarash served as the first station for the mobile clinic. With the house not being too big, every two medics shared a room in which they received the refugees for consultations and treatments, while the kitchen was turned into a pharmacy and the living room served as a space for children to play while they waited for their turns.

Capacity- and logistic-wise, Mobile Clinic Station 2 was quite a large-scale undertaking. When we arrived, the Swiss Red Cross had just wrapped up the distribution of cash vouchers to the hundreds of Syrian families in the area. Within half an hour, we turned the abandoned youth centre into a well-functioning clinic. In an incredibly short period of time, the message of our arrival had spread like a wildfire, leading to an exponential growth of the people waiting to be treated. It was striking to see how many young mothers had come to get medication for themselves and their children….