By Steve Olweean | Director
Over these last few months the prolonged violence, loss, and ever mounting displacement due to the ongoing civil conflicts within Syria have only served to generate more victims who flee to Jordan for sanctuary, further swelling the massive number of refugees languishing there now for well over 9 years, with no end in sight for their dilemma.
The compounding challenges for these refugees struggling daily with multiple threats to their health, safety, and security, and profound loss, has been phenomenal; while at the same time the pandemic has continued to significantly strain our limited resources needed to carry on our psycho-social treatment and recovery services to this increasingly high risk community.
This is particularly true for the most at-risk members of the refugee population – children and women.
As such the number of those in desperate need is rapidly mounting as direct in-person services from humanitarian aid organizations has drastically diminished across the board in the region.
Throughout this time the services of the Social Health Care (SHC) treatment program has fortunately persevered in continuing to assist these refugees in Jordan, primarily thanks to the dedication of our amazing volunteer local and international service team. Our team is made up of expert psychosocial trauma therapists, medical professionals, social workers, and teachers, all who volunteer their time, skills, and hearts to this work. Within the travel and direct contact limits imposed by the pandemic, this commitment is making the difference in making it possible to provide vital life-saving treatment services to those most vulnerable through enhanced tele-health, and keeping hope alive until we can fully re-establish our in-person on-site services that have aided refugees since 2011.
As part of this current work, resources are increasingly required to provide tele-communication technology to establish and maintain virtual stations at residential sites in Jordan housing large numbers of refugees allowing access to our team, medical equipment and supplies provided to each site that enable refugees we serve to regularly self-monitor and receive targeted medical guidance, health care, and support from our health care providers, and self-help skills training to support their ability to cope with crisis conditions on multiple levels, and support each other in doing so.
Both providing victims of trauma and loss with the psychosocial trauma treatment - and now COVID-19 health care, and also equipping them with the personal coping and self-care skills to enable them to take an active part in their own individual and communal healing recovery, is at the center of our service philosophy. This approach is consistently proving to be highly successful in helping to achieve healing and recovery, and the generous support of our donors helps to make this possible.
While our devoted service team that is capable of reaching more and more refugees continues to grow and be available to steadily expand on our overall potential for services, due to the increased cost of computer communications equipment, on-going technical services, and medical devices required to reach and maintain treatment and support contact with refugees at multiple locations across Jordan during this extraordinary period, our limited funding resources are necessarily consumed by these technical costs.
Each donation helps to overcome these limitations placed on our services due to lack of funding, to sustain and make these direct services immediately available to more of the most vulnerable and at-risk – the children and women who make up the large majority of the refugee population.
Your continued donations are immensely appreciated and crucial to continuing our humanitarian work, and to the healing of so many.
HOW YOU CAN HELP MAINTAIN OUR LIFE-SAVING ASSISTANCE:
Feel free to contact Steve Olweean with any questions or to share your feedback at: SOlweean@aol.com.
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