Humanity has its problems. Mass death and destruction, discrimination, corruption in politics are all regular occurences and we firmly believe this needs to stop. People are people are people.Everybody deserves the same.
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Post-traumatic stress disorder is a horrible condition that affects many people. It’s a debilitating mental illness that can make it hard to live – and it is still not enough to describe the absolute horror faced by those in Syria.
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A doctor has coined a new term in effort to describe the pain suffered by Syrian children. Human Devastation Syndrome is a term created by a neuropsychologist, Dr. M.K.Hamza, to accurately describe the levels of horror faced by youngsters in Syria.
During the five year civil war, many children have been orphaned, seen friends and family members die horrifically – and even those who have survived and made it to refugee camps are struggling. They are often left with no food or water, have no access to education or medical treatment – these are children tragically deprived of their most basic human rights. Children caught up in the conflict are being abused and exploited by being forced into early marriages or army groups.
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Hamza elaborated: “They have seen dismantled human beings that used to be their parents, or their siblings. You get out of a family of five or six or 10 or whatever — you get one survivor, two survivors sometimes. A lot of them have physical impairments. Amputations. Severe injuries. And they’ve made it to the refugee camp somehow.”
Hamza is an important figure in SAMS - the Syrian-American Medical Society, which is organisation consisting of volunteers that bring medical treatment to the frontline of Syria and its neighbouring countries.
“You have children who are devastated,” he said, “and this is not the end of it.”
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“Even the word ‘poor’ is not justifiable here because it’s a less than human condition,” Hamza said. A psychiatrist who volunteers with SAMS, agreed with that:
“I have patients who tell me they were touched inappropriately by their doctors,” he said in an address to the conference. “The doctors, because [the patients] were Syrian, assumed they were ‘whores.’”
“There are girls on the streets of Beirut selling themselves — 8, 9 years old,” he continued. “And then you tell their parents: Why don’t you send them to school so they can improve themselves? And they say, ‘They make $50 a day. Can you give me $50 a day?’”
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The SAMS Foundation is a non-profit, non-political humanitarian and medical relief organisation that work in the frontlines of Syria and neighbouring countries. However, an intensive-care doctor working with SAMS says they are still not doing enough – he says they are just putting a plaster on the problem: “Instead of treating a child’s wounds from a missile…we need to stop the missile.”
This couldn’t be truer than ever – we have all seen the monstrous and tragic things the Syrians have had to deal with – there has been plenty of news and media coverage.
But, it seems that this is beyond us. What else can we do than making photos go viral and try to voice our opinions like that?
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We could give all we had to charity and people will still do stupid, senseless things. I wish the world wasn’t such a horrible place. But it is – and I pray for hope and peace and love for all those in Syria and other war-torn countries.
