“They’ve seen terrible things: bombings, shooting, people screaming…Their lives were turned upside down.”
Excellent reporting on the tragic situation facing Syria’s children, from NBC.
The charity Save the Children has produced a compelling video public service announcement, which brief snippets of a young girl’s life, going from a happy, safe childhood, to living as a refugee amidst war. Interestingly, the child depicted – and the location – is the UK — to bring home how children living ordinary lives in Syria have been thrust into what would before have been a completely unthinkable nightmare.
Save the Children has issued a report on the status of health care in Syria, titled “A devastating toll: the impact of three years of war on the health of Syria’s children.” The report exposes a broken health system and its consequences: children not just dying from violent means but from diseases that would previously either have been treatable or prevented.
Imagine you have a young child whose legs must be amputated because hospitals don’t have the proper equipment to treat them, or a world in which a patient opts to be knocked unconscious with a metal bar because there are no anaesthetics. Imagine a life where newborn babies die in their incubators because of power cuts.
Horrific, isn’t it? Yet this is reality for people inside Syria who have endured the hell and barbarity of war for three years.
An excellent video, from the New York Times website, titled “Syria’s Wounded Generation,” shows a medical after-care center near Turkey’s border with Syria, where civilians and combatants recover from life-altering injuries. The Times’s Mac William Bishop spoke to casualties of Syria’s brutal war.
In Oslo, Norway, a small boy sat shivering without a coat on a bench.
See what happened, and what it has to do with the children of Syria.