Brothers Together Iraq

$1000 Challenge

2008-08-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

Our first gift towards the opening of the Brothers Together Iraq office has been given by a church in Dallas, Texas! Thank you so much!

A thousand dollars goes a long way towards the capital expenses needed to set up a new office here in Iraq! We are issuing a challenge to other churches to do the same! Can your fellowship match $1000 for the cause of reconciliation and healing in Northern Iraq? If just 30 churches will do the same, all of the set up costs for one year AND Goran's support will be covered. As a memento for your donation, your church will receive a picture colored by one of our children who have returned from surgery with a healed heart!

Click "Give Today" to make your match!

Advertise on Brothers Together Iraq

2008-08-18T13:09:00.000-07:00

Want to advertise your product or company on Brothers Together Iraq? Here is information on our rates. We'll help you share about what you do - can you help us save lives in Northern Iraq?

125×125 pixel Ad Spot - $125 USD / month
SPOTS AVAILABLE: 4 spots (below the main page banner in the sidebar)
INCLUDES:
125px x 125px advert in right hand column on ALL pages
Text Link Ad in the sidebar under “My Sponsors”
Monthly mention in a blog post briefly introducing your product / business

………………………………………………
Text Link Ad - $50 USD / month
SPECIAL:
Purchase this ad for six months and only pay half!
SPOTS AVAILABLE: Unlimited
INCLUDES:
Text Link Ad in the sidebar under “My Sponsors”
Monthly mention in a blog post briefly introducing your product / business

………………………………………………
420×80 pixel Ad Spot - $250 USD / month
SPOTS AVAILABLE: 1 spot (above posts)
INCLUDES:
420px x 80px premium ad site-wide
Text Link Ad in the sidebar under “My Sponsors”
Monthly mention in a blog post briefly introducing your product / business

Why We Save Lives

2008-08-12T20:59:00.000-07:00

“You can’t romanticize poverty.”

Brothers Together is the English name for Shevet Achim (www.shevet.org) which was founded in 1994. Shevet's purpose is to help non-Israeli children receive lifesaving medical care in Israel. Shevet Achim seeks to foster relationships between Jews and Muslims to ease tensions in the Middle East. They seek to cross lines of division to show that an enemy is in fact a neighbor.

Through a partnership with MRDS, Brothers Together has been saving lives in northern Iraq since 2005. The first year the project was in operation, the Sulaymaniyah received and sent six children for heart surgery. In 2007, 35 families presented their ill children to us. Of those, 12 received heart surgeries in 2007; another 10 were approved and are awaiting funding and/or their administrative processes to be completed.

Unfortunately, due to the inadequate healthcare system in Iraq, we expect this trend to continue. Hala Al-Salaf, an Iraqi Fulbright scholar working with the World Health Organization, explains why the Iraqi healthcare system has deteriorated to its current state:

Forced migration, which is often called “brain drain,” is perhaps the biggest problem facing the Iraqi health com¬munity. Iraq’s Ministry of Health reports that 102 doctors and 164 nurses were killed between April 2003 and May 2006, and some 250 Iraqi doctors have been kidnapped in the past two years. Because of this violence, Iraqi health professionals are fleeing in droves, as many as 12,000 since 2003. This is exactly what the militants want to see – professionals being pushed out to weaken the system.

Medical universities are cutting their departments since they have fewer and fewer professors. This leaves the medical graduates with no solid clinical training, while facing the daily hardships of continuous emergencies and other demands. To make matters worse, these young doctors have to find creative methods to perform their tasks in the absence of required supplies and equipment, at a time when millions of dollars are allocated to healthcare services.

Can you imagine how that affects the healthcare system and the lives of the people? If we are unable to prepare a new generation of well-trained doctors, who will run the hospitals, treat patients, and help the Iraqi people live healthy lives? The exodus of so many professionals is really taking a toll on Iraq’s healthcare system, and could pose serious problems well into the future.

Sadly, there will be a need for our work for many years still to come.

Closing the Gap
Until the Iraqi medical system can meet the challenges before it, Brothers Together stands in the gap, providing for children what the healthcare system cannot.

Conditions such as Tetraology of Fallot, Atrial Septal Defect, Ventricular Septal Defect, and resulting pulmonary hypertension are just a few of the cardiac anomalies routinely found in our children. In the US, these conditions are typically found and repaired within hours, days or weeks of birth. Many are simply “holes in the heart” (if that can be called “simple”). However, in Iraq, it is not unusual for a family to be made aware of their child’s life threatening condition when the child is a toddler or teenager, and also told at that time he or she has only months to live.

Once as a family reaches our office, it is imperative that nothing stands between them and life saving medical treatment offered through Brothers Together.

How We Save Lives

2008-08-12T17:20:00.000-07:00

It begins with a simple question: can you heal my child?

Pre-Screening
The process for each child begins when the child’s parents arrive at the office in Sulaymaniyah. Many have traveled from hours from Kirkuk, Erbil/Hawler, the Dohuk area or the villages of Iraq to our office, searching for hope for their sick children. Office Director, Goran Hassan meets with each family and collects the following information:

Basic personal information such as name, guardian’s name, phone number, etc.
Medical history and reports
Echo Cardiogram

He scans all documents and forwards them to Brothers Together via e-mail. These reports are evaluated by Brothers Together staff and are subsequently forwarded to a cardiologist. Children who are deemed eligible for surgery are selected for further screening in Amman, Jordan. Families are expected to pay for this flight to Jordan themselves (approx. $1600 USD roundtrip for child + guardian, plus $200 room and board).

Screening
Once children are selected for screening in Jordan, Brothers Together contacts the Iraq office who, in turn, contacts the families. Goran provides the families with all of the necessary information – such as date and time – for the screening and tells them how and where to buy plane tickets.

He will often accompany families to the Iraqi Airways office to assist them with their ticket purchase.For most families, they have never flown before or been out of Iraq. The process of traveling out of Iraq is nerve-wrecking, let alone traveling with a deathly ill child. The families have to obtain passports for the guardian and the child.

In Iraq, there are several types of passports and several ways to get the one that will allow entry into Jordan and Israel in a timely fashion. A family can go to Baghdad to hand deliver their application (the cheapest way—about $200); or pay someone to do it ($500 is the current rate—last year it was $1000). By this way, your passport will be returned in about a week, but you risk the dangers of traveling to and from Baghdad, which is still very risky for the Kurds, even in post-war Iraq. The other option is to simply mail your application and wait for the government to process it—typical returns take a year and cost about $60.

Goran often fields phone calls late into the evening from worried and anxious parents about their paperwork, upcoming travel, screening and surgery.The families travel to Jordan for screening where one of three outcomes is possible:

The child may be chosen for immediate surgery in which case he or she travels immediately to Israel for the procedure.
The child may be selected for surgery at a later time and be sent back to Iraq to wait, or wait in Jordan for appropriate paperwork to be completed for travel across the border
The child may be deemed inoperable and returned to Iraq

In the first two scenarios, funding must also be available for the flight to Israel ($1600USD) and surgery ($7000.00USD) before surgery can occur. All that stands between saving 22 children in 2007 and four or five times as many annually in future years is funding.

How many more could we save if we had your commitment for flights and surgeries?

Surgery
Following the screening, Brothers Together contacts Goran to inform him of the results. They wait until Brothers Together selects a date for surgeries, typically one—three months after screening. Once a date has been chosen and the children are selected for that date, Brothers Together again contacts Goran.

Goran contacts the family as in the screening phase and provides the families with all of the necessary information – such as date and time of surgery —and tells them how and where to buy plane tickets again. He answers any questions the families may have about surgery or travel. He may even again accompany families to the airline office.Brothers Together emails an invitation letter for each family describing the surgery their child is about to have, which is printed and given to each family to assist them at passport control in Jordan.

Once the families leave the airport for Amman, Goran contacts Brothers Together as they arrange to meet the families at the airport in Jordan. He then stays in contact as they travel through Jordan, waiting for a happy reunion with each family back in Iraq!

How To Help

2008-08-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

Families from all over Iraq come to the black gate day after day, looking for hope for their dying children. With your help, Goran and Brothers Together offers the hope and surgeries the Iraqis so desperately need.

The Brothers Together Iraq office in Sulaymaniyah serves all of Iraq. The majority of cases today are from the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, but, as word of the work spreads, families have begun to come from Kirkuk and even points further south.

The table below presents the financial support needed to administrate the Brothers Together Iraq office annually, including staff salary and expenses.

Once these expenses are covered, local staff will be able to complete the work of saving lives and changing hearts in northern Iraq full time. These amounts include a simple small office in Sulaymaniyah to meet and serve the families.

Also included are other necessary expenses for an office in Iraq; utilities such as a generator, gas, furniture, internet, a phone and phone cards, printer/scanner and associated supplies. Travel includes taxis, buses and/or a lease on a vehicle which will be used for traveling to and from work and to visit families and donors.

As well, we imagine a future where more children’s lives are saved through increased funding of the surgeries, and flights to surgery. As many children were sent to surgery from the Spring 2008 screening as were sent in all of 2007. Huge numbers like that are only possible through generous gifts from like-minded investors like you.

Our goals are to complete each of the following, funded completely by friends of Brothers Together Iraq:

Pre-screen all children who come to our office for assistance
File and transfer all necessary documents
Send 60 children annually to Brothers Together screenings in Jordan
Send at least 25 children to Jordan for transport to surgery in Israel
Pay for travel – screening and surgery – and surgery costs
Increase awareness of Brothers Together’s work among those needing heart surgery
Help 100 children over 4 years have heart surgeries with the potential to save their lives which they would otherwise not have an opportunity to have

The table below breaks down the annual costs of our ambitious goal:

Broken hearts become reconciled hearts.

Sick hearts become healed.

Brothers Together Iraq is saving lives and changing hearts even today and you can be a part of the miracle.

What can you give so a child in northern Iraq might live?

Every gift is tax deductible through Brothers Together and no gift is too small.

From Our Director

2008-08-12T07:14:00.000-07:00

(director, brothers together iraq)
My passion for children led me to become involved with the organization, Shevet Achim, in 2006, while working as a translator for MRDS. Shevet Achim (or Brothers Together) provides heart surgeries for children in Israel when their home country’s doctors do not have the skills or equipment to perform the surgeries. This has been a dream of mine, to help Iraqi children who suffer from heart problems and I realize God made this opportunity possible.

As Project Director, every day I meet new hopeless families who are eagerly looking for help for their children. Since God put me in this work to help these beautiful kids, I’ve learned that a lot of Iraqi children suffer with heart problems and need help from outside Iraq.

Imagine how many other children have the same problem and are looking for help. Imagine how many families suffer seeing their adorable child suffer, waiting for help. Imagine how many other families gave up on their children, waiting to see hope. Instead their death came first because of the lack of help in their home country.

Please lift these beautiful children up in your prayers that the Lord would heal them physically and spiritually. That God would continue to give me wisdom and at patience to do the work, and that He would use me to reach these families and help them understand that God is the true Physician that heals their children.

Goran Hassan
goranhasatgmail.com

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ABOUT GORAN

Goran Hassan was born July 1, 1981 in Halabja, Iraq.

Halabja was the site of the brutal 1988 chemical weapons attack by Saddam Hussein which massacred over 10,000 Kurds in just one day. Goran’s family fled Halabja the day before the attacks, returning a few years later so Goran could finish primary and secondary school in the city of his birth.

Goran has a Bachelors of Arts in English Literature from the University of Sulaymaniyah. In September 2004, he began working for MRDS-Halabja , a US-based NGO, as the Staff Translator.

As early as 2004, MRDS-Halabja partnered with Brothers Together to save children. Goran served as the translator for the American staff member who was overseeing it. However, as the project grew in scope, and Goran’s passion for the children grew, he began to take on more of the responsibilities himself.

By the Fall of 2007, it became evident that this project had outgrown it's status as one of many projects for MRDS-Halabja.

In March 2008, after much discussion between MRDS-Halabja and Brothers Together, Goran was invited to join the staff of Brothers Together to open a dedicated office in Sulaymaniyah.

Goran has been happily married since December, 2007.