Angie Meeker designs.

“You can’t romanticize poverty.”

In late 2007, I spent six months in northern Iraq as the PR director for a humanitarian relief and development organization. One of the projects our office directed remains close to our heart: Brothers Together. 10% of everything we make here at AngieMeekerdesigns is donated to Brothers Together. Find out how YOU can help save a life simply by choosing us to design your next website.

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 (an American relief and development organization), Brothers Together has been saving lives in northern Iraq since 2005. The first year the project was in operation, the Sulaymaniyah office 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. Choose AngieMeekerDesigns to create your next website, and 10% of your payment will be given to Brothers Together to help save another child’s life.