For Dorly, a refugee camp in Jordan was 'coming home'
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| Dorly O'Sullivan at the Gormanstown fundraising concert. |
When Gormanstown Chapel Choir's Dorly O'Sullivan heads out as a volunteer to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan at the end of April, it will be her third week-long mission with the programme operated by the small NGO Atlantic Humanitarian Relief, writes Brian Byrne. But it will also be a continuation of a commitment she had as a teenager in Switzerland and later as a young woman in Paris.
"When I first went to Jordan with AHR, it was like coming home," Dorly told the Diary last week after the fundraising concert, 'Musical Reflection for Holy Week', organised by the choir in the church in Gormanstown. "From the age of 14 I was involved with an organisation that looks after refugees. In my 20s for a couple of years I worked in a refugee camp in Paris, where they were all Algerians. So when I came to Jordan, you know, the children were just the same. The mood of the adults — gratitude and resignation — all that was exactly the same as it was 50 years ago in Paris. You have to realise that things haven’t changed, they're just in different places."
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| The Gormanstown Chapel Choir and the Dara Quartet. |
The twice a year AHR missions provide medical, paediatric, surgical and dental care, together with humanitarian aid, focused on refugee camps in Northern Jordan. In all, some 80 people take part in each initiative, a mix of nurses, doctors, surgeons, dentists, pharmacists and humanitarian volunteers. Operated by AHR since 2010, the volunteers are from America, other parts of Europe and, increasingly in recent years, from Ireland.
For Dr Brendan O'Shea, another member of the Gormanstown choir, the upcoming mission will be the second one he has participated in. For his wife, practice nurse Corrina Hopkins, it will be her eighth. Both work at The Bridge Medical Centre in Newbridge. "Most people are familiar with the concept of a refugee camp, and can relate what has been done to Syrian society to what is happening much closer to home in Ukraine," Dr O'Shea told the audience in Gormanstown last week. "But it is different to actually go out and engage with these people, and it is a very humbling experience."
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| Dr Brendan O'Shea. |
On last October's mission, the group carried out 3,500 medical consultations, and dispensed 2,600 prescriptions, mainly for things like diabetes and hypertension. "It’s a very intense week, based around the refugee camps and two or three of the hospitals in the area. There were about 130 fairly major medical procedures, including hip replacements, hysterectomies, cataracts, tonsils and adenoids — the things that we kind of take for granted here. There were also over 2,000 smaller dental procedures carried out."
All the volunteers self-fund their travel and other expenses, and give their time and expertise at no charge. But with some 800,000 refugee Syrians in camps in Jordan, is it just a drop on the ocean? "It is what it is," Dr O'Shea said. "It is what we can do. Your support and your presence and your thoughts this evening are hugely valuable to the people that we're going out to. That there are people in Kilcullen and around Ireland, and in America, who are understanding of what's happening to them, is very important."
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