Paul Calvert spoke with Caritas Baby Hospital

Children's Relief Bethlehem is an international ecclesiastical aid agency and the umbrella organisation of Caritas Baby Hospital in Bethlehem. With an Outpatient Clinic, Inpatient Wards and a Mothers' School, the hospital is the second biggest employer in Bethlehem and each year treats between 30,000 and 35,000 children. Paul Calvert spoke with Bashir Qonqar from Children's Relief Bethlehem to find out more.

Paul: What is Children's Relief?

Bashir: Children's Relief is a social organisation that was founded in 1952. The founder of this organisation was a Catholic priest and his name was Father Ernst Schnydrig. He came from Switzerland to Bethlehem and he saw the devastation of the people: we had a lot of refugees at that time in 1952 in Bethlehem. The situation of the children was really bad, so he decided to start something for the locals. He took a small apartment and he put 14 beds inside and he called it the Caritas Baby Hospital. The aim was to support the health system for the children and the Children's Relief Bethlehem or the Caritas Baby Hospital has developed in the last 62 years from a small clinic, to one of the most important children's hospital in the West Bank. We now have about 82 beds for children and we have another six beds in the intensive care unit. We are the second biggest employer in Bethlehem with about 250 people working for the Caritas Baby Hospital. Every year we treat between 30,000 and 35,000 children in the hospital, between the in-patient and out-patient clinics. Last year, 2013, we have treated at the hospital around 36,000 children.

Paul: What is your mission in Bethlehem today?

Bashir: The mission is to help the children. Our mission is actually the children not only of Bethlehem, but the children of all the region and all of the people living in this place. When we work with children we never look at nationality or religion. Our work and our mission is to help these children to have a better future and to have better health.

Paul: Do families come here to the hospital, or do you go out as well within the community?

Bashir: We used to have a mobile clinic; that was during the Second Intifada. In the Second Intifada, as you may know, the whole of streets were closed and it was really hard for the people to reach us at the Caritas Baby Hospital. It was like a small project going to the villages and starting working there with the children and families. This has now ended because the situation is better and that means the people can now reach us better than before. However, some of the villages are far away, like Hebron, so we still actually go there and try to provide some of the healthcare for the people.

Paul: What sort of needs do some of the children have that you go out to visit, or come here to the hospital?

Bashir: It depends, there are a lot of diseases that the people have. A lot of people don't come to the Caritas Baby Hospital, like when we speak about a lot of villages near Hebron, because the people don't have enough money to come even to the hospital, so we try to go and give them visits; every two weeks the clinics and doctors go there and we try to work with the children there.

Paul: Are you seeing a lot of diseases because of poverty?

Bashir: Sure, like we have a problem with feeding. A lot of children are not getting enough nutrition, which of course affects their health. At the same time we also have a problem that sometimes even the mothers of the children who are breast feeding, are not getting enough nutrition to give it to the children. We have other problems, like we get during the winter-time a lot from the Bedouins who are still living on the outskirts of Bethlehem and they come because the houses are not ready for a cold and hard winter, so they come here with pneumonia, or with these problems that can develop afterwards and these are all under the poverty diseases that we have.

Paul: Are a lot of these diseases around a lack of education? Do you provide education to help some of these families?

Bashir: Yes we do this. We have at the Caritas Baby Hospital a mother's department. When the parents bring their child here to the hospital and if this child is admitted, the mother of the child has to stay with the child in the hospital and we have this mother department where they can stay and it is a place where we also work with the mothers really intensively. We give them a lot of courses where we try to explain what is best for the child when it comes to nutrition, healthcare and when it comes to the development of the child. It is a very important thing that we are trying to do as a hospital, not only to be a children's hospital, but to also become a family centre. That means working with the family and with the children at the same time.

Paul: Are their many suffering children in Bethlehem?