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Health crisis in Lebanon - hospitals are bleeding!

Many thanks for your support, which meant we were able to complete the project successfully.
project summaryThe humanitarian situation in Lebanon is alarming. The once flourishing country stands on the precipice. The explosion in the port of Beirut on 04 August 2020 has once again massively accelerated the decline. With the delivery of medical supplies from Switzerland, the Rosary Hospital in Beirut can be helped.

Background

"Stop the Bleeding" - Lebanon is suffering! Corruption and mismanagement led to the collapse of the economy in recent years. The once thriving country is on the brink of the abyss. The explosion in the port of Beirut on 04 August 2020 has once again massively accelerated the decline. 218 people died, 7,000 were injured and 300,000 became homeless in one fell swoop. Large parts of the city's infrastructure were severely damaged, including several hospitals near the port. Inflation rose to 215% last April. According to Caritas Switzerland, poverty has increased even further as a result of the pandemic. Currently, 78 % of Lebanese live below the poverty line. Among those who have moved to Lebanon - refugees from Syria and Palestine as well as foreign workers - 89% live in extreme poverty. The people urgently need help!
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Idea

With the explosion in the port of Beirut, we (Helvetia Fair Health Association) decided to support the severely damaged "Hôpital des Soeur du Rosaire (Rosary Hospital)" with an emergency aid program. In direct contact with the hospital management we make sure that money and material gets into the right hands and does not get lost on the black market. Now we have been asked for help again. Material and medicine are either hardly available or no longer affordable. In addition, more and more employees (doctors, nurses, technical staff, administrative staff) are leaving the country because they can no longer support their families from their wages. Those left behind suffer all the more. With the help for a selected hospital we want to make a start.
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Implementation

We collect money (from private individuals, foundations, companies, etc.) and unused but valuable material from hospitals and other health care facilities, check it for completeness, functionality and expiration date and send it by sea as emergency aid directly to the Rosary Hospital in Beirut. The Rosary Hospital notifies us of what is needed and ensures that the import is approved by the authorities. To date, we have already been able to send several loads of aid. The material was received with much gratitude at the Rosary Hospital.
Currently, due to restructuring, Affoltern Hospital is donating several pallets of high quality surgical material. In addition, oxygen concentrators from the nursing home Baar and FFP2 protective masks from the company Puag. With this crowdfunding campaign we want to cover the transport costs. As soon as the money is collected - we expect at the end of May - the material will be loaded onto the ship in Basel until it arrives in the port of Beirut in 6 - 8 weeks.
With this we can make a small contribution to stop the worst bleeding. In the longer term, we are striving to secure the hospital's operation with further targeted measures. The people in Lebanon deserve it!
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Initiators

Helvetia Fair Health Association (www.helvetiafairhealth.org) is a young Swiss NGO. Primarily founded with the aim of supporting young, talented people from the health sector in the Near and Middle East as well as Africa in order to give them a future and thus support the entire society.
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Material has arrived in Lebanon!

On Friday 29.09.23 the medical material arrived in Lebanon. Find out more in this update.

The time has finally come. On Friday 29.09.23, the surgical equipment from Affoltern Hospital, the oxygen concentrators from the Baar Care Centre and the protective masks from Puag AG, Bremgarten, arrived at the Hôpital des Soeur du Rosaire in Beirut, Lebanon, after a long journey and some delays in importing them. The sisters of the congregation and the staff received it with great joy and gratitude. We were thus able to make a small contribution to the running of the hospital, which was badly damaged three years ago, and to alleviating the great suffering of the people of Lebanon.

We would like to thank the there for you team for their great and professional support. And of course to our many donors, without whom we would not have been able to realise our humanitarian project. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

As the situation in Lebanon is deteriorating rather than improving, we are constantly on the lookout for more medical supplies to ship back to Beirut. At the same time, we are continuing to fundraise so that we are ready when new material needs to be transported.

Rosary Hospital would also like to thank the donors: "Words cannot express the depth of our gratitude and the overwhelming emotions that fill our hearts as we sit down to write this letter. On behalf of the entire Rosary Sisters Hospital Family, we want to convey our sincerest appreciation for the incredibly generous donation of medical supplies and the oxygen generators that we recently received form your esteemed organisation. The impact of your donation extends far beyond the tangible medical supplies themselves. It has breathed new life into our hospital, and our spirits".

Goal achieved - material can be delivered soon!

A very big THANK YOU to all the donors who have made it possible for us to send the urgently needed material on its way to Beirut. CHF 10,000 have been exceeded! I am overwhelmed!

Special thanks for the personal commitment of individual donors in publicising the project. Thanks to the many donors for the transport, but also thanks to the Affoltern Hospital, the Baar Nursing Centre and the company Puag AG for the valuable material, which now finds a new use. We were able to make the project known throughout Switzerland with a personal presentation of the project as part of the Odd Fellows Switzerland camp at the Waldstadt Lodge in Rheinfelden. Through them it has also been presented in various local newspapers. Also many thanks to Galenica and their employees and Swisscom for their generous support. Thanks to the many volunteers who helped sort out and list the material at the donor sites and transport it to the temporary storage facility in an aircraft hangar at Air Services in Basel. Here we are allowed to store the material free of charge until it can be shipped (see photo).

We have currently requested a new cost estimate from a logistics company. With the CHF 11'810.- we should now be able to handle the transport without any problems. The price also depends on how much water there is in the Rhine. Depending on the water level, the material will also be transported by train to Antwerp and from there by sea to Beirut. The journey by ship will take 2-3 weeks. From the port of Beirut, Rosary Hospital will take care of the delivery to the hospital.

Thanks to "there-for-you" for the professional support with crowd funding. It was a great experience for me!

We will be happy to report again when the material has arrived at the hospital.

A big thank you to everyone!

Peter Messmer

Helvetia Fair Health Association

Lukas Fahrländer 200 CHF
Fritz-Georg Fark 100 CHF
Dieter Michel 100 CHF
Verena Hofstetter 50 CHF
Vermittelt durch Swisscom 300 CHF
Anonymous 50 CHF
Carlo Habich 500 CHF
Katharina Hoff 1'000 CHF
Elisabeth Zihlmann 300 CHF
HANS UND URSULA WÜTHRICH 1'000 CHF
Orden der Schweizerischen Odd Fellows, Ressort Soziales 1'000 CHF
Odd Fellows Schweiz - Eidgenossen-Lager Nr. 1 1'360 CHF
Wohlfahrtsfonds der Waldstadtloge Rheinfelden 1'000 CHF
Roland Weiss 200 CHF
Christian Vogt 200 CHF
Florian Staehelin 100 CHF
Christian Hoenen 500 CHF
Anonymous 1'000 CHF
Galenica AG 2'850 CHF
Currently, there are still no project partners if you are interested, please contact us via info@there-for-you.com.

Primary Partners