Bedford sisters donate dental care and supplies to Syrian refugees
By Paul Palmeter
CBC News
A pair of graduates from Dalhousie University’s dentistry school are sharing their story of how they helped hundreds of Syrian refugees.
Asile and Asraa El-Darahali are sisters who work at dental clinics in Bedford.
In December, they left for Jordan where they worked for a week near the Syrian border in the Za’atari refugee camp, home to 80,000 refugees. Half of those were children with very bad teeth, the sisters say.
“Most of the people at the refugee camp didn’t even own a toothbrush,” Asraa El-Darahali said at a presentation Thursday evening.
“They couldn’t brush their teeth, so most of the people we saw there had multiple dental abscesses where they were suffering from chronic pain.”
The sisters spoke to a crowd of about 100 people at the Dalhousie campus. Their presentation called, “Helping Hands: Bringing oral health care to our local and global community,” outlined many of the obstacles the El-Darahali sisters had to overcome.
Dental chair donated
They travelled with a group of 45 health care professionals with the Syrian American Medical Society, who were headed for the refugee camp for a one week mission.
When they landed in Jordan, customs officials threatened to confiscate all their bags full of dental tools and supplies. They managed to “sweet-talk” their way out of it.
“You see a lot of pictures online, but really [it’s] different when you are actually there,” Asraa El-Darahali said.
“That’s when we realized just how much they were struggling and how much devastation the Syrian crisis had actually affected these peoples lives.”
The pain was so bad for many of the children in the camp they couldn’t sleep at night or function normally, she said.
There was only one dental chair at the refugee camp, but the two sisters had arranged to have another chair delivered from a $10,000 fundraising effort in Halifax. The chair remains at the dental clinic, inscribed with the words, “donated by the community of Nova Scotia, Canada,” on one of the arms.
Family fled Kuwait
In the one week they were there, the two sisters were incredibly busy, treating 300 children.
“We did about 30 a day for five days — each of us — so we did quite a bit,” Asile El-Darahali said.
“The kids welcomed us to their camp and they were just so thankful for the work that we did for them.”
The two sisters left behind many supplies in an effort to provide better dental care. Both said they would jump at the opportunity to do it again.
The El-Darahali family moved to Canada in 1992 when their family fled Kuwait after the outbreak of the Gulf War.
Source: www.cbc.ca