In the room are two boys: one from Iraq, the other from Syria.
The Iraqi boy’s body was peppered with shrapnel when a car bomb detonated near the market where he was shopping with his brother. His brother died. The Syrian boy’s face bore the markings of burns – a fire that was sparked by a shell landing on the house next door spread to his family’s, and he was there.
Now they are both receiving treatment in Amman, the Jordanian capital, at this Médecins sans Frontières hospital, where the walls are covered with children’s drawings. “The children whose faces have been disfigured draw monsters,” said Talha al-Ali, a paediatric counsellor. The Mowasah Reconstructive Surgery hospital is no ordinary hospital, for within its walls are housed war-wounded from around the Middle East, generations united by the joint trauma of witnessing and barely surviving an upheaval that has redrawn borders and destroyed the foundations of nation states. Initially set up in 2006 as a reconstructive surgery hospital to treat Iraqis maimed during the US occupation of the country and the ensuing insurgency, it now provides a temporary home to those whose lives have been upended by conflicts in Syria, Yemen, the occupied Palestinian territories and even, for a time, Libya.
It is a microcosm of the region’s maladies and the trauma they have wrought on civilian lives – there are people here who have been wounded in sectarian bloodletting, shelling, airstrikes, occupation and crackdowns by dictators.
“From one day to the other, these people’s lives have been completely changed or destroyed, and we’re trying to offer them a second chance,” said Jean-Paul Tohme, who runs the day-to-day operations of the MSF hospital, at its new building opened in February.
The facility provides reconstructive surgery to the wounded, whether orthopaedic or plastic surgery, saying the practice is neglected in the region’s hard-hit nations, which lack the capacity for long-term care beyond handling emergencies.
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