I'm getting ready to leave for Palestine on Saturday! I'm going to be working as a consultant on a USAID development project in Ramallah. There's a medical complex of five hospitals, and I'll be working with the EMS and emergency medicine services, which is hugely exciting.
Like most of us Americans, I don't know enough about the enormously complex and confusing history and political environment of the region, but here are a couple of thoughts: while the Israelis have a fantastic, well-developed Western-style EMS and healthcare system, the Palestinians do not. Even though Ramallah is just a few kilometers away from Jerusalem, a car accident or heart attack victim has no access to the Israeli hospitals because of the security wall and border checkpoints. You can imagine a rough parallel by thinking about what it would take somebody with an emergency in Tijuana trying to get through the border crossing to get in to a San Diego hospital. The Palestinians are at an enormous economic disadvantage, and improvements in their healthcare system would do a lot to improve the quality of their lives.
To say that navigating the region's political and ethnic conflicts is difficult would be to put it mildly. There are issues of religion (Jews, Muslims, and Christians), race (Arabs, European and African Jews), and class (Israel enjoys a robust economy, while the Palestinians have a number of barriers, political and physical, to development).
This trip will be the first medical development travel I'll have done in a while, and I'm a little rusty. I know I'm forgetting to pack something....
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