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The Week in Germany: Current Affairs

October 26, 2007

Non-Profits Airlift Afghan Children to Germany for Surgery

A doctor and an Afghan child on a flight from Kabul to Hamburg, Photo, dpa

A plane carrying 59 injured Afghan children requiring surgery landed in the northern German city of Hamburg Wednesday (17th Oct) in what was termed one of the biggest medical relief airlifts of recent years in Europe.

Ambulances were waiting to take some of the children straight to some of the 30 hospitals across Germany that will treat them. On the outbound flight from Germany, the chartered Hamburg International Boeing 737 had taken home 20 other youngsters already treated, along with 4 tons of medicine, wheelchairs and equipment for clinics and orphanages.

The organization "Kinder Brauchen" Uns (Children Need Us) and the Albertine hospital group, a Hamburg non-profit, established the scheme because poor families in Afghanistan cannot afford hospital care.

"This aid encourages respect between Christians and Muslims," said Fokko ter Haseborg, chairman of Albertine.

The Indira Gandhi Hospital, the Kabul partner in the scheme, has a long waiting list of sick and injured children who need to go to Germany.
Five doctors and staff from the Albertine Hospital spoke later of their anguish at saying goodbye in Kabul to the cured children and taking on board shy new children aged 3 to 17, some crying in pain or with mutilated faces.

The flight alone, which has been in preparation for the past two months, cost 110,000 euros (156,000 dollars). After their hospital treatment the children are to recuperate in Germany with home-stay families, many of them Afghan or Turkish, for several months.

The relief organization has been bringing poor Afghan children to Germany since 2002 for treatment, most of them victims of bomb blasts, burns or heart complaints. In the past 23 missions it has used scheduled flights via Dubai. The organization plans to conduct two charter flights a year in future if it can collect sufficient funding for operations on such an unprecedented scale.

Kinder Brauchen Uns, founded in 2001 and based in the German city of Muelheim an der Ruhr, has recruited 40 participating hospitals and 230 home-stay families. Albertine hospital, a top German cardiac clinic, will treat 12 children with heart disease. The expensive operations will be funded by grants and private donations.

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Kinder Brauchen Uns

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