Community Health Project

In our Community Health Project in Jordan, we are seeing lives transformed through health screening and education. We work in partnership with local organizations, medical professionals, and medical students to offer community health screening and health education for beneficiaries who are poor and marginalized.

Last year we restarted a women’s exercise and health discussion group which had been forced to close a few years ago. We worked hard to write material that was simpler, more engaging and practical, based on our first experience. The women really enjoyed it, and we ran it a second time, with some new members.

We are now running it for the third time, with the same group of women, because we saw trust beginning to build between them. In the group, there are Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, Gazan, Turkmen, Jordanian, and Egyptian women. One week they started spontaneously sharing about their mutual experiences of being outsiders and refugees in this country.

We rarely, rarely see women listen to each other. Usually, one person’s story is a chance for another woman to ‘one-up’ them with her story, or to offer a lot of unsolicited advice, but on this occasion, they just listened and empathised and cried with each other.

It’s very exciting to see us getting somewhere in our dream of women building trust to dream together and catch the vision for change and cheer each other on in their capacity to bring change.