Listen to the audio:
Hi, my name is Claire Porter Robbins, and I am a freelance journalist. I was on assignment with ONE magazine shortly after the Assad regime fell.
I was very fortunate to travel through Homs, Aleppo, Damascus, and the Mar Moussa Monastery, which is in rural Syria, where I talked with ordinary Syrians, including Christians, and learned their perspectives on the end of the war and what comes next. And those ranged from optimism to anxiety, sometimes all within the same conversation.
A massively bright light during my reporting was to hear firsthand how Catholic Near East Welfare Association provided health care for Syrians during, and still after, the war, by funding churches to pay the medical bills for people in their communities who needed the support.
One example that will stay with me, and I open my story with it, is that of a young woman named Rita, a mother of twins who has been suffering from heart conditions requiring surgery, tests, and drugs since the war started. And those are massively expensive due to the crippling inflation that the country has seen. The churches [and] the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Aleppo have helped to subsidize many of her medications and surgeries, which has effectively saved her life, allowing her to be a good parent to her children and participate in her community. And at the same time, the programming from St. Vincent de Paul and the churches has provided her with comfort and support during such a scary time for her family.
Even though the war is over, programs like these that run through the church will continue to be necessary, at least for the near future, as inflation comes down and as hopefully jobs and work return. But for now, they are a bridge for the communities in Syria.
Read more about the situation of Christians in post-war Syria in “Healing Hands in the Shadows of War” in the September issue of ONE.