How Syrian doctors are helping refugees in Lebanon

A group of young Syrian refugee professionals in Lebanon are helping ease the refugee burden placed on their place of refuge.

Dr. Fadi al-Halabi, a Syrian refugee from Damascus, helped found Multi Aid Programs or MAPS, that provides medical and educational services to some 300,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon and serves vulnerable members of the Lebanese host community.

With donations from the Qatari Red Crescent and the Syrian American Medical Society, they have built medical clinics and facilities in Lebanon and serve both the refugee population and Lebanese with a medical hotline, a mental health clinic, physiotherapy clinic and a breast cancer clinic that is the first of its kind in Lebanon.

Mohammad al-Masri, a young Syrian teacher who fled Homs, Syria in 2014, oversees the organization’s informal education programming. He told Al Monitor that there is a large gap “between the work of the UNHCR, what the Lebanese government demands and what Syrian refugees want to do to support their peers in need.