BASR (the Bethlehem Arab Society for Rehabilitation) is one of the several overseas charities supported by the Parish. We shall be singing of Bethlehem this Christmas, and of the healing power of what happened there 2000 years ago. Today’s Bethlehem, that dilapidated little city in the West Bank Occupied Territories, seems worlds away from our comforting Christmas image. The huge Wall of Separation, which slices its way through the edge of the town, is the physical manifestation of a wider human injustice, whereby travel may be denied, houses and crops destroyed, workplaces, schools and hospitals cut off, and lives systematically endangered. It seems to have become a model for all those politicians resorting to the rhetoric of separation, and to the construction of barriers and walls. Reconciliation seems to recede ever further.
Our media like to portray the West Bank in monochrome, as a place of violence. This is only partly true. Go there and you see a cultured and multicultural society of Muslims, Christians, Jews and people of no particular faith. Co-existence has been its main theme for centuries and, despite the bleak repression it suffers, tolerance continues to survive. In Bethlehem, we can still see churches and mosques, religious houses, the university, schools, hospitals and numerous smaller organisations rejecting the negativity of conflict.
Members of our congregation have visited, and often formed lasting connections with several of these. Alrowwad is the cultural centre of Aida Camp, which works with refugee women and children in the fields of drama, music, dance and art and the development of life skills. Bethlehem University, a Roman Catholic foundation, has a predominance of Muslim students, most of them young women, whose feminist principles challenge the Western stereotype of Muslim female oppression.
And through annual donations, our Parish supports the work of BASR, an extraordinary Bethlehem hospital. From its beginnings as a Cheshire Home in 1960, BASR has developed into a centre of excellence in the Middle East for research into and treatment of physical and mental trauma, and all kinds of disability, all too necessary in today’s Palestine. Though it readily criticises the authorities and security forces about unwarranted violence to the young and vulnerable, BASR is not politically partisan: its admissions policy does not discriminate on grounds of gender, age, religion or social class, and admits referrals from all over the West Bank. ‘Every patient’, says the inscription at the door, ‘is first and foremost a human being’.
More than a treatment centre, BASR has an outreach programme in the Bethlehem community, providing education, training and family support. Families play a big part both in this work and in the hospital treatment itself; their involvement is seen as a definite aid to recovery. Its exemplary work with traumatised young children, also involving parental support, gives some idea of the range of local need: nursing, OT, physio, audiology, speech, vision, psychology and psychiatry, orthodontics and prosthetics.
Parental support also helps to bolster BASR’s limited funds, most of which are raised from voluntary donations. If you are interested in learning more about BASR, or making a donation of your own, or visiting it when you are next in Bethlehem – visitors are always welcome – please look at www.basr.org.
Rehabilitating Bethlehem
Bill Risebero