From Ekklesia-On a recent sunny day in Gaza, mothers and their children waited on benches on the manicured campus outside of Al Ahli Arab Hospital to receive care from a hospital-run programme that offers three-months of services to 750 children up to the age of five - writes Lynette Wilson.
The nourishment programme is just one of the many outpatient services the non-profit, public hospital operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem has continued as it transitions into a specialty hospital and weathers financial difficulties exacerbated by a recent loss of funding.
“It is our witness as Christians to serve the poor,” said Suhaila Tarazi, the hospital’s director. “With all that is going on in Egypt [political turmoil] and Syria [civil war], to keep a place like this one, a Christian place like this one, it’s important.”
The hospital employs 110 people, 30 per cent of them women, and serves some 30,000 patients each year, 6000 of them in the free medical mission, she added.
On 2 January 2013, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem Suheil Dawani, travelled from Israel to Gaza via the north’s Erez Crossing to see the hospital, meet with staff and to hold Eucharist in its chapel.
More here-
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/17791
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