This year, The Sunday Times has chosen to partner Medecins Sans Frontieres in a Christmas Appeal to help the children of Iraq.
Many children in Iraq have suffered horrific injuries, in roadside bombings, suicide attacks on market places and mortar fire on their homes. Medical facilities within Iraq are scarce and expensive. Many of the country's doctors have been forced to flee the fighting and those that remain do not have access to facilities to carry out complex operations on bomb and burn victims.
MSF works with doctors in Iraq to identify and refer patients to our surgical programme in Amman, Jordan. The team of doctors and nurses, many of whom are Iraqis, perform complex operations that will allow the children to eat and to speak, to walk and run, to learn to write and, maybe, one day, achieve some sort of normal life.
Maxillo-facial surgery can rebuild a shattered jaw, reform facial features and allow a child to eat normally, and perhaps to speak. Damaged eye sockets can be repaired to allow prosthetic eyes to give a child a more 'normal' appearance.
Orthopaedic surgery rebuilds shattered bones, reshapes distorted limbs and restores the ability to walk. Complex skin grafts separate burned fingers and toes to allow a child to dress themself and hold a pen.
Helping the doctors to help the children
The doctors of Iraq once had some of the best medical facilities in the region. Now they are few in number and lack resources – some are the only specialist in their field in the country. A small part of your donation, 10 per cent, will allow the Royal Society of Medicine to open its extensive library of medical expertise to the doctors and medical students of Iraq, through access to online journals and web forums.
Your donation
Nothing can give the badly wounded children of Iraq their old, more carefree lives back, but without the work of the MSF team, their plight is unbearable. Your donation can give them hope.
To make a donation by telephone please call 0800 088 7480