Photos by Amurtel and Humanity Now
Welcome to the first issue of Humanity Now’s Humanity News. When we travel, we wish that you, our donor community, could see what we see. To try to show you, we’ve decided to create a newsletter that focuses on a different topic every issue. Today we’re highlighting one of our beloved partners, the diverse and compassionate team of women at Amurtel in Greece.
If you’re walking through Athens’ Victoria Square, you might notice what’s essentially a stroller parking lot in front of a nondescript office building. Upstairs in a small but cozy suite, women and their babies are visiting Amurtel, an organization that offers vital
support to displaced pregnant women and mothers of young children. Amurtel first established its operation in Greece in 2015. Now the team completes some 4,518 mother and child visits annually, offering a wide range of services including pre- and post-natal care, breastfeeding consultations, family planning advice, and peer-to-peer counseling. Such support is helpful to any woman, but it’s particularly necessary for refugees and migrants, who have often lost their traditional support systems. To offer the best possible care to this diverse population, Amurtel provides services in Arabic, Farsi, French, Turkish, Spanish, and other languages as necessary.
To give you a sense of the kind of women who benefit from Amurtel’s support, we’ll tell you about “Aisha,” from Afghanistan. She married at 18, having never received any education on sexuality or pregnancy. When she went into labor, she had no idea how the baby would arrive or what would actually happen as she gave birth. This information, considered shameful, wasn’t shared, which left Aisha feeling very scared and vulnerable through her pregnancy and delivery. After she arrived in Greece, Aisha began attending education and support sessions at Amurtel. She developed a deeper understanding of her body and health. These days, she can speak about women’s health issues honestly and frankly. That’s important not only for Aisha herself, but also for her children. “I want to be ready to talk to my daughters about these things when the time comes,” she says, “so that they will not be as afraid and alone as I was.”
When Humanity Now travels to Greece, we always stop by Amurtel and visit with Rana Abdulsamad, the operations manager, and Georgia Stavrakis, the fundraising and communications manager. The staff is small, but the center buzzes with activity. In one room, a pregnant woman might be picking up diapers—Amurtel distributed over 44,000 diapers in 2022!—and in another room, a small circle of women might be attending an educational session about women’s rights and gender-based violence. Several clients have gone on to become peer-to-peer counselors, sharing their knowledge in their own communities. Georgia and Rana are quick to tell us that the place thrives because of what each woman—staff and recipients alike—brings to the program. Rana, a mother of two herself, tells us, “I never feel like, ‘I’m saving them from trauma.’ I’m learning from them.”
How does Humanity Now help Amurtel? We’ve used our donor funds to pay for the translation of informational literature, new computers, medication, and birth preparation courses. Humanity Now’s most recent grant is covering the cost of support-group counseling and home visits to new mothers. If you’d like to know more about Amurtel, you can visit them at https://greece.amurtel.org.
