Basmat Amal concludes the «Flower of Life» initiative

The Basma Amal Foundation for the Care of Cancer Patients in Palestine, through its two branches (Gaza and Jerusalem), concluded the initiative “Flower of Life” under the slogan “Get checked to bloom”, targeting marginalised women in the border areas — within the project “Strengthening cooperation among civil-society institutions for strengthening the future Palestinian state”, in partnership with Pal-Think for Strategic Studies. The initiative ran for a month and a half.

The initiative offered awareness workshops on breast cancer and shed light on the importance of early detection of the disease — easing the heavy burdens on the patient and her family from the exorbitant treatment costs and the obstacles of travel to receive chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The awareness workshops took up important matters, among them: introducing the disease, its causes, its symptoms, the ways of preventing it, how to conduct periodic examination, and the risk factors leading to the disease — in addition to food's role in prevention and treatment — using qualitative methods and non-traditional approaches including brainstorming and the approach of participation, discussion, and dialogue.

Skype was likewise used to allow contact among the women of the homeland's two halves to exchange experience and lessons — reflected in raising their health awareness and learning more of the challenges and obstacles facing women on both sides. This is what Pal-Think sought within its project: contact among all groups in the homeland's two halves, and dialogue on their unified issues with a unified Palestinian voice.

In the Gaza Strip the initiative set out from the northern governorate and then to all of Gaza's governorates, concluding in the south — simultaneously with its spread in the city of Jerusalem in cooperation with the partner civil-society institutions and health centres: a total of 36 awareness workshops for 580 women from Gaza and Jerusalem, with 3,000 awareness leaflets distributed to them explaining the mechanism of self-examination and the means of contacting the health educators. 45 women were registered for a free mammogram examination with the Palestinian ministry of health to check on their health, with the necessary preventive measures taken.

From these awareness workshops the initiative's team drew out the principal obstacles hampering early breast-cancer screening among Palestine's women — social, economic, and health-related — along with correcting the timings of self-examination and correcting mistaken practices the women follow.

These meetings with the women of the homeland's two halves produced a research paper titled “The obstacles to early breast-cancer detection for the women of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank”, to be published in cooperation with Pal-Think for Strategic Studies.

The management of the Basma Amal Foundation affirmed the foundation's continuation in spreading awareness everywhere until it achieves its goal — that we lose no woman needlessly, for early detection of breast cancer saves life at a rate of 90%.