Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt

by Rania Kassab Sweis

Each year, billions of dollars are spent on global humanitarian health initiatives. These efforts are intended to care for suffering bodies, especially those of distressed children living in poverty. But as global medical aid can often overlook the local economic and political systems that cause bodily suffering, it can also unintentionally prolong the very conditions that hurt children and undermine local aid givers. Investigating medical humanitarian encounters in Egypt, Paradoxes of Care illustrates how child aid recipients and local aid experts grapple with global aid's shortcomings and its paradoxical outcomes. Rania Kassab Sweis examines how some of the world's largest aid organizations care for vulnerable children in Egypt, focusing on medical efforts with street children and out-of-school village girls. Her in-depth ethnographic study reveals how global medical aid fails to "save" these children according to its stated aims, and often maintains―or produces new―social disparities in children's lives. Foregrounding vulnerable children's responses to medical aid, Sweis moves past the unquestioned benevolence of global health to demonstrate how children must manage their own bodies and lives in the absence of adult care. With this book, she challenges readers to engage with the question of what medical caregivers and donors alike gain from such global humanitarian transactions.

208 pages, Hardcover

Published June 29, 2021

Reviews

[Elida H · Rating 4 out of 5]

this would’ve been 5 stars, but i hated how she did too much summarizing in the beginning of each chapter and i wish there were more concrete solutions on how to “revision the model of the child in global medical aid policy”. aside from these complaints, this book was amazing! pretty easy to read for a policy student & entertaining & compelling stories. i liked the look into the children and workers lives. there could’ve been even more on the children. i wonder why it took so long to write this book after the study was done. love a participant observer study! very well done!