FOREIGNER, IN LOVE WITH ROMANIA / Raed Arafat: Romania is where I feel at home

He has designed and introduced to Romania an innovative emergency intervention system, which today is given as an example in other countries and is also used by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a case study. He did all this starting with a used car equipped with sirens and now he prepares interventions of paramedics who descend by cables to hardly reachable places from a helicopter. While Syria is his home country, Romania has become to him his foster country that he knowingly chose, with both its good and ugly sides and which he loves for the simple reason that it is worthy of his love.

We are talking about Raed Arafat, who was born on May 24, 1964 in Damascus, Syria's capital city and raised in the town of Nablus, in northern West Bank. It was there that he and his classmates set up a first aid team, a first sign of his future passion for emergency medicine. In 1981, aged only 16, he came to Romania to study Medicine. After a preparation year in Pitesti, he attended classes at the Faculty of Medicine of Cluj-Napoca.

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