The two pillars of the center: Father Cortbawi and Dr. Kraft
In Hazmieh, on a green hill overlooking the city of Beirut, stands the Father Cortbawi Foundation — that great institution whose hand upon humanity is remembered with praise and appreciation.
It has stopped a wide breach in our unjust social order and softened its harshness, by making possible for hundreds of deprived children and young people a healthy, balanced life, and by securing for them, along with
basic schooling, a manual trade to help them face life.
The Crippled Children's Center
We are here to speak of a special wing, the newest thing established in the Father Cortbawi Foundation, going back no more than a year: I mean the Crippled Children's Center — for it is the only center of its kind in our Arab East, and with its founding a door of hope has been opened that had been shut in the faces of the innocent little ones on whom nature bears down hard for no sin of their own committing, denying them the well-being of a natural life like other people's, and leaving them a heap of misery, a burden on their families and on society..
The merit of the Lebanese Child Welfare Union:
In 1950 the Union delegated the Reverend Father Cortbawi to represent it at the Zurich congress, which dealt with how to help physically handicapped children so as to make them working elements in life.
Father Cortbawi returned and laid before the Union the theoretical conclusions he had gathered from the congress, and agreement was reached between him and the president, Dr. Jamal Karam Harfouche, to work together to create this center in Lebanon.
The Father Cortbawi Foundation:
The necessities of the project were classified — building, trained specialist personnel, medical treatment, services, etc. ... and the lion's share of them fell to Father Cortbawi, for without his foundation and his energy the realization of the project would not have been possible. It was he who provided the building — a special wing, completely equipped — and it is he who now
Special games for exercising the hands to recover their activity