News

Jana Sayegh, Lebanon This week I decided that my class would need to learn through their independent, step-by-step work. Usually I’d plan for an activity that requires a teacher’s guidance throughout, but on Monday they only needed me to supply a fixed set of rules and the rest was on them to make of in…

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George Abdallah, Lebanese-American For the past few days, I’ve been noticing one student in particular. At the start of each day, her head is tucked down low. She sits at the same desk, in the far back of the classroom, to avoid having to make eye contact with me or her fellow students. No matter…

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Gianluca Generoso , Italian Another intense day at Jaraahiye is over. As a sports volunteer my task is to help children play during their outdoor break hour. Even if it may seem trivial, it is not an easy task to canalize students’ energy in meaningful and collaborative games, but it is indeed very fun for…

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Esther Ng , Chinese As I ate my man’oushe for the lunch break, a teacher sat opposite me asked, ‘Are any of the volunteers this year from Germany?’ Intrigued by her question and unsure of what to say, I answered, ‘No. I don’t think so. But I think one of the volunteers is half-German’. ‘Oh,’…

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Claire Ziller, American Every day spent at Jeb Jannine is a day spent laughing, exchanging languages and expressing love in every way humanly possible. As a teacher that can’t speak Arabic fluently, I’ve been learning the most genuine forms of human interaction from these kids. My class is around nine years old and they are…

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Caitlyn Cournale, American First day of summer camp! This is always a crazy day, so many new faces and feelings, the air was bustling with excitement and curiosity. I am working with six year olds and I could see it in their eyes from the moment they came in how happy they are to be…

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Bassil El-Zaatari, Lebanese-American As we drove up the usual curvy, hilly roads towards Jib Jannin, I knew today would be different. For today would be the day we sat down with our teachers and talked to them about lesson planning. We started off with Val giving us a demonstration of a sound activity we could…

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Avo Markarian, Syrian-Armenian Thursday the 19th was a special one. For the first half of the day, Conor McGuire, an intern at Jusoor, had some of the volunteers prepare different activities in three languages. Hovsep, my brother/program coordinator, and I kicked it off with an activity in Armenian making no gestures whatsoever, which made sense…

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Anushe Sheikh, United States-Pakistan Today was monumental for me. Alexandra Chen, a remarkable woman and a child psychotherapist, specialized in victims of sexual assault and trauma, gave us profound advice that I wish I had received a long time ago. The very first wisdom she passed onto us was to leave our expectations at the…

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Adian Murphy, The United Kingdom During our second day of volunteering with Jusoor, we go straight into learning and exploring some classroom activities with Ziad Kanaan from Right to Play. This organisation focuses on gender inequality, building peaceful communities and life skills. Ziad stresses how significant it is for games to be used as exploratory…

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