Category Archive for: Volunteers

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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Julia Imbriaco, United States Marhaba, Jusoor family! My name is Julia, and I am a new Jusoor volunteer and a Master’s Degree student at Columbia University studying education and humanitarian policy. I am happy to share some reflections from the beginning of Jusoor’s fifth annual summer program: a three-week day camp for over 400 children,…

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Lana Abi Rached, Lebanon – France I gave to Mariam, Mohamad and Aboud, 3 kids from Jusoor School in Jeb Janine, disposable cameras. I asked them to take pictures during the week end and give the cameras back to me on Monday. I was very excited to see the result. Once I developed the pictures…

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Lana Abi Rached, Lebanon – France As humans, we develop empathy towards other living beings, especially those who look and feel like us. We tend to respect life; as we know how valuable ours and our loved one’s is for us. Through centuries and eras, humans naturally developed communities in order to protect themselves, exchange…

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Lana Abi Rached, Lebanon – France One of the biggest challenges of this volunteering, being Lebanese, was facing my family and my family’s friends. Facing the constant criticism, “why don’t you help Lebanese, they need help as well”, “if you help them they will stay here and steal our land”, “why do you even bother…

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Lana Abi Rached, Lebanon – France Going every day to Bekaa from Beirut is tiring. You wake up at 6, wait for the bus, take this bus all the way to Bekaa for 2 hours, teach in Arabic for 4 hours and then go back all the way to Beirut. Sounds horrible doesn’t it? But…

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