Reader\'s Digest Australia - 06.2019

READER’S DIGEST

June• 2019 | 67

kept going back to Kfarmelki. Over
three months, they began adding more
kids to their register.
But as his work went on, Alaa came
up against new kinds of problems, he
explains as he embarks on a day of out-
reach visits. At one door, a gaunt man
invites him into the modest family
apartment over a supermarket. Abdel
Hamidi, 40, a stone-carver from Idlib,
shows off framed examples of his in-
tricate handiwork – but explains that
despite his skills, he can’t find enough
work and can barely afford food.
Abdel reveals that his younger son
Mohammad, seven, is enrolled in
a government school – but his two
eldest, H sein, 13, and Sami, 12, are not.
They’re b oth working for five dollars
a day, Hsein in the shop downstairs
and Sami for a water delivery service.
Abdel’s wife Marwa bursts into tears.
“Any parent would want to send their
child to school,” she says. But their fi-
nancial situation is stopping them. The
answer’s no , for now.
Alaa – the s on of a doctor who grew
up in the nearby city of Sidon – ad-
mits that this work can be emotional-
ly tough. He is afraid that if children
aren’t helped into school, Syria faces
“an uneducated generation. A lot of
my friends’ parents were not educated
because of the civil war,” he says, refer-
ring to Lebanon’s sectarian conflict of
1975 to 1990. That war disrupted ed-
ucation across the country, leading to
poverty, high infant death rates and
further violence.

Thanks partly to Alaa’s work, the

classrooms at the school in Zefta have

begun to fill. In the first nine months

of 2018, 460 children took classes here.

Outside is a walled courtyard where

the kids play games. But this is also

where, at the end of each six-week

cycle, the teachers hold a mock-grad-

uation ceremony. They can’t hand

out certificates, a power reserved for

government-run schools, so they have

crafted a cardboard frame with a mor-

tarboard stuck to the corner. The kids

take turns to be photographed smiling

in the centre, their grins recorded to

seal the hopeful moment.

Back in the school, in an Arabic class

Maan with his teacher Laura Hijazi