St. Andrews Orientation

This whole week we’ll be getting oriented with St. Andrews and today was the first day. This year, the organization is doing something it has never done before. Unlike the past two years, when the refugees traveled to the main center in Cairo, this time we’ll actually be splitting up and going out into the communities. This will probably be more difficult and involve more planning on both our part and the organization’s, but it’s incredibly exciting. It will be a much more comfortable environment for the kids, it will be more easily accessible, and we’ve moved the classes to the evening so children who have jobs can still attend.

During the very casual orientation, Fiona, the person from St. Andrews that is leading this project, and some of the facilitators that will be helping us, got to talking about how we should focus on the reality of the situation. Many of these kids have this dream in their minds that we, coming from America, have the power to take them home with us or get them to America somehow. I know it’s not nearly the same thing, but I thought of when I was younger and reading the Harry Potter books and wished to no end that I would get a letter from Hogwarts on my tenth birthday. Again, it doesn’t compare to situation of these kids, but there’s still the strained yearning that kind of fills your entire body, that hope that your whole life will change somehow, and that slow, heavy feeling in your stomach when your tenth birthday passes by, and then your 11^th, and then you’re 16 and it’s just a silly memory of some stupid dream. America might as well be Hogwarts to them, not just in how foreign it is, but for most of them, quite frankly, in the likelihood that they’ll ever go there. Being here, now, in the moment, it just makes me so upset. Not exactly in an emotional sense, but more like unsettled and antsy. I want to do something, physically, with my hands, as if I could feed them education and a better quality of life with a spoon.

Fiona told us how we’re going to have to think of some creative ways to teach and get to these students. Especially because the focus of our work with them is not teaching English or Arabic, which will apparently only be a small part of what we’re doing. We will be concentrating on important skills, like teaching them how to apply for housing, the process for appealing a decision on refugee status, and even basic things- many of the children are separated and don’t have parents to tell them the simplest things, like what kinds of food are cheap and nutritious, that they are allowed to go to the hospital when one of them breaks a finger, that they should brush their teeth. It could be anything. What I was getting at, though, was that this stuff has to be taught to children in a way that they can understand, and I really don’t have a creative bone in my body.

Now that I think about it, it’s really difficult to feel qualified to do something like this. These kids need everything in the world, and I don’t think there’s a politician, economic planner, or social worker out there that can solve all their problems. Who am I to try? And I know I’m not here to solve all their problems, but they just have so many that even trying fix a few begins to look like quite a daunting task.