“English for Syria” team carries its message to 8 thousand students

 “Teaching is a humanitarian message more than a profession,” a phrase agreed upon by the “English for Syria” educational team and interpreted through a voluntary initiative to teach English during holidays in the region of  Damascus countryside, for schools that suffer from a shortage of subject teachers.

The specialist guide for the English language course in the Education Directorate of the countryside of Damascus, Bashar Abu Rafea, the supervisor of the initiative, noted that his idea arose from the need to fill the educational loss of students, which was imposed by the conditions of the terrorist war on Syria in a number of areas. The work began  in 2018, where contact was made with the teachers of the subject to volunteer in the team. The work began with five teachers and then expanded to ten. They started from the western Ghouta regions and then headed to Eastern Ghouta, and the priority of teaching is for students of primary and secondary education certificates.

After the initiative entered its fourth year, Abu Rafea said that it included a number of schools in more than 30 educational areas in the countryside of Damascus, and so far about 8000 students have benefited from it. He pointed out that the difficulty of securing transportation in the recent period constituted an obstacle to the team and was overcome with the support of the Directorate Education in the countryside of Damascus, which also provided educational techniques to promote the initiative.

Abu Rafea said, “What we are doing is a national duty, and every person is able from his position to play his role in rebuilding what terrorism has destroyed at all levels, especially with the difficult conditions that Syria is going through as a result of the terrorist war and the unjust economic siege on it.”

The two students, Osama Al-Safouk and Imad Haimour, expressed their thanks and gratitude to the initiative team, which compensated the students for the lessons they were deprived of during the presence of terrorism in their areas. The two students, Ruqayyah Qudeih and Ghina Salik, pointed out the need to expand the initiative to include other study subjects to enable the students more and compensate what they missed.

Inas Abdulkareem