Dear readers, I am going to tell you something about one of the most courageous children of our epoch. He has grown to be a handsome teenager now and his name is Mohamed Al Jounde.
However, when he was just 12, he had to leave his city of Hama, in Syria, in 2013, after the Assad regime abducted his mother twice for her activism.
Along with his family, he had to live among tens of thousands of other children in refugee camps near Beirut, Lebanon. “I had to say goodbye to everything. Everything disappeared; everything I knew for the past 12 years disappeared. I had to flee because the situation got worse every day”, reminisces Mohamed, while talking to Metro.co.uk.
Mohamed’s father had been a visual artist and his mother a math teacher in Syria, but after fleeing to Lebanon, they couldn’t afford to send Mohamed and his sister to school.
The Guardian newspaper quoting Mohamed, wrote that he didn’t go to school for two years. This filled him with emptiness. Mohamed’s parents are both politically aware and they taught Mohamed how important education was for the future of Syria.
However, the abrupt change, from having everything at home to nothing in a refugee camp, in his life had sent him into trauma.
This broke his heart when he found thousands of children like him who wanted to go to school but couldn’t. War, like ill-magic, had wiped everything from them; their homes, their neighborhood parks, their playgrounds, their toys and above all their schools. Mohamed saw this all with his bare eyes and couldn’t tolerate the suffering of his counterparts. “The kids really wanted an education…” Mohamed told the Guardian.
Meanwhile, his father took him to see a photographer called Ramzi Haider. When Mohamed held a camera in his hands, he felt inner strength and at that instant he fell in love with photography. “It ended the emptiness in my life-it helped me express myself and show people how I live,” stated Mohamed in the Guardian.
While Mohamed learned mathematics from his mother at home, he started learning photography from Ramzi Haider. He proved to be a quick learner in spite of his depressed condition. Meanwhile he began working with volunteers and NGOs on small projects in the refugee camps.
However, Mohamed still felt bored. He wanted an exclusive space where he could learn and express himself with other children of his age. He recalls, “I had nothing to do because I didn’t have friends”.
Mohamed decided to change the situation that he and his counterparts had found themselves in. He was already teaching math and photography to some other students, but that didn’t seem enough. So, in 2014, together with his family, relatives and volunteers, he decided to build what is now Gharash School in the Bekaa Valley refugee camp.
“As of October 2017,
UNICEF reports, there
are 1.7 million children out
of school in Syria.”
Currently, the school provides education to 200 refugee children aged between six and twelve. Mohamed assists children in learning, healing and also in having fun with games and photography.
Mohamed’s message to other students living like him is, “The future is unclear and uncontrollable, so I stopped worrying about that. I want to focus on what I can do now.”
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