It has been many months since you have heard from me, not because we had little to report, on the contrary, we have been extremely busy, as you would expect, stepping up to address:
1. The emotional impact the genocide has had on all of our community. To this end, we added more therapists and were gifted a tailor-made guide on managing Ongoing Traumatic Stress Disorder (OTSD) written by Mercy Corps for our students.
2. Additionally, we sent our Director of Student Affairs, Iman, to Egypt to check on and support our many Gazan students already studying there. We also traveled to Egypt to meet the two classes of Gazan medical students who are recent graduates of Mansoura University and ensure their required internship year was in place along with their housing and basic needs cared for. We have also partnered with, or guided organizations who also wish to support educational opportunities —- more details to follow in our next newsletter.
3. We also dedicated our focus to those graduating this summer, as they faced unimaginable stress and fear for their families in their final months of study.
As always, we will share metrics only to ensure the dignity and privacy of our student community. For more detailed information, please feel free to contact us.
About our 15 Graduates:
- They attended high school, undergraduate programs, master’s programs, and medical school.
- They studied in Egypt, Lebanon, Germany, the UK, Canada, and the US.
- They are all Palestinian; 8 are male, and 7 are female.
- They come from Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Palestine 48, and Jordan.
- They completed degrees in political science, computer science, nursing, digital marketing, software engineering, entrepreneurship/management, international relations, physics and data sciences, and medicine.
- Eight of them are moving on to the next level of education, while the other seven are entering the workforce before returning to school or launching their professions.
- Five of them were sponsored by one of our partners, the Horizon Foundation.
- These LE.O’s were matched with existing scholarships at the institutions they studied in. Your generous and thoughtful donations covered language testing, passports, visa fees, travel, dorm-room setup, computers, book money, school supplies, nominal tuition funding gaps, health insurance, emergencies, and other essentials on a case-by-case basis.
The Sumud, resilience, and courage exhibited by the students we work with have been extraordinary to witness.
It is in the details; our successes are due to our attention to detail when caring for these students, our daily interactions with each other, and listening to their stories, their fears, the circumstances of their families in harm’s way, or their suffering in the camps.
The need to step up and ensure that the education of our youth is not interrupted is great currently and will be more so as time passes. We cannot continue to do our work let alone expand to take on more students without your generous support.