Summer Time - Learning Time
Intensive catch-up classes for the 3rd year in a row
Picture taken in our camp school in Sahl Arka (Akkar, Lebanon)
The Holy Month of Ramadan is over and the summer is here. In the heat of Northern Lebanon, our team of international and local summer volunteers has launched the third edition of our intensive catch-up classes for Syrian refugee children and Lebanese host communities during school vacations. During two months, our volunteers will be delivering daily intensive classes to more than 200 students in the surroundings of our first Peace Centre in the Akkar region (Lebanon):
This year will also be the start of the official Accelerated Learning Programme of Lebanese public schools, funded by UNICEF. The goal is to finally enroll Syrian refugee students into public Lebanese schools. The international community has granted more than $600 million for this purpose to the Lebanese government- but the results after one year of implementation are very meager. Only 20,000 of the estimated 500,000 Syrian school-aged children without education have been enrolled over the past school year. Now things shall get better.
R&R Syria is supporting the enrollment of Syrian students into public schools. We made sure that more than 90 students of our informal camp schools have been registered for the Accelerated Learning Programme and we will double our efforts during this summer to find a place for them in the upcoming school year. We organised transportation to the public schools and invite all kids attending the summer lessons there to participate once a week in some water fun in a nearby river restaurant. We hope this will increase the motivation to keep on learning!
In the meantime, our own summer lessons are taking place in four different locations: the R&R Peace Centre in Bkarzla, the Al-Ihsan camp school in Aarka, the smaller camp school in Tell Abbass El-Gharbi and the public school in Hissa. We have been working with each of these locations for years, but there are still new students coming in from the surrounding refugee camps. Summer is a perfect opportunity to bring them to the level of their classmates who have already been enrolled in public school or our informal camp schools over the last two years.
The intensive classes include English and French, alongside classes in Arabic, Math, Drawing, Theater, Journalism, and other creative lessons. Without our international and local volunteers, we would not be able to carry them out. And without the help of our many private donors, there would be no volunteers. Please continue supporting our work by making a small donation to one of our accounts! Many thanks, also in the name of those we serve!