My mother was born in Deir El Balah refugee camp in Gaza in 1951. Gaza was a very different place then. She was an UNRWA student and beneficiary from birth until she left to Egypt to pursue her education in the late 60s. Ultimately, she became a sociologist. I remember while growing up, she would repeatedly tell me about the UNRWA preventive health services and the daily milk, vitamins, and meals that she had received during her years at UNRWA schools. At this point, they were very poor, and as a result, the nutritional support she’d received at UNRWA schools was vital to her physical and mental growth.
Flash forward to1978. I was born in Lebanon at the height of the civil war and we fled the country to Jordan where I spent my early childhood. We spent a couple of years in Kuwait and we were vacationing in Jordan for the summer when Iraq occupied Kuwait. This was a severe blow to my dad’s career. In the aftermath, my family faced severe economic hardships. Despite being a middle class family in terms of level of education and aspirations, we lived at the poverty line (and frequently slipped below it) through my teenage years.
I was enrolled in UNRWA’s Al Jofeh elementary school, in southeast Amman from the 7th through 10th grade. I can’t emphasize the importance of what UNRWA has provided me during those formative years: despite over-crowded conditions (40 students or more per teacher) and limited resources, I received an excellent education that prepared me for an uncertain future.
I have fond memories to this day of my math teacher Sameeh, English teacher Sami, and many other very dedicated staff that managed to steer the ship and deliver good results, despite all the odds. This staff, refugees themselves, was exceptional and received employment opportunities through UNRWA. Some of the experiences I had during those formative years included correspondence with a twin school in Sweden that sponsored a science day at the modest lab we had then. This dramatically helped and positively impacted me and my fellow students. This relationship became very important for my personal story down the line. I finished the 10th grade with top scores, and I was instructed by UNRWA staff to keep up the good work and come back at the end of high school (12th grade) to apply for a scholarship to help with my college expenses.
