Our Superhero Mohamad upholds education despite hard circumstances

As soon as one meets Mohamad, they cannot avoid noticing his funky and cool haircut and the lines drawn by his barber’s shaver on the sides of his head and on his eyebrow. A couple of years ago, before his arrival to Lebanon, Mohamad was a different boy. In Aleppo where he lived before finding refuge in Beirut, 13 year-old Mohamad was the smartest student in his class.

“Our school was of the old Syrian houses’ style. It was like a big house with lots of students and classes. I remember my school mates and miss them a lot”, he speaks fluently, drawing a sad smile on his shy face every now and then. “I was supposed to be in the 6th grade, if we hadn’t been forced to leave home”.

Shortly after his school was bombed and his whole neighborhood was under shelling, Mohamad and his family fled the war and sought refuge in Lebanon. Four months in Save the Children non formal education programme in Beirut area were beneficial for Mohamad to remember what he had learnt, before and cope in a new education system despite the language barriers.

“I learned English here at the center, while I hadn’t learnt any foreign language back home”, says Mohamad speaking about his experience with the education programme in the center where we met. “A person’s future would be brighter with education. None has a good future without it”.

Mohamad took part in a non-formal education programme that ended in September 2014 and was funded by the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PBRM). Currently, Save the Children is implementing another one targeting 700 out-of-school children in the same area.

However, when his father couldn’t find a job to provide for the family, Mohamad’s parents asked for his support in generating income.

“I had to leave school to work in a sewing factory. A couple of months later, a friend of mine called to inform me that a phone shop was going to open and was looking to recruit young men, so I joined”, he says. “Today I know how to disassemble phones, fix them, and reassemble them again”, he adds with great pride as he whispers some of the job’s secrets to us.

Despite preferring the job in the phone shop over sewing, Mohamad terribly misses school and education. He often goes back to his books and reads his old notes.

“He still remembers all the education that he got, he knows everything by heart”, says Mohamad’s mother, as she bitterly tells us how tired he gets at home at the end of his 12-hour working days. “He also makes sure to give his two younger sisters pocket money, and encourages us to send his 3 year-old sister Ghina to school next year”.

Mohamad, similar to thousands of Syrian refugee children, is a hero who insists on struggling away from home, which suffers from a protracted and draining war.