Lebanon TrustLebanon Trust (Ireland) – Helping Children CHY 19091 |
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We have just returned from Lebanon: six volunteers from three countries spent two weeks in Lebanon, working at The Father Andeweg Institute for the Deaf, and visiting and delivering donations also to two kindergartens for refugee children and an institute for street and orphaned children.
Time went fast and the trip was very intense, but we are proud of what we achieved on behalf of our donors and supporters. Thank you all!
This month, an international group of six Lebanon Trusters will fly to Beirut for the charity’s annual trip to visit the institutions we support financially, and to do practical work. As every year, we will stay at the Father Institute for the Deaf in the outskirts of Beirut, and do maintenance work there. We will also visit their outreach program in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands Syrian refugee live.
As we have been doing for several years now, we will also visit two kindergartens for refugee children, run by our partner Association Najdeh. We plan to visit the orphanage Home of Hope as well, which we got to know & supported last year for the first time.
We all look forward to being in Lebanon! Many hearfelt thanks to all the friends who donated and help our charitable projects.
Have a look at the newsletter of the Father Andeweg Institute for the Deaf (FAID) in Beirut, which we support since 2008 (in pdf format).
FAID reaches deaf refugees in the mountains of LebanonCurrently, the Father Andeweg Institute for the Deaf (FAID) in Beirut welcomes about 20 deaf Syrian refugee children. This is as much as they can handle, because getting financial support for Syrian students is extremely difficult. Yet, the need is huge, as Lebanon has taken in about 1 million refugees from Syria.
This is the reason why FAID has created a different, innovative approach to this problem. It is called “Outreach Program” and consists of having 2 special education professionals going regularly to the Zahle region in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where most refugees are. They will provide hearing aids, speech therapy and education, most importantly working with the parents of the deaf children. A special program has been devised to teach parents how to best support their children.
The program is scheduled to start in September 2018, and it will run in collaboration with Salam, which we at Lebanon Trust visited last year.
Today Nadine and Hussein Ismail of The Learning Center for the Deaf (LCD) in Lebanon visited their support association in Switzerland, the “Freudeskreisder Gehörlosenschule LCD Libanon” (FKLCD) in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Hussein and Nadine explained what they do and the projects that they intend to develop in favour of the deaf people of Lebanon. The atmosphere was very welcoming and the whole day was very interesting and very well organised. Well done!
We at Lebanon Trust visited Nadine and Hussein last November at their school LCD in Baabda, near Beirut, and were impressed by it.
(© UNHCR/Diego Ibarra Sánchez)
The United Nations agency for refugees and its High Commissioner Filippo Grandi went to FAID, the school for deaf children that we help since 2008. The star of this wonderful video is Mohammad, aged 7 and born at the very beginning of the Syria war. Mohammad is from Syria and he is a refugee; he lost his left hand when his house was shelled in 2014. Now he and his family live in Beirut. He is deaf and atttends FAID, where he is a very good and very diligent student.
The David & Kathleen Halpin Fund of the Community Foundation of Collier County in Naples, Florida, has donated USD 1500 to Lebanon Trust for its charitable projects. We are impressed and deeply grateful for their great generosity. A big THANK YOU to all staff and members of the Foundation, and a special thought to Kathleen and Mick Halpin who made this possible.
It is wonderful to have friends like you!
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Our work in 2017 |
(tablets and smartphones: best viewed in landscape mode)
Dear friends,
2017 was a very productive year for Lebanon Trust. Thanks to your generosity, not only did we help the school for deaf children we have been supporting for ten years now, and the two refugee kindergarten we always help, but also we visited and donated to an institute for street, orphaned or abused children. We also met with a school for deaf teenagers – which prepares them for university – and a Lebanese non-governmental organisation that works with Syrian refugees and poor Lebanese.
The two weeks we spent in Lebanon in November were very intense. We stayed at the deaf children’s school that we support, the Father Andeweg Institute for the Deaf (FAID).
We donated them 8000 dollars to help financing speech therapy, which teaches deaf children how to speak and lip-read. this gives them an unique opportunity to communicate with the outside world and, in time, become independent.
We had a very generous sponsor, Tiziana Virgilio from Genoa (Italy), who financed the complete renovation of FAID’s kindergarten playground. We made a new reinforced-concrete floor, covered it with 400 rubber safety tiles, installed a new perimeter fence, fixed the existing toys, bought new ones, painted and decorated gates, walls and handrails. Also, we pruned a tree and removed a large wild overgrowth that blocked the light. We also fixed and painted the adjacent “mock shop”, utilised to teach children grocery-shopping.
The children and the teachers were absolutely delighted. At the end of all this work we had an opening ceremony with ribbon-cutting, sweets and soap bubbles. Every volunteer received a beautiful present from FAID. The new playground was dedicated to the memory of a friend, Francesco Lo Torto, with a plaque on the wall.
Besides all this, a generous Irish sponsor, GK Nets of Howth, donated a marvellous net (80 metres by 4 metres!) for the new football area used by the older kids. We brought it all the way from Ireland to Lebanon for free, thanks to British Airway’s generosity!
The plaque on the playground wall, in dedication to the memory of a friend.
We work in good spirits to remove the and clean the 400 existing rubber tiles
The old fence, part of the playground, with rusting barbed wire and plenty of overgrowth
The area of the playground in now ready for renovation
The iron rods are put in place for the reinforced concrete
The cement mixer and the crane-pump came at night, and started work right away
The making of the cement floor
The new floor is ready and smooth
A reason for celebration
As soon as the cement was solid, we started working right away making the new fence, installing the the rubber tiles for the safety floors, painting the gate and the handrails, fixing the existing toys and procuring the new ones, and all the rest
A bit of decoration: arabic and western numbers being painted here
The new playground is ready
The new playground waits for the children – it will be a big surprise!
The ribbon-cutting ceremony! Children and teachers are delighted
Our chairman Christy presents FAID’s Grace with a donation of 8000 dollars for financing the speech therapist
One of the children is Amir, a deaf Syrian refugee who has no family. During the week he stays at FAID, and spends the weekends at the Home of Hope. The Home of Home provides housing, accommodation, meals, clothes, education and care to children who have no parents or have been abandoned or abused. We went to visit it on a Friday evening: Amir was absolutely delighted to see us there, and kept trying to tell the other children that we were his friends and were there to see him. We were welcomed by Rachida and Brady, who run the institution together with other staff and volunteers. We were impressed by their dedication and their work. A few days later we realised that we still had a bit of money, so we went shopping with Brady and bought 100 pairs of shoes (“crocs”-like) and much underwear for the children, for a total of 350 dollars. We also donated some footballs from a generous sponsor in Ireland. The kids were overjoyed. They have very little.
Our volunteers and Home of Hope’s Brady with one of the kids seen here next to the shoes, underwear, footballls donated on behalf of our generous supporters
Beirut’s Armenian quarter, where we went shopping for shoes
Two residents of the Armenian quarter
In Lebanon there are literally millions of refugees, both long-term ones from the wars in 1948 and 1967 (between 500’000 and 600’00 of them), and an estimated 1.5 million more recent arrivals from the war in Syria. We went to visit the kindergartens of two refugee camps, run by our partner Association Najdeh, one in Beirut and one in Tyre, in the south of Lebanon. These two kindergartens are cheerful and spotless, despite the surrounding dire conditions. The staff are fantastic, motivated and resourceful, and make the most of the little they have. The children are delightful, and – at age 3 to 5 – learn Arabic and English. We donated 2000 dollars to each kindergaten.
One evening we went to visit The Learning Center for the Deaf (LCD), founded and run by Hussein, son of the late Father Andeweg who created FAID, and his wife Nadine. LCD runs an early-intervention centre, for deaf babies and their parents, a nursery school and the preparatory three-year schooling for university. Its services are complementary to FAID. It is very well organised and superbly run. Congratulations to the two visionary founders.
Our volunteers with Hussein and Nadine, the founders of The Learning Center for the Deaf in Baadba, Beirut
One day we went to the Beqaa valley, which borders Syria, to meet with LADC-Salam, a Lebanese non-governmental organisation. Its aim is to provide flexible, effective and non-bureaucratic assistance, which fills the gaps where refugees and local communities do not receive sufficient support, in light of the overwhelming need created by the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. They run many important project and a community centre with after-school for children and courses for adults. Many Syrian refugee children do not attend school. A bus fitted as a “mobile school” reaches children in the refugee settlements and brings them up to speed so that they can enrol in the public school system. We met the founders Joseph and Martin, and the medical coordinator Laran. They also have many young volunteers who spends weeks or months helping out the various projects – people from all over the world, driven by the same idea. Meeting them was very inspiring, and we hope that one day we can collaborate.
We would like to thank all Marina’s friends in Arquata Scrivia (Italy, who contributed generously towards our charitable projects in Lebanon. Your altruism allowed us to do much good work and donate money to very worthy causes in Lebanon, all related to disadvantaged children: deaf kids, refugees, street children and orphans. All these stories and pictures are on this blog.
Thank you Arquata!
Christy Kinsella, together with all the volunteers of Lebanon Trust and the Institutions that Lebanon Trust supports, would like to express his deepest gratitude to everyone at the St. Peregrines GAA club in Blanchardstown for their ongoing support and their superb cake-baking. Thank you friends!
We are deeply grateful to all the friends who, year after year, have been actively and tirelessly helping Lebanon Trust in succeeding in its charitable projects. In particular, we are indebted to
(in alphabetical order) Amanda Davis, David Keane, Elaine Curley, David Tryse, Jayne Delahunt, Julie Weber, Louise Hanlon, Mick Halpin, Stephanie Derwojed, Wolfram Rausch from Symantec Corporation in Dublin
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the Symantec Foundation, a corporate advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Jung Y. Yang and Stephen King of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Paul Velaski, Chief Operating Officer & Chief Financial Officer, Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Jaime Barclay, Symantec Corporation
Lebanon Trust would like to thank heartfeltly Kieran Mc Loughlin of G.K. Nets, who provided a marvellous net (80 metres by 4 metres!) for the children of FAID, the school for deaf children we have been supporting for ten years now. The net will be the cherry on the cake for the new football area in front of the classrooms that are being built now. Thank you Kieran and G.K. Nets for your continued support over the years!
During our recent stay in Lebanon, we paid a visit to The Learning Center for the Deaf, welcomed by the truly visionary founders Hussein and Nadine. Hussein is the late Father Andeweg’s son. (Father Andeweg was the founder of FAID, the school we have been supporting for 10 years now). The Learning Center for the Deaf is complementary to FAID – it runs an early-intervention programme for deaf babies and their families, and the three years of preparatory schooling for those who wish to attend university.
Splendidly-run school, Father Andeweg must be proud!
Also this year we went to the Association Najdeh‘s kindergarten in the refugee camp of Burj el-Shemali in Tyre, south Lebanon.
The kids are delightful and learn Arabic and English. The teachers and their coordinator are bright and really dedicated. They all make the most of a difficult situation. This is a fantastic place to see. On behalf of our donors and supporters, we left a donation of 2000 dollars. Thank you all!
The kids pay attention during an Arabic class
and learn geometry in Arabic and English, at age 4:
this old minubus takes them home
a view of the refugee camp, and some Lebanon Trust volunteers enjoying a meal on the street
the beautiful fishing port of the old city of Tyre
