Well, I have decided to come home. There is nothing wrong; after much thought I am convinced that it is what I want to do. There are many reasons and I would be happy to talk to any of you about them, so whenever I see you make sure to ask! I am in Beirut now (out of the reach of Syrian censors), then will be traveling a bit before coming home. It has been a while since I wrote on this site so here's what I've been up to......
Immediately when I got to Damascus I met a woman in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). They are, in effect, the state for Palestinians displaced from their homes. They operate in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. They were the organization I hoped to work for and it was exciting to get an "in" so quickly. A few days later I went to a meeting for English tutors and that same day I was scooped up for help by the French woman who is running the UNRWA Vocational Education/Employment project in Syria.
She gave me about 2000 pages of literature either primarily or secondarily related to unemployment among the country's refugees and asked me to write a report about it. It was an interesting project and I put a lot of time into it, handing it to her 2 weeks later. It's about 20 double-spaced pages, should any of you care to read it just let me know. That may not seem like much given the volume of what I went through, a lot of the material was only tangentially related. For example, there would be sections of statistics on poverty--which is strongly related, but not the focus of my paper. The goal of the project was to understand what is known about the causes and situation of unemployment for the population, what is being done to lessen its effects and what attempts are showing signs of success. What I wrote will be distributed (narrowly) in order to inform UN workers who will create a survey asking about people's experiences with UNRWA vocational education and their opinions on how to combat unemployment. What I did was so that people can get an idea of the situation without reading everything.
I met lots of people and have enjoyed many interesting conversations on this trip, I saw some fascinating places and ended up working on a project that I really believe in. Thinking about the additional experiences that I could have had made the decision to come home difficult for me. I am so lucky to have the option though, thank you all for reading and writing to me. See you guys soon!
Kit
