...and inspire them to aim for a better life
Child refugee who made it her mission to save girls from arranged marriages
SHE may only be 25, but Muzoon Almellehan has overcome more obstacles in her life than many women face in a lifetime.
However, what makes Muzoon so impressive isn’t simply that she has embraced every challenge with determination, but that she seeks to inspire others on a daily basis.
From the moment she arrived in a refugee camp aged 14, Muzoon has battled long and hard for the rights of children — particularly girls — to have an education.
Her battle has been so successful that, aged just 19, Unicef made her its Goodwill Ambassador in recognition of her struggles. Her fellow ambassadors include actors Orlando Bloom and Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
Muzoon’s aim is to see every child given the chance of an education. It may be something we take for granted. But this university graduate knows only too well that, in many parts of the world, things are very different.
‘Education isn’t a privilege, it’s a right,’ says Muzoon, who lives in Newcastle with her teacher father and younger siblings. ‘Every child deserves to be kept safe and deserves to have an education. I will never stop speaking out for all those children round the world who don’t have a voice.’
Muzoon was just 11 when war broke out in Syria in March 2011 and her happy life disappeared in a heartbeat.
‘Until then life was completely normal,’ she says. ‘Dad was a teacher. Mum kept house. I was like every other kid, going to school and hanging out with my friends. I wanted to be a journalist.
‘I had nothing to worry about. I didn’t know how lucky I was.
‘But when the war started, our lives were turned upside down. Suddenly, it wasn’t safe to leave the house to go to school because you could get killed. Even going to the shops was dangerous. And there were weeks when there was hardly any food. Basics like bread simply disappeared. Everything I’d taken for granted was gone. The bombing was so bad you knew you could die at any moment.’
The family endured these daily terrors for three years before fleeing. Although her parents were convinced it was their only hope for survival, abandoning their home was deeply distressing. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my lovely home and my school,’ says Muzoon. ‘Life was horrible, but it was all I knew. This was going into the unknown.’
Following her father’s instructions to only pack essentials and determined to hold fast to her dream of an education, Muzoon, then 14, loaded her backpack with her school books. There were more than ten of them, making the bag almost impossible to carry.
The family drove to the Jordanian border, joining 5.3million other refugees. Ten miles over the border, they found themselves in Zaatari, one of the world’s largest refugee camps. Their new home was a tent with no electricity or internet. Water came from a central tank.
‘We’d been used to space and privacy. Now we all had to sleep together and share a kitchen with others,’ says Muzoon. ‘We were in the middle of the desert. It was boiling hot in the summer and perishing cold in the winter. But my father kept reminding us of how lucky we were to be alive.’
Within a month, the first school, supported by Unicef, opened in the camp. Muzoon was ecstatic. The camp school, however, was nine static caravans, each housing a different class, it was chaotic. ‘Refugees were coming and going all the time,’ says Muzoon. ‘There would be 30 students in my class one day, only 20 the next.’
But Muzoon buckled down, determined to keep alive her dream of going to university.
‘Having a goal really helped me cope. Instead of concentrating on the present, I dreamt of the future when I could return to Syria.’
She was also eager to encourage other children in the camp to do the same. ‘When I went to my first class, I saw so many of the children I’d seen in the tents weren’t there. I quickly learned that some girls, even those as young as 13, were being married to men in the camp instead of coming to school.
THEY were chatting about it as though it was normal. Their families thought marriage would protect them. I also discovered there was this general attitude around the camp: “We’ve lost our homes and are refugees. It’s not our right to be educated.”
‘Why would you let war take everything? Nothing should take away your knowledge. And as refugees, we needed education more than ever to face the challenges and suffering in our lives.
‘There was a friend of mine at the school, a very good student. One day she stopped coming. It was only when I asked other girls that I discovered she had got married. She was 14, like me. I felt so sad.’
Undeterred, Muzoon carried on her campaign when, 18 months later, the family were moved to Azraq, a camp consisting of rows of tin shacks.
Every day, she toured the camp, talking to parents about sending their children to school, encouraging the girls to attend. ‘I told them there is no better protection than education,’ she says. ‘I explained that one day we would need a generation of engineers, doctors and teachers to rebuild Syria.
‘There was one girl who was going to be married to a man old enough to be her father. It wasn’t what she wanted. When I told her she had a choice, she was able to convince her parents to let her stay at school and not get married.’
But, most of all, Muzoon dreamt of escaping the camp. The chance came in 2015, when the then prime minister David Cameron offered to resettle up to 20,000 Syrian refugees. Ten weeks later, her family was on a plane to Newcastle with eight other families.
Given refugee status with fiveyear visas, everything had been arranged so the family could settle in easily and, within a week of their arrival, Muzoon and her siblings were heading off to school.
The culture shock was enormous. However, thanks to her own resilience and the support of staff at her school, she thrived.
In 2018, she took up her place at Newcastle University. Now, with a Masters degree in International Relations, Muzoon works full-time for her local council helping asylum seekers and migrants, as well as travelling the world in her Unicef role, campaigning for the rights of children. She visits refugee camps where she hopes to instil the same passion for education in others.
‘I tell them that life will get better,’ she says. ‘I was in their place; I know how they are feeling, but I tell them that there is life ahead.
‘I hope that one day I will hear how they have become engineers, doctors, lawyers and teachers and have returned to their homes to build a new life.’
Muzoon recently returned to the camp she left as a teenager. Being reunited with her old teachers and discovering how they use her story to inspire students was testament to just how far she has come.
‘I’d like a career in politics or the media,’ she says. ‘I hope I’m living proof that one small person can make a difference. When I started, I just had my voice, but I was determined to be heard. From talking to my friends and classmates, a movement gradually grew that can’t be silenced.’