Lakeside finishes off year with Syria unit
Classes at Lakeside focused on the Syrian Civil War in the final week of the school year and learned from two alumni about their work advocating for the Syrian people.
Lakeside graduates Mouaz Moustafa and Natalie Larrison visited the school last week to provide information about the ongoing conflict and discuss their roles with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which Moustafa helped to found in 2012. He is now the executive director.
Larrison joined the SETF in early 2016 as director of outreach. They are both graduates of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
Fifth-grade students from Lakeside Middle School filled the high school auditorium on May 25 to hear from the alumni. The school district alerted families to the opportunity.
“To have Lakeside alumni come back and share what they are doing and accomplishing is such a great opportunity for our students to see how they too can make a difference in the world,” said Lakeside Assistant Superintendent Bruce Orr. “It won’t only benefit our students. We also invited parents to participate in some of the various sessions.”
All of the fifth-grade teachers at the middle school taught lessons about Syria for the week prior to their visit and led various activities for students to learn about the conflict. The school’s fifthgrade teachers are Cori Archer, Tammy Brown, Cory Cox, Crystal Davis, Julie Hardin, Whitney Henry, Jennifer Horton, Lauren Kelly, Tina Lester, Misty
McAlister, Mary Kay Olenak and Derek Wells.
Larrison and Moustafa commended their knowledge of the conflict and their diligence during the unit. Orr said many students attended school to learn more about Syria despite exemptions they earned throughout the semester. Moustafa said the students know more about the Syrian Civil War than most people in the world.
More than 14 million civilians have been displaced and at least 500,000 Syrians are estimated to have died so far in the conflict. Syria had a population of more than 22 million before the war began in 2011.
Moustafa said attending Lakeside was crucial to his understanding of the Holocaust and the lessons the world should have learned about how to respond to a large scale humanitarian crisis. The Syrian Civil War began with peaceful protests.
“It is the best way to persevere and reach (your goals),” Moustafa said. “Whether you think about the Civil Rights Movement with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or others in history, that is how you approach it, not through violence.”
Moustafa explained how violent reactions from government forces escalated the protests into an armed revolution. The country is now divided into areas controlled by the forces of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as ISIS; President Bashar al-Assad and his allies, which include the Russian Air Force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Shi’a Islamist militant group Hezbollah and numerous foreign and domestic militias; and their opposition.
A working group in Conway pledged support in 2016 for at least five years for a school and orphanage in the Idlib Governorate province in northwest Syria, which is still controlled by the Free Syrian Army. The SETF began its management of The Wisdom House Project for kindergarten-aged children in Idlib in September.
“Where it is located in Syria, there are many planes and it is very vulnerable to air attacks,” Larrison said. “It’s almost like a hidden school and many of the students who go to the school are orphans.”
The village’s clinic treated victims from a chemical weapon attack in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4. At least 86 civilians, including dozens of children, were killed. The main hospital for the Maarat al-Numaan District was bombed several days earlier, forcing victims to seek care elsewhere.
The school moved underground in December. The village where the school is located celebrated graduation on May 24 and the SETF recently shared a message of gratitude from one of the teachers.
“It was a long year,” the teacher said. “We shared many emotions, memories, experiences together. We would like to say thank you to everyone who participated in making this project real, from our donors in the U.S. to the local community here, including the parents, the local council and the rest of my colleagues in the Wisdom House administration, who all have their fingerprints in the project. Long live free Syria.”
The SETF pays the salaries of five faculty members on staff and will inject more funds into the local economy by working with local seamstresses to provide the students with school uniforms, which are common in Syria. Another Lakeside alum, who wished to remain anonymous, provided a donation to pay for the uniforms.
Details, photos and videos from the graduation ceremony can be found on the school’s website at http://www.thewisdomhouseproject.com/. The SETF also posts updates online at http://www.syriantaskforce.org/, where visitors can sign up for email newsletters. Multiple social media accounts are available for the SETF, The Wisdom House and Letters of Hope, a new initiative launched by Larrison.
Larrison was at Lakeside Middle School on May 24 to observe activities and help students write Letters of Hope, which are delivered to children at The Wisdom House. She and Moustafa were recently in Turkey and provided about 1,000 letters to a member of the council for the school’s village. The council member transported the letters to the school and many were read aloud during the graduation ceremony.
“It was like you brought them whatever it is they wanted the most,” Moustafa said. “More than anything, it made them feel like they were cared about and that the world was not OK with them going through this.
“These letters are so, so, so important, because they are going to brighten up someone’s day over there. It is going to allow them to know someone cares. Hopefully, we can get letters back to give to you from someone else there responding to what you sent them, which is a beautiful thing of connecting people together.”
The SETF recently celebrated the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which “seeks to impose sanctions on supporters of Syria’s Assad regime, encourage negotiations to end ongoing atrocities and support prosecution of war criminals.” The bill is named for the pseudonym of a former photographer and officer of the Syrian Military Police. He documented atrocities committed by Assad’s regime in almost 55,000 photographs before the SETF helped him defect and flee the country with the photographs.
Selections from Caesar’s collection have been displayed by the United Nations in New York, the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress, several museums in Europe and in a prominent exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The bill has passed to the Senate for consideration.