Al Salam’s journey from idea to reality
Al Salam school’s beginnings trace back to Dr. Anas Al-Kassem, an obesity surgeon from Oakville who began visiting Reyhanli on medical missions in early 2012.
While there, he noticed Syrian children in the street. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, what are they going to do in Turkey?’ ” he says.
Al-Kassem’s mother-in-law ran École Al Salam, a Saturday Arabic school in Montreal. When she asked him how she could help, he told her “Why don’t you start a school for refugee kids in Reyhanli?”
The idea hit home and fundraising efforts in Montreal began. That summer Al-Kassem was joined by his brother-in-law, Bassem Saimeh, who had been tasked with starting the school.
At the time, Saimeh was a master’s student at McGill University, studying accounting. He had no expertise in school-creation, nor had he previously set foot in Turkey. His strategy was simple and effective: he put out the word about his plans to Reyhanli’s then-small Syrian community and asked qualified people to meet him at a café at 6 p.m. Six people showed up that first evening, he says. On the second evening, 22 people arrived. By the fourth night, he had 60 prospective staff.
“I was in a state of disbelief that I found all the different skill sets,” says Saimeh, who now lives in Oakville. He rented a farmhouse surrounded by olive trees, and Al Salam — named after the Montreal school — was set to open. Saimeh was back in classes, so his mother asked her friend Hazar Mahayni to oversee the school opening.
Mahayni arrived expecting 300 students on opening day. Instead, some 900 showed up “and they were registering more,” she says.
She soon discovered bigger problems. The man who’d rented them the farmhouse was not the owner, and he was profiting from the school in other ways too — overcharging for buses, and opening a store inside its gates. She confronted him after talking to a lawyer, she says.
“He threatened to kidnap me and take me back to Syria,” says Mahayni. “I wasn’t scared. I don’t know why. I said, ‘I’m Canadian. I have my embassy. They will protect me.’ ”
By the next fall, Al Salam had expanded to Grade 9 — running three shifts out of the same, uninsulated farmhouse. It was so cold, students worked at their desks wearing winter coats and hats.
“Our entire team came back very, very sick from that trip,” says Lina Sergie Attar, co-founder of the Karam Foundation, which ran a creative therapy program at the school in December 2013. As a result, her Chicagobased foundation donated $13,000 for a heating system.
Another visitor to the school that winter was Faisal Alazem, a young Montreal engineer who was the spokesperson for the Syrian Canadian Council. For two years, Alazem had been publicly decrying the mounting deaths in his native Syria with little to show for it from the Canadian government. To him, the school seemed a positive and tangible solution. He formed the Syrian Kids Foundation to oversee fundraising, awareness campaigns and communications for the school, so Mahayni could focus on the important part — the staff and students.
“It just stole my heart,” says Alazem, 32. “I came home, and channelled all my energy to support this project.”
His efforts quickly paid off, and by the summer of 2014, the school expanded again with a new computer lab, and a whole second floor for 800 high school students.
Last summer, the first 80 of those students graduated from Al Salam. One of them, Dunia Almelhm, scored 97.4 per cent on the Turkish equivalency exam — the highest mark in the province.
“It’s very impressive when you consider the obstacles these students have faced,” says Alazem.
Take Almehlm, an 18-year-old from the village of Baba-Amr, near Homs. In a letter, she describes spending the war’s early days reading Homer’s Odyssey in her father’s vast library. The library was ransacked by government forces, and her father arrested for participating in protests, she says.
Her father has since died, and her mother escaped to Qatar with two of her siblings. When Almelhm crossed the border into Turkey at 15, she was in charge of her two younger brothers. This fall, she was one of five Al Salam students offered full scholarships to Turkish universities.
In October, Concordia University announced it would waive tuition for two Al Salam graduates for “at least a year.” Almelhm will likely be one of them. What is the future of Al Salam school? Mahayni has many dreams: a daily snack for hungry students, a commerce program so students graduate with job prospects, and another expansion to accept students who have been on the school’s waiting list for years. That list, she says, now has 4,000 names on it.