We wish you a Merry Christmas! This year’s Christmas message takes us to Syria, where after years of war and displacement people are returning, children can finally go back to school, and collective reconstruction is creating a future.
Dear supporters,
amid all the immeasurable suffering in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, and in many other places around the world, there is nevertheless something this year that can give hope: Syria.
After 14 years of civil war and more than five decades of brutal oppression, the Syrian people have overthrown the Assad regime. Millions of displaced people have been able to return to their homes, to embrace family members they had not seen for ages – including our friends whom we have accompanied since 2017 in the refugee camps of Aarsal in Lebanon. For more than ten years, they lived there under plastic tarpaulins, despised by the Lebanese state and large parts of Lebanese society. Over the years, some of them themselves became Grünhelme members, building roofs and classrooms with us, installing fire-safe electrical systems in tents, and setting up a carpentry training workshop and a skate park. And this year, finally, what only the hopeless optimists mocked as dreamers had still counted on: back home.
But what does this home offer? At first glance, mainly collapsed and shot-up buildings, enormous piles of rubble, and felled olive trees. But it is much more than that: a feeling of freedom and self-determination! The image of destruction does not deter Syrians; rather, it is also a symbol of a new beginning for them. They are building a new life for themselves on the ruins of the old regime. And this is exactly where we provide support: just a few months after the liberation of the country, we restored the school in Buwaydah, the hometown of our Grünhelme team in Lebanon.
The small town, located in the far west of the country between Homs and Al-Qusseir, had been almost completely destroyed. One of the few buildings still standing was the middle school, but it was riddled with bullet holes and gutted from the inside: windows, doors, electrical systems, and sanitary facilities torn out; paint and plaster crumbling from the walls; all furnishings removed.
Work on the school went hand in hand. Not only did our Grünhelme staff pitch in and achieve a great transformation within just a few months. The entire town also helped, carrying newly welded desks into freshly painted classrooms or hauling construction debris out of the schoolyard. Since the summer, children have finally been able to attend regular school classes again! Most of the approximately 400 pupils were born and raised in Lebanon, Turkey, or northwestern Syria. There, they often attended informal schools or could only participate in classes irregularly. They knew Buwaydah only from stories and from their parents’ longings. Returning to Syria therefore initially means change for the children and young people: saying goodbye to familiar surroundings, however precarious they may have been, and to many friends who have returned to other parts of Syria. The school now offers them stability, new friendships, and a future perspective that they did not have in the places they fled to.
But the school is even more than that: the rapid reconstruction gives people the feeling that things are moving forward and that they are not being left alone with the enormous task of rebuilding. Syria’s future depends on reconstruction and on justice. If the country is not rebuilt comprehensively and if all population groups are not integrated into this still young construct of a new statehood, it will provide fertile ground for radicalization and violence. That is why we are building, together with Syrians, toward a just world and a just Syria.
Many thanks to you, dear donors, for supporting us in this work.
Merry Christmas!
Simon Bethlehem (Chairman) and Max Werlein (Deputy Chairman)
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Syrian school shines in new splendor
After three months of construction, the war damage to the middle school in Buwaydah has been repaired. More than 300 children can now go back to school here. We are already working on the next renovation project.