How the Alsama Project grew from a small Lebanese flat to educate hundreds of teen refugees

Five years ago Maram was an illiterate 13-year-old Syrian refugee girl living in the Shatila camp in Beirut, Lebanon. She had never been to school and her father planned to marry her off within a year. Today, Maram is still living in Shatila. But she isn’t married. In fact, she is busy applying to universities in the UK, US and UAE for an undergraduate degree in international relations in 2026. 

I met Maram in January 2020. Her black hijab was drawn deep into her face. She couldn’t lift her gaze and look me in the eye. When I asked her what her dream was, she shrugged her shoulders. “To get married and have children,” she whispered, barely audible. 

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Maram was among a group of 40 young teenage girls sitting on mats in a damp, dim room on a rainy day in Shatila. They had come here because they knew Kadria, a Syrian woman also living in the camp. I had met Kadria a couple of months before while I was volunteering for a local NGO in Beirut. Kadria had told me about these girls and that she wanted to do something for them in order to dissuade them from getting married at the age of 13 or 14. So we rented a small apartment as a youth centre where we would teach the girls a few hours a week reading and writing.

We called the centre Alsama Project, which means sky in Arabic. It was supposed to be a short-term project. Kadria was waiting to receive refugee status in a western country and I wanted to go back to the UK to pick up my career as a publisher and novelist.

My husband and I had taken a sabbatical from our respective jobs in the autumn of 2018, after our youngest child had graduated from school, to spend a year volunteering for an NGO in Lebanon. By late 2019, after a year in Beirut, my husband had already returned to his career, and I was about to pack my bags to leave Lebanon too. 

Then something happened that neither Kadria nor I could have foreseen. The girls lifted their gaze, locked eyes with Kadria and me and demanded an education. Maram told us, “We want to go to school, we want to go to university, we want to be ready to help rebuild Syria one day.” So I resigned from the publishing house and moved permanently to Beirut. Kadria declined an offer to move with her family to Italy. We committed to set Alsama on a path to give Maram and her friends what they were asking for: a proper education. 

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Today Alsama provides education to 880 out-of-school teenagers in two refugee camps in Beirut. Maram and her friends will be among the first Alsama cohort to head to university in 2026. In April this year we will open the first Alsama centre for illiterate teenagers in Syria. My new novel Shams is inspired by Maram and the Alsama girls. Many of them, like Maram, grew up under Isis. Their parents are often illiterate. They come from a culture where girls get married as soon as they reach puberty and boys begin work life at the age of four or five collecting plastic from rubbish dumps.

These young people have to fight every single day for their education. Their determination, resilience and self-motivation inspires awe. I wanted to explore where they are getting their fighting spirit from. The odds against their success are so large. Yet they seem to be able to turn their disadvantage into advantage. They,  overall, out-perform more privileged students from European countries. 

When we hear the word ‘refugee’ and ‘refugee camp’ most of us think of a temporary set-up. But many camps across the world have existed for decades – and their number is increasing. For example, Shatila was set up in 1948 for 3,000 Palestinians. Now, it is home to over 20,000 people. The Palestinian families who live there extend into third, fourth or fifth generation. They still lack the right to work, to vote, or even to own a bank account.

In addition, over the last decade the camp has seen a huge influx of Syrian refugees many of whom, even after the removal of Assad, still fear to return to their country. Yet to say that ‘the world is turning a blind eye’ is too simple. So much of what the world does – NGOs, aid agencies, governments – has the effect of strengthening the status quo, rather than working towards solutions.

In order to bring to life this contradiction, I decided to personify Shatila. Like an evil goddess or a wicked godmother, Shatila wants to survive. Change for the better is not in her interest nor in the interest of the systems that support her. Shams poses a danger to Shatila. She is curious, seeks education and aspires to a better future. So is this young woman cunning enough to stand up against the evil goddess of the camp and all that this goddess represents?

Shams by Meike Ziervogel is out on 10 March (Salt, £9.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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