Dropping out of middle school to earn a meager handful of much-needed dollars for his family captured Hamzi in a very bad story.

A bad life-story that will cut his future down to a small size of struggle and second-rate opportunities. But it is also a story of buried treasure.

Hamzi was a good student. Math was his favorite subject – his passion. He had to put this passion on ice, maybe forever, when he dropped out to go to work in construction as a 16-year-old.

And it was hard to see his buddies going on to high school. He was left...MORE

Rahaf fled Aleppo with her family when missiles started crashing into their neighborhood.

They now share space with others in a communal shelter near Aleppo. Crowded, chaotic, crammed together.

She attends a temporary school there. Due to a learning disability, she is older than the grade level she is in. For other students, she is “the big girl who can’t read.”  It was very hard for 14-year old Rahaf when others made fun of her.  

Making friends was very hard, too. Teen girls, especially in the...MORE

Magic. Refugee camp. Poetry. Youth. A library.

What?! A library for refugees in a refugee camp? Poetry and writing workshops in that library? What's going on here? Backstory coming up.

Amjad's life crashed in the early days of the Syrian conflict. Violence. Hatred. Deep emotional wounds in a 20-something young man. Escape to a refugee camp. "I didn't know what a refugee was. I was a university student, not a refugee – whatever that was."

"When I came to the camp I felt that my spirit was being broken – just like so many youth around me....MORE

Nadin left her hometown of Dera’a, Syria with her husband Mohanad in 2013 and became a refugee in Jordan. The day they left was the hardest of their lives, but it was no longer possible to stay. Half of their friends and family had died and the others had been arrested.

"I arrived bringing only my soul and my childhood memories," Nadin said describing her first moments arriving in the Za'atari Refugee Camp. "When I first saw the tents, I felt like my life had stopped."

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The Za'atari Refugee Camp is a place where people who have no choices have to live. Youth in particular have very little control over their lives. They don't know when they'll be able to return home and most decisions about how they will live in the camp are made by others.

They are people in search of a significant life and a way to contribute to the world, but there is so much they cannot change.

The Creativity Fund Committee was born out of the desire to find what they CAN change. Every month, youth bring their ideas to this...MORE

We just celebrated a major milestone at our Youth Center in the Za’atari Refugee Camp: the official opening of our new sports field. It’s a rare patch of green in an oppressively brown and dusty refugee camp. Hundreds of youth now have a safe place to play and run around with their friends. 

This achievement alone is a big reason for us to celebrate. But the completion of the sports field means something even more significant: the Youth Center is now fully operational. 

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In 2012, Bassem fled Syria to Jordan to the Za'atari Refugee Camp to escape snipers, machine gunners, rockets, and bombs in his hometown in the south of Syria. He figured he would be in the camp for a few days and then get back to his undergraduate university studies. That will soon be four years ago.

Za'atari Camp has changed a lot since Bassem first arrived. From a cluster of hundreds of emergency UN tents in the middle of deserted fields not far outside Za’atari town, it has grown to become the 4th largest city in Jordan - a...MORE

On September 15, we officially launched the new Questscope Youth Center in the Za’atari Camp for Syrian refugees in northern Jordan. The Center—whose funders include the UN and the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation (MBC)—will engage 500 Syrian youth in recreational, educational, artistic/cultural, and psycho-social activities. The entire program has been designed and led by our dynamic team of Syrian volunteers inside the camp.

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“How can you handle your mentoring work along with caring for your family in the camp?”

“These are also our kids—the kids who will build Syria in the future. So I care about them as I care for my own kids,” said Mariam.

Mariam is a mentoring coordinator for Questscope’s mentoring program in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp—a role that has made her a mother to many.  

Moms are the most powerful beings with the most difficult job ever. It takes tremendous strength to raise a child in normal conditions, but imagine trying to do so in the hard living conditions of...MORE

"It was the worse trip I had to take in my life, a trip where I had to leave my home, all my belongings. I remember a tear in the eye of my old neighbor and the shadows of a homeland that we may never come back to."

"Here in the refugee camp, our new reality: “refugees.” There were times when we would be so frustrated it turned into self-pity, and everything around us seemed to have only a black color. At those points we could have been thinking, this is the end of the journey!"

"Except, it’s not!"

"When you meet...MORE