The Camp

Stage One – Born to score.
Future English was born where Ahmad and Chris escape life. On the football pitch next to the MSF office where we both worked in Burj Barajneh; a refugee camp in South Beirut. We freestyled English to the kids. Count from one to ten to take a penalty. Name five colours to earn ten minutes playing as the striker. First student to say three words beginning with C becomes the captain, and so on. Bazinga! We’d found our methodology: gamify learning and suddenly it’s fun.

Stage Two – A civilised hijack.
We turned a car park behind the football pitch into our classroom. Lessons began with the buzz of our kids racing to deliver more chairs than the rest; from the camp to the class. It was a shanty school but there was a purity about it. We had a problem: most of the children spoke little or no English. How could we connect the biggest language in the world to one of its oldest: Arabic? We decided the newest and fastest growing language on the planet could build that bridge: Emoji.
Written on smart phones and Whatsapp everywhere, Emoji’s human mirror alphabet system has connected us all from Patagonia to Palestine. Working with emojis taught our children words, things and feelings that everyone across the world understands.

Stage 3 – The hunt for a permanent heart.
We needed a base; one room, at least. A place to teach and keep our classroom, materials and children safe.
Wherever that centre would be, it would be in Burj Barajneh. A shanty town built in 1947 by refugees and genocide survivors. When every resident in a community is stateless, it follows that there will be a certain volatility about the place. We might be in the Lebanese capital, but this bubble in South Beirut isn’t governed, policed, assisted or monitored by Lebanon’s state or government apparatus. We needed a safe space for our children to escape to whenever violence flared in the camp.
We had a few perfect meetings, handshakes and verbal agreements on contracts. Then a phone call or text message followed a few days later informing us that the agreed price had just increased, or the room would be shared with someone else. Doing business in refugee camps is hard. Finally, using Ahmad’s connections, we found an old house that we were able to convert into a school. We now have four classrooms, boys and girls toilets and a small kitchen in our education centre.

Stage 4 – Welcome to Future English.
We equipped one classroom with chairs and tables. A whiteboard for the teacher and a chalkboard for the students. We hired Dan, an English teacher and keen footballer from London, and Ibrahim and Hamza, two local teaching assistants from the camp who speak both English and Arabic. We began teaching four lessons a week to the children from Burj Barajneh.

Stage 5 – Stay at home learning.
A second lockdown hit Lebanon and curtailed our lessons. We developed a framework where our teachers would prepare homework sheets for the children, sanitise them, then deliver the work to Hamzah who would then take the sheets to our students’ homes. Later in the week, a second worksheet would be created; Hamzah would collect the first round of homework as he delivered the next installment; the sheets were returned to the teachers for marking. We continued operating like this until the lockdown was lifted and face-to-face teaching could continue. Concurrently, Chris was tutoring our students who had access to smart phones via Instagram. This proved to be an excellent way of keeping in contact with the more able students and ensuring they continued to progress at an exciting pace.

Stage 6 – Equity in the classroom
Finally, we are back in our classroom and continuing lessons and learning at pace. To increase female participation we are introducing a dedicated girls’ class. To supplement English lessons we offer art classes; these provide students with the opportunity to learn different techniques and to experiment with a variety of mediums. In addition, art provides an escape from the realities of everyday life.