Reclaim Childhood, Jordan
I have just returned from an eight-week-long internship with Reclaim Childhood, an NGO located in Amman, Jordan that seeks to empower refugee and at-risk girls and women through sport. Reclaim Childhood (RC) operates regular after-school sports leagues and a month-long summer camp that targets refugee and Jordanian girls ages 8-16 living in underserved urban communities in Jordan. The programming is led by women from the local community, Jordanians and refugees alike, who act as coaches and mentors for the girls in their neighborhoods. These women attending coaching clinics provided by Reclaim Childhood, and are trained in conflict resolution strategies and how to work with victims of trauma and torture. They nominate girls in their communities who they believe need or could benefit the most from RC’s programming, and bring them to camp or practice via a bus provided by RC. The organization prides itself in the safety of its participants, as well as having members of the girls’ communities running the show.
As a summer intern, I was able to work at the summer camp, as well as learn more about the inner workings of a 501(c)(3) while working on my organizational and administrative assignments. I was placed on the Communications team within the organization alongside three other interns and an Arabic translator. Our team was charged with constructing a communications strategy and social media plan for the organization, producing a storytelling initiative which took the form of a documentary about an RC beneficiary family who had three daughters enrolled in sports programming (one as a coach), and creating a promotional video to showcase the work of RC. I was in charge of storyboarding, filming, editing, and producing the promotional video about the organization generally, and the summer camp specifically, and found that video was a powerful medium for conveying the extraordinary work happening at Reclaim Childhood. It was a rewarding experience to hear what the coaches and beneficiaries had to say about the organization, and a joy to put together some of the highlights of the summer.
One thing that distinguishes Reclaim Childhood from the myriad of other refugee-related NGOs operating in Jordan is that it serves refugees of all ethnicities and nationalities. Many NGOs or community-led initiatives are tailored to a specific group, as they have often been created in response to specific conflicts that have caused an influx of refugees into Jordan. Given the magnitude and international consciousness of the refugee population from Syria, many international efforts have been placed on serving Syrian communities in particular, though there are also organizations that are tailored to Iraqi and Palestinian communities. Reclaim Childhood aims to integrate these communities, giving the participants an opportunity to meet and socialize with girls from other nationalities that they might not otherwise encounter. Just over the summer camp, Reclaim Childhood was able to provide sports programming for 277 girls from a total of seven different nationalities, including Jordanian, Syrian, Palestinian, Somalian, Sudanese, Iraqi, and Egyptian athletes. It was heartening to see the social cohesion so actively sought after realize in the form of personal reflections from the girls after their summer camp experience. One of the older girls commented, “I look forward to coming here every day. What I love the most is that there are multiple nationalities in here yet we are all here together.” It can be easy to become cynical about the degree of impact of initiatives geared toward unquantifiable goals such as community-building, but this experience left me with a resounding sense of respect for the work Reclaim Childhood is doing.
I was constantly in awe of this organization and the people running it. With a relatively small budget, Reclaim Childhood has a stellar reputation among the refugee populations it works with—demonstrated by a widespread desire for increased programming in the form of a program wait list. The coaches are amazing role models and mentors for the girls they work with, and it was clearly evident through everything they did how much they cared about the girls and their wellbeing. As for administrators, Reclaim Childhood is spearheaded by two of the most capable, committed, and passionate women I have ever had the pleasure of working for, and I have no doubt that the organization will continue to grow with them at the helm. The degree of mentorship was not necessarily something that I was anticipating when I started interning with Reclaim Childhood, but it is certainly what made the experience transformative. As interns, we were trained well, challenged daily, and provided with every opportunity for personal growth and internal processing. We engaged in thoughtful discussion about topics ranging from the legal status of Sudanese refugees in Amman to how we might approach our identities as volunteers abroad and how to navigate the “Western/White Savior Complex.” As far as internship programs go, I could not have asked for much more.
This internship experience has ignited a desire to become more educated about the refugee experience in its entirety—the primary forces of conflict or persecution that have pushed refugees to flee their homes, the relations between the refugees and their host communities, and the legal nuances of seeking resettlement. I’m particularly interested in relations between refugees and host communities, as that has increasingly become a point of conflict in populism and xenophobia plagued host nations. This upcoming semester I will be taking an anthropology course titled “Refugees and Migrants,” and hope to further explore the questions that I have encountered during my work this summer through my coursework. Part of the RC internship experience included visits to other NGOs operating in the Amman area and learning about the work they do. One such visit that was especially interesting was to the Jordan office of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP)—which happens to be headed by Stephanie Gee, Williams Class of 2010! IRAP organizes lawyers to provide direct legal aid, litigation, and systemic advocacy for and on behalf of refugees and displaced persons. This organization does incredible work in the Jordan community, and the presentation taught me a lot about the nuances and challenges of the resettlement process and the legality of certain policy responses to refugee influxes. As I have a key interest in international and human rights law grown through previously interning with Human Rights Watch, this visit was both enlightening and has planted seeds in my amorphous career aspirations.
Additionally, this internship has sparked a career interest in sports for development and peace-building, as I was truly able to witness the unifying power of sport and play across races, nationalities, and communities painted to have irreconcilable differences. There is ample opportunity to apply the life lessons and values taught through sports to situations of conflict and racism, and I hope to use sports as a vehicle for education and conflict resolution in some form in my future. Having grown up playing sports throughout my schooling, I have seen the lessons learned on the court as inextricable from my education in the classroom. The spillover effects of working with others to reach a common goal are readily apparent, but heightened immeasurably when it starts conversations about acceptance, belonging, and tolerance. As I approach another crossroads in my life after my last year at Williams, I am hopeful that I will be able to take the lessons I learned during my internship at Reclaim Childhood and apply them to similar work in the future.
I would like to thank the alumni sponsors of the Alumni Sponsored Internship Program for providing the means for Williams students to embark on experiences such as this one, and the Class of 1972 specifically for making my summer with Reclaim Childhood possible. Over the years, their generous contributions have allowed hundreds of students to experiment with new career paths, giving them the opportunity to expand their Williams educational experience to include “real-world” lessons that build upon, complicate, and contextualize the learning that happens within the four walls of a classroom. After this summer, I can attest first hand to the transformative power of eight weeks spent doing something you didn’t know you would love, and hope that this program continues to create these opportunities for students. I would also like to thank the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for their construction of this program, for advising students to take advantage of this opportunity, and for the general support they afforded to grant recipients.