Learn Arabic and Teach English to Syrian Refugee Children in Lebanon

Bring a towel and an open mind. It's not easy work, but it's the kind of work where at the end of the program you can see the difference you made.

Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Not everything will always be the way you expect it to be. But that could be said for anything.

Keeping an open mind is the most important thing you can do.

I was teaching the women and the youth at the center. My day looked like this:

I wake up at 7:45 am and head down to the center (it is in the same building if you're based in Beirut). My first class (youth) starts at 8:30 so I spend 30 minutes waking up and looking at my lesson plan for the day. I finish my class at 9:15 and take my 15-minute break for breakfast.

My next class isn't until the afternoon so I spend that time either lesson planning or preparing things for my classes or helping around (there's a lot to be done and a lot of people that could use an extra hand). Sometimes I stand outside the children's classes and just watch other volunteers teach.

After lunch, it's usually time for my second class. The classes are 45 mins each.

After the second youth class, I usually have about an hour to prepare for my Women's class, which is an hour-long.

My women's class ends at 5 which is when the shift ends. Time to go home :)

Honestly, the thing I was worried about the most was living with so many strangers and then working with them as well. What I didn't realize was that these strangers become akin to family.

As for working and living with the same people, with time, you learn to cope. Some people go for runs in the park. Others ask for quiet time in their rooms. Some people make friends outside of SB. Others buy a guitar. Everyone finds their own coping mechanism.

Returning volunteers often talk about how impressed they are with the resilience and love in the hearts of the children in our classes. Most recently, a volunteer told me about a boy who he described as "an actor," meaning one of the most dynamic and captivating children he's ever met. This experience showed the volunteer that, despite the loss and hardship that the children and families in our centres experience, their love and passion for life is what drives them to move past this difficult time and work towards their future.

While I spend most of my time in Brussels with the SB Espoir project, spending time in the Ouazi or Bukra Ahla centres with the children, women and youth in our communities allows me to try to begin to understand the power of human resilience - particularly from young people - and how this resilience needs support to grow to allow an individual to flourish.

While we have a massive responsibility to our community and ambitions to grow them even further, SB OverSeas feels like a small family - people coming together no matter what their individual troubles, to help each other because that's just what we have to do. Not doing something that could help our mission is not an option that exists in our minds. When we come across a problem, we work together to creatively find a way out - it's these moments of problem-solving and collective brainstorming that make me the proudest.

For us, success comes from hearing stories of perseverance, resilience and growth from the people in our community. It's not a matter of how many children we teach a day, but rather how many of those children finally see a future because they passed the exam to go to public school. It's the woman who feels ownership of and appreciated for her abilities when she creates and sells a hand-made canvas bag or doll. They are not factors, but rather stories of hope that mean success to us.