Third year College students Razan Osman and Selam Asihel have received one of this year's Davis Projects for Peace Awards. Their $10,000 grant will help Osman and Asihel to establish a six-week-long community-building program for 15 to 20 orphaned girls in Egypt this summer.
One of the key goals of the project, which is known as the Sakina Peace Progam and drew inspiration from the Young Women's Leadership Program, is to educate the girls about topics such as women's health and future career paths, as well as to provide them with the resources needed to finish their educations. The grant will finance the purchase of materials needed for the girls to produce handmade clothing and ornaments. Those goods will be sold in tourist shops that are part of a network of eco-tourism, and any profit the girls make will go to a scholarship fund that will sponsor their educations for the next year.
Osman and Asihel, who first found the grant with the help of the Center for Undergraduate Excellence, also hope that the program will be able to connect individuals across cultures. In particular, Muslim and Coptic Christian children - sects that are divided traditionally - will interact and "work together even though they're from different backgrounds," Osman said.
In Egypt, the poorer members of those two religious groups often live in separate communities from each other, she said. Fighting between the two groups results in them being exposed to less education, and as a result, members of their communities are more prone to adopt more dogmatic ideas about each other, Osman said. The program exists in part to help the participating orphans to overcome the damage these divisions can cause.
"Amidst social problems, war and poverty, women tend to get caught in the middle," Asihel said. "And with education and exposure to one another, these problems can be solved or, if not solved, at least relieved a little bit."
Osman and Asihel, who both live in Northern Virginia currently, felt especially drawn to this issue because of their own religious and ethnic backgrounds. Osman is a practicing Sunni Muslim who is fluent in Arabic and has lived in Sudan and Egypt. Asihel, on the other hand, is an Eritrean Coptic Christian who was born in Sudan and is fluent in Tigrinya. Both students believe they will be able to reach out to the girls despite the religious barriers in Egypt.
To help establish the program, Osman and Asihel will work with an Egyptian orphanage to draw upon a preexisting system that places girls into relationships of "big sisters" and "little sisters." The students also have contacted various organizations - such as Pathfinders, Coptic Orphans and the World Bank - to help facilitate their workshops.
Every year since the summer of 2007, 100 groups have received the annual Davis Awards, which are given to projects targeted at countries around the world. The grant comes from the family of Kathryn Wesserman Davis, who created a fund for world peace projects upon her 100th birthday.
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