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Our Story
A Story About School
We have met a school owner and a principal by the name of Amira Rahal Dandach. She started her story by how she got to the village of Ersal in the East of the Lebanese Mountains in the early 1960?s, with her new husband who was sent as a school teacher.
Amira is an English Collage Graduate in Beirut, Lebanon and the daughter of the first Arabian Prince of Abu Jabal Tribe. Who lives in Lebanon, Syria and some other Arabic countries, who agrees of educating his children of boys and girls.
Ersal was a village with a larger population, who believes of educating their male children only, while their female children look at it like a forbidden place. Amira asked her young husband why they don?t allow their daughters to go to school. He smiled and told her ?because they use their education to write letters to boys? and it is a much known theory used by a lot of families.
Amira continues.
Amira asked her husband to go with her to visit the mayor. She asked if she could teach the girls. Amira couldn?t believe her ears when the mayor gave her the go ahead. Then she started with 35 girls between the ages of 4 and 12 years of age. She prepared the living room in her very small home with cushions on the floor and a wood burner for a heater. She bought in a very minimal amount of money, buying pens, books, and work books.
She than started to see the disappointment on her husband?s face for the reasons of there culture and he asked her to stop everything that she was doing. Amira agreed with him, to make him happy, but secretly she asked the girls to come to her after he leaves to work in the only public school in the village.
Then the girls used to hide behind the fence, peeking their heads like frightened rabbits. By then, Amira had 85 girls. Their love for education made Amira get closer to them and she changed her modern cloths and she wore village cloths, just so the parents didn?t hate her.
Then again, her husband found about the secret volunteer job, and he forbid it then the chief of police and the mayor talked to him into getting me to apply for a license to the ministry of education. It was a very big surprise when the news about my very small school got to the president of Lebanon. At the time, it was President Fouad Shehab who sent me a congratulations letter and she named the school after him.
By the second year, Amira had 285 students, and she moved to Baalbeck and opened up a lot of doors to a lot of schools to be built. Amira?s school now has 740 students. Most of the students are girls and 300 of them are orphans and poor. |
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Albasel School - Baalbeck - Lebanon مدرسة الباسل بعلبك لبنان with
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