Dear friends and supporters,

this is an unprecedented time for Lebanon and for FAID, School for the Deaf. We at Lebanon Trust keep trying to suppport them. Recently FAID sent a letter to its friends:

Lebanon is still without a government (since August 2020), the economy is under severe pressure, and our currency has devalued by 85%. There are fuel and medicine shortages, and daily blackouts.

The staff of FAID have been busy providing online educational support to our students and parents during the times that we can’t meet.  Most of this is done through Whatsapp.  We are sending educational videos that help parents to work with their hearing-impaired children.

We are delighted to see how parents are rising to the task of becoming their children’s educators. It is also great to see how this homeschooling strengthens the bonds between the children and their parents. It is a silver lining to see the relationships flourishing between parents and their deaf children.  However, it isn’t all smooth sailing: the shortage of mobile phones with our families and lack of data packages is a problem.  And it is something that we are trying to solve.

Based on the success of rolling out this educational support system for our regular students, we started to use a similar approach to supporting our outreach to Syrian refugee families. Our supports are tailor-made to suit the formal education level of the parent & the age and educational level of the child.  At present, more than 80% of parents are engaging with our program, and we hope to increase this number as time goes on.

We also hope to continue to support parents this way even when the pandemic ends.

None of this vital work is possible without your continuous support.  We want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for that.