DAMASCUS, Syria, January 22 (UNHCR): Eighteen-year-old Maryam is living her dream as she studies a legal textbook at the back of her family’s rented apartment overlooking wasteland in a depressing Damascus suburb.
When the Iraqi refugee arrived here in August 2005, she thought her plans to study law at university had disappeared forever. The then teenager came to Syria from Baghdad with her mother, brother and sister to join their father, who had fled the Iraqi capital a year earlier after receiving death threats.
With almost no savings and reliant on the UN refugee agency for assistance, they could not afford to spend money on higher education. – My daughter cried a lot because she felt all her dreams were falling apart, recalls her mother, Fatima.
At a community centre in the suburb of Jaramana last September, her mother spotted an announcement about a UNHCR project to send the children of needy Iraqi refugees to university for free.
The programme was launched last November with 154 Iraqi refugees starting degree courses at universities in the cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Deir Ezzor and Lattakia under an agreement with the Ministry of Higher Education.
Maryam was among those who applied and she was accepted to study law at Damascus University. She is now in her first year of a four-year course and hopes one day to return to Iraq and help rebuild the country as a lawyer. – It is the responsibility of my generation to rebuild Iraq and that’s why we should learn and pursue our education, she says.
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