By Holli Chmela

BAQAA - For many children in Amman, the start of the new term means donning clean uniforms and filling schoolbags with new notebooks and carefully sharpened pencils. But for the nearly 16,000 students registered at UNRWA schools in the Baqaa refugee camp, these seemingly ordinary items are hard to come by.

On Saturday, 36 girls and 29 boys from Baqaa - located 20 kilometres north of Amman - received new bags filled with pencil cases, pens and pencils, erasers, Arabic and English notebooks, colouring pencils, rulers and stickers. UNRWA and school officials chose students who are most in need of assistance to receive the donations.

“Maybe their father can’t work, or the family has too many children, or they live in very bad conditions… because even the ones who are OK are very badly off,” said Raba Naser Harrar, who works at the women’s centre in the camp.

The bags and school supplies were donated on behalf of Action Committee, a group of young volunteers mobilised mostly through the social networking website Facebook and a young woman named Sara Alsharif.

Alsharif said she started the group with her friend Ahmad Qatanani in August 2007 because they saw a need for a private volunteer organisation without the bureaucracy and paperwork often faced by larger aid organisations.

“The aim of the group is to help as many needy people as possible. It would be more complicated if the group was registered,” Alsharif, 25, explained.

Currently, the Action Committee group on Facebook has over 300 members, she said. In addition to the two founders, the original group of youth volunteers numbers around a half-dozen.

On Friday, nearly 20 volunteers gathered at Alsharif’s family home to gather donated materials and prepare them for yesterday’s distribution.

Um Omar, an American who has been living in Jordan with her family over the past five years, brought her three children to help with the project.

“We live in west Amman so we live a very segregated life… We live on American dollars so our ability and our lifestyle is very different than most other Jordanians,” she said.

She added that it was important to have her children involved, because: “I feel like I need to show my kids another way of life.”

Her eldest daughter, Aisha, 11, explained why she was helping fill the pink, purple and blue bags with school supplies for Baqaa camp children.

“They don’t have a lot of money and can’t afford these things. They need our help,” she said.

The Action Committee said it received over JD500 in monetary donations and supplies through its online “Back to School Bookbag Campaign,” which was spread by word-of-mouth and blog postings.

At the camp, about 15 volunteers, half of them young children, distributed bags to a girls’ school and then to a nearby school for boys. According to the principal of the boys’ school, who did not wish to be named, 1,200 boys in grades 1-6 attend the school, which has an average class size of 45 students.

He said 80 per cent of Baqaa camp residents live under the poverty line and many of the boys chosen to receive bags on Saturday either had no breadwinner in the family or fathers who were only able to earn JD150 per month.

“People living in Amman only go… from Sweifieh to Abdoun or wherever - they don’t see poverty.” Alsharif said. “I really want people to see the camps, to see real poverty. When people go there, they see how people are living there and they start to appreciate more what they have,” she added.

After visiting the schools, the volunteers gave baby clothes and supplies to an 80-year-old man who lives in a one-room house with his second wife, their three-week-old baby and other children.

Mera Alharami, 23, who visited the camp for the first time yesterday, said she was taken aback by the extreme poverty and unhygienic environment of the camp.

“The shocking part was he kept saying ’alhamdulillah’. The whole family is living in one room, but he’s just happy to have one extra room,” Alharami said of the old man.

The Action Committee executes one volunteer activity each month for the country’s impoverished, and more during the holy month of Ramadan, including hosting iftars and preparing food packages.

Alsharif said it is not just the recipients who benefit from the donations, but also volunteers who are placed outside of their comfort zone.

“I am really happy because so many people want to physically volunteer; they don’t just want to donate, which is good, but they also want to take action,” Alsharif said.

“There are still good people, and it’s good to see kind people who are willing to help.”