I am Fatima Awadh Arif al-Rayani
Age: 16 years
From Dara /Ankhal
My goal when I joined this workshop was to learn how to treat the camera and make it part of me and part of my life.
My goal is also to take wonderful pictures to document my daily life and accomplishments in a beautiful way that gets attention and gets noticed.
In the north of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Zaatari camp is one of the world's largest refugee camps, housing more than 80,000 people displaced by the Syrian civil war. In 2018, Lens on Life and Questscope partnered to accomplish something unprecedented in the world of international youth development - refugee youth talent would be leveraged financially to support refugee youth talent development. The synergy between Questcope's mentoring, education, and emergency aid initiatives for thousands of disadvantaged youth, and Lens on Life’s digital literacy and photography programs was realized as thirty refugee youth began training on the basics of photography.
These youth grasped the key concepts of photography and captured life in Zaatari camp, highlighting their own experiences to share with a global audience. Work from this initial workshop was auctioned in New York City to raise funds for a full-time Lens on Life photography school within the Questscope Youth Center in Zaatari camp. Together, Lens and Questscope continue to lead subsequent photography training courses often bolstered by a growing network of volunteer professional photographers who have supported our programming across the globe. The school provides daily photography and computer literacy courses to hundreds of youth between the ages of 13-20. Students are taught by refugee instructors from Daraa and Damscus, Syria.