Success Stories

EGYPT

Our many years of experience proved invaluable when COVID-19 began spreading in communities and on university campuses across the United States, requiring our staff to shift gears quickly to meet an unprecedented challenge: how to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of international students in the face of a global pandemic. Our roster of students in the United States included some 300 Fulbrighters in graduate studies, 149 undergraduates in the Hope Fund and DKSSF programs, and 199 high school students in the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) Program.

As the students scattered from their universities to their homes across all 27 governorates of Egypt, university courses moved online and Amideast adjusted to providing student support services remotely and virtual training and activities. Within one week of the closing of universities throughout Egypt, Amideast moved English classes from an in-person format to a synchronous virtual format, working with teachers to adjust curricula and their pedagogical approaches, while continually improving the program by including asynchronous content.

The 30 students, who belong to the USAID-funded HEI Public University Scholarships program, were able to experience the American academic approach and values. They took on team-based projects with their American colleagues — competing to draw up the best business plan in their entrepreneurship course — that developed their leadership and collaboration skills.

The students included 38 Egyptian undergraduates in the HEI Public University Scholarships program, whose travel home was impacted in particular by a lack of international flights. With the help of the Egyptian embassy in Washington, DC, which facilitated arrangements with EgyptAir. They travelled in May in three groups on chartered flights to Egypt and were placed in a mandatory 14-day quarantine in Marsa Alam before returning home.

As the COVID-19 crisis became a global pandemic, a former teacher and an alumnus of Amideast/Yemen have swung into action on the medical frontlines. Benjamin Cooper, who taught with Amideast/Yemen in 2013-14 before returning to the United States to pursue a career in nursing, has been working in an ICU dedicated to COVID patients. Recently, combining his teaching skills with firsthand experience on the frontlines, he was a guest speaker in Amideast/Yemen’s first fully online course.

On this International Women’s Day, we are celebrating the accomplishments of women in the countries in which we work. Here is a sampling of stories of hope and change from each country:

BLADI — short for Building Local Associations for Development and Innovation — is a training and institutional strengthening program that is enabling CSOs to provide services that offset the vulnerability of individuals in these communities. While an important goal is to reduce the risks that the CSOs’ beneficiaries will become sympathizers and supporters of violent extremism, the primary goal is to strengthen governance and operational structures of the CSOs to enable them to effectively design and implement impactful projects in their communities.

To date, 862 English language teachers across 11 countries have been trained and certified through PCELT — a U.S.-accredited program developed through Amideast’s partnership with World Learning/SIT Graduate Institute. In 2019, 116 teachers from six countries were trained through the generous support of the U.S. Embassies in Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, and Palestine, and through a private donor and teachers’ self-funding in Lebanon.