“Hi my name is Reddin Ahmad and I have signed up to volunteer for the Excellence Center helping local students learn English. I will be volunteering for two weeks starting from 18th June to 3 July 2016. I chose to come to this center in Palestine as I wanted to experience the palestinian culture and make the most of my ramadhan. I have always wanted to visit Palestine and experience the day to day life. Usually during ramadhan I don’t make the most of it and waste a lot of time. For this year I wanted to see how ramadhan is in Palestine and to use this time to help others. As a student there are many times when I study with friends and we use this time to teach each other things that we need help with. During these times I enjoy explaining to others and realise that I do like teaching. Furthermore I want to improve my arabic and all these little reasons added up to me deciding to volunteer in Palestine.

During my stay I wish to try and help out teach English to students in any way that I can. While doing this I hope I can steadily learn the basics of arabic. My main aims for this trip; are to volunteer and help students learn English, to improve my arabic, to visit great places and see various areas of Palestine (in particular Masjid Al-Aqsa) and to meet new people. Already travelling through Israel and Palestine alone has been a great experience and has led me to converse with many different people. I hope to contribute to the Excellence centers work by helping the teachers in the running of their class. I will try do this first by seeing what the teacher needs me to do and then by helping individual students who do not understand the work by explaining it in different ways and correcting their mistakes. If possible I can also try and organise games as a way to further the students learning. An idea of a game I thought of is to give one student a word (such as boat) and the other students have to ask questions in english and try and figure out the word. This could be done in teams to add competition!

As a student of medicine, I will have experience many times talking to patients whome english is not their first language and communicating with them can be difficult.  Through the experience I get here I will be able to handle this much more effectively and find ways to explain and communicate to the patient. Furthermore I have always wanted to travel all over the world, and travelling to Palestine alone will give me confidence and kickstart the conversion of my dreams to a reality. I believe wanting to do something and actually doing it can be difficult and it is the first step that is the most difficult.

I do believe I can make a difference. In particular, as a student myself, there were specific points in my education that I feel were vital in me getting to where I am. I will aim to have a similar impact for as many students as I meet.If even only one student was touched by my efforts then I would regard my trip as a success and hope that Allah accepts my work.

I hope to learn a great many things about Palestine and also about myself in the next two weeks and I look forward to it!”