Spirit in Action
The Hope Fund for Palestinian Students
A visit with the founder of The Hope Fund, a project to help connect promising, but poor, young people from the Palestinian refugee camps with special college scholarships here in the USA. Fahim Qubain, himself raised in the Middle East, found his way up via the education he received at the Ramallah Friends School in, at that time, Palestine, graduating in 1942. He labors on, diligently and remarkably, at the age of 82.
- Broadcast on:
- 07 Jan 2007
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- other
I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep I have no arms but yours with which to hold The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old I have no hands but yours with which to see To let my children know that I am out and out is everything I have no way to feed the hungry souls No clothes to give, and they give, the ragged and the morgue So be my heart, my hand, my tongue Through you I will be done The enders have I none to help I'm down The tangled knocks and twisted chains The strangle fearful minds Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmead. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love, and helping hands Being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life I have no way to open peoples eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind Today on Spirit in Action, we'll be talking with folks about the Hope Fund. The Hope Fund is an effort to connect disadvantaged, hard-working students from Palestinian refugee camps with full four-year scholarships in U.S. colleges. The founder, Fahim Kubain, was born in Palestine and attended secondary school at the Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker School of the Region that brings together Christians and Muslims in a search for peace, compassion, and academic excellence Fahim, crippled by childhood polio, found himself thriving in the loving academic community, eventually locating in the U.S. with a Ph.D. in international relations He's written a number of books, articles, and studies on the Middle East Now, 82, he continues working energetically for the Middle East with his attention focused on the Hope Fund, an organization that he founded back in 2000 His hope is to foster peace and especially hope for the Palestinians By giving them away out of the desperate conditions they find themselves in, and by exposing them to caring people outside the Middle East Fahim is assisted in this work by his wife, Nancy Kubain, who also has a master's in Middle East studies and a driving concern for the people of the Middle East Both Fahim and Nancy have spent many decades working for peace and compassion in this beleaguered region long after the age of retirement Their work is clearly spirit in action We'll also be hearing from a few of the students who have been brought over to U.S. colleges by the Hope Fund Khalid Al-Nimur, raised in Beirut, Lebanon, but officially of Nazareth due to Lebanese law, was one of the first students to earn a scholarship through the Hope Fund Mohammad Harun is a junior at Bridgewater College and comes from the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza Shereen Abu Kiran is a freshman at Bridgewater She is from the Arub refugee camp in the West Bank near Bethlehem I asked Shereen and Mohammed how the Hope Fund has changed their lives and their prospects for the future When I lived in the camp, I had a lot of ambitions, I had a lot of hopes that I wanted really to achieve Like I wanted to be something, I achieved something in my life, but when I was living there, all of them they were just a dream But when I applied for the Hope Fund, you know, it's the name, it's Hope Fund, like it's Hope When I adopted scholarship, I knew that I'm going to achieve all of these ambitions And I'm going to be the girl who my parents and other people, they want from me to be And it was great, it changed everything in my life It changed my life, actually, I'm coming from a refugee camp I've been here about two and a half years I had very few hopes to go to school, to have higher education But thanks to Bridgewater and thanks to Fahim, I'm now able to go to Bridgewater College Have higher education, pursuing graduate school and engineering And I'm just happy for it, and this has changed my life Those were Shereen Abu Kiran and Mohammed Harun, two of the recipients of the Hope Fund Now let's talk to the founder and the forces behind the Hope Fund, Fahim and Nancy Kubain Fahim and Nancy, thank you so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action It's our pleasure Yeah, it's our pleasure I got your mailing just a couple days ago about the Hope Fund And it sounds like a very exciting and worthwhile project Could you explain for our listeners exactly what the Hope Fund is? The Hope Fund is an organization that I founded in 2000 As a result of an article by Geraldine Brooks, who's Jewish And she is on my board, in which she details She used to be the correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, Middle East correspondent And she wrote a heartbreaking story about her encounter with Palestinians, a young boy, a bunch of boys 15-year-olds in a refugee camp And the first thing she did was to go and visit And the first thing that happened to her was these kids started throwing stones at her car Broke her windows and so forth, but instead of getting angry and mad She followed one of these boys to the hovel that the parents and the family lived in In typical Middle Eastern Arab fashion, the ministry entered the shack She immediately became their friend And the first thing they did is in typical fashion of her coffee She really tells the story of her relations with the family and the boy And they're broke, you know, they didn't have any money But she nursed us through a local college education at the University of Bethlehem As a result of the article I called Geraldine as to what we can do with this boy to help him out His name is to come to the United States He had gone to five years in Israeli jail And she said, "Well, how about some cash to help him out, let's raise some money and bring him over?" Well, I did send him about $400 on my own Then I kept thinking about it and I said helping this boy May ease our conscience, may make us feel noble But he doesn't really solve any problems Because there are thousands of rides roaming around in the Palestinian refugee camps So I said we should set up an institution to carry on with the work We got organized in the hope fund chartered in the state of Virginia Our mission is to try to get scholarships for the poorest and the most vulnerable Palestinians And that's what we did, and then by just sheer luck I was able to bring the first two students, Harlot and Hanean from the refugee camps in Lebanon Toronto College, which gave them full scholarship, four years scholarship I started appearing to other colleges and we now have about eight colleges And then next year we'll even have five more So we raised from generous, compassionate colleges So far, pretty close to $2.5 million In four or four years' scholarships, with virtually no expense We developed a fantastic board of directors that include a president of a college A couple of former U.S. ambassadors This robust of Washington and so on All dedicated to alleviates the suffering of the Palestinians in a non-violent way It sounds to me like you're pretty committed to peace work, aren't you? I have spent most of my life working for global peace in various projects Even local community, we took our years back We had a co-generation plant that was going to set up a plant in our area And we'd have polluted the entire area And I thought that my wife and I, another, we fought for three years And everybody was against us, including the city council But eventually, thank the Lord, we prevailed And they packed up and the company finally packed up Is the moral of the story what Fahim wants, Fahim gets And if you have your mindset on global peace, then they better get out of your way I hope so, if there is a losing cause, I support it I am like Don Kohote, I am always fighting windmills Except that you don't fight windmills, you probably favor windmills You fight coal generation plants I fight coal generation plants I am opposed to what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians And I joined with a lot of Jewish groups and Israeli groups in the same fashion We don't want Israelis to be hurt, I do not want Palestinians to be hurt So the hope fund began basically back in 2000 How did that go, how did you get off the ground? We started out with Ronald College with two students who are now, had graduated And they are in PhD programs right now Khaled in engineering, Hanan in biochemistry And then Bridgewater College joined, Bridgewater now has three students And we brash out into other local colleges like Washington and Lee has two Next year we are going to have Swarthmore with one student Hopefully, Haverford with one, we now have Bryn Mawr with one And these are all quicker colleges essentially So let me get this straight I noticed in your literature that there are eight colleges committed Providing full four-year scholarships for Palestinian students for this coming year Of those eight, four of them are in Virginia Which I think is understandable because that's local area for you So you had connections there and of the others Two or three of them have Quaker connections So what's motivating these colleges to take on this extra cost This extra outreach to invite in Palestinian students Because they all realize we have no political motivation We are a group that dedicated to the poor and to the hungry and oppressed It's a story that nobody can fight against It appears to the human spirit, it appears to the better part of the human animal We go to these colleges and tell them our story Most of our students come not from the best schools in the Middle East By definition, they go to under what schools, United Nations, the Reif and Works Organization schools whose entire function is to serve Palestinian students, refugee students So our students come from poorer schools But they are at the same time very focused They are the cream of the cream and the crop Not a single one of our students has failed this They are all in every single score here They are at the top of their classes We select not because they are only poor But we only select the very top boys and girls with brilliant minds Our aim is to have these people educated in disciplines Where they can easily find jobs And then our hope is that they will raise their economic and social level themselves And then help their families raise the level of their families And hopefully again increase intellectual capital of Palestinian society Before they come, once they are selected, they have to sign a pledge That they will go back, not only that they have to go back But they have to conduct themselves at the school in such a manner That they will bring honor to their people and to their society And then when they go back, we want them Because the people in the Middle East, particularly Arab world today The only side of America that they see is imperialism They see war, violence and so forth By bringing them over here, we also hope as a byproduct That they will see a kinder, gentler America That there are people who care, who are for peace, who are not anti-Arab or anti-anybody And they do, there is a transformation period Where they become in love with America And when they go back, we hope they will become a good will ambassador for the United States I wondered what this looked like from the Palestinian students' point of view I asked Mohammed and Khalid what impressions they had had of the US before coming here And how their ideas have been changed by being here I had the impression that the US, it's the greatest country in the world Everybody knows that, I know a lot of things about it Good things and also bad things But now I came here, I met very great people in Bridgewater I met very good family and rich men I changed the way I'm thinking, the way I'm approaching things Now I'm more open to the other side, I'm more open-minded I'm looking forward for peace more and more Because I so believe that the only way to achieve justice is through peace I live a lot far away from the American University of Beirut So I've had a lot of contact with a lot of Americans over there So I kind of had, I mean I expected what they told me, basically So it wasn't very different what I expected, we mainly probably expected everything to look like New York City And not having small-sized cities as Roanoke Lexington is But basically the culture was perfectly explained to me before And I actually lived between them I did not expect to see like any house or like a big backyard or anything or much more garden or anything, but like it's starting to be just blogs and blogs concrete That was a Khalid Animur and Muhammad Harun Students from Palestinian refugee camps studying in the U.S. Thanks to the help of the Hope Fund This is Spirit in Action and I'm your host, Mark helps me Let's return to our visit with Nancy and Fahim Kubain The diligent workers who make the Hope Fund such a source of hope As they talk about the why, what and how of the Hope Fund Most of the American colleges actively try to recruit foreign students And they have a faculty member or somebody who takes care of foreign students in their school And also like the junior year abroad, you know American school is going abroad So they are all looking really for foreign students What we are doing is we are providing a mechanism where they can also actually get these Palestinian refugee students It's something they probably wouldn't be able to get to very easily If they didn't have some kind of intermediary to do it But what we have been really amazed is that what good quality these students really are The ones that come over to have worked hard and they end up very good students But also the colleges want to have their students to become acquainted with students of this background Not only from the upper classes or whatever, but people down below struggling So they're really happy with it What role does the Hope Fund play in helping these students transition And to help them integrate into this very different society? Before they come, we are usually in touch with them by email or some other mechanism We track them from the first day they get selected until about six months later when they show up We pay their transportation from the Middle East And then Nancy and I, wherever they land in the United States, we meet them At the airport, bring them to our home They usually spend about a week here in our home And then after they go to school, we keep in touch with them They come and they spend their weekends with us quite often They asked Thanksgiving a year ago We had 28 people for Thanksgiving, including about 12 of our students and their guests Fahim, is it you or is it Nancy who's doing the majority of cooking for these feasts? She's dishwasher, I am the co-op And what do you serve them? I mean, they're coming from a very different culture Do you have to modify the menu a lot to match their tastes? They don't eat ham and so forth So we give them Middle Eastern food, we make them feel at home Remind them of the old countries, so to speak, and they help us cook And then it makes them feel as if they're home We are really their parents away from home Here's what Khalid had to say When I asked him about his continuing connections with the Hope Fund Considering that he's been here since 2000, I was wondering if they were still supportive of him They invite me over over like Thanksgiving Actually, they didn't invite me to come for Christmas, but I was visiting my college home mate There's still a lot of my family here, basically So they give me a kind of moral support When I was applying for graduate school, I gave them a call and just discussed their thing with them So they kind of helped me choose things So they are still there for me and they help me out in directly all the time If anything comes up that I might seem interested, they will give me a call and let me know So they're still my family in the United States, basically If you think of them as family, do you actually call them by family names like Ant and Uncle? Actually, I call them Uncle James Nancy prefers me to prejudice what it's called as Nancy, but I sometimes call her as Nancy or Auntie Nancy We like to deal a lot with women's colleges Because in Arab Islamic society, the men and women are separated much more And the women feel more comfortable in a women's environment So, Bryn Mawr is a natural ally? Definitely, yes, but we have other schools, Randolph-Macon Women's College We're going to have a couple of good one girl at Highlands College next year Another one at the Columbia College for women in Columbia, South Carolina But we're very interested in women's colleges Does religion affect these students much? I mean, given that they come from an area of the world Where religion is such a part of the clash about what's happening between Jews and Muslims And with the Christian influence thrown in there? All our students, by sheer accidents, are all Muslims Because most of the people in the refugee camps are Muslim rather than Christian The Christians are usually financially and socially, Randolph-Macon And the people in the refugee camps are the salt of the earth These people are the fella hai in the peasants The peasants are the people who suffer And we try to get to the peasantry Many of the parents, they are reluctant to send their daughters The boys, no problem, go to it But the girls, their hesitants, we have had two or three We offered scholarships, two very valuable scholarships And they turned them down because they were afraid Very God, the United States, a Sodom and Gomorrah They see our girls, you know, half-endressed And the idea of America is a Hollywood idea Let me give you one particular experience We had one girl from Gaza And if there's a hell on earth, that's it That's the place The Gaza is a consultation camp People can't get in, they can't leave, they're lacking a present I am particularly interested in Gaza because that is where the boiling anger is most And we thought we could siphon off this hate by bringing some of the... So we have one girl, we worked on her for six months We got her scholarship here, and finally her father, in essence, refused her to go I thought it was important to talk to the students themselves To find out how they perceived religion as affecting them both at home And here, while they're in the US And how much of a role religion played in their worldview I think that for Shireen, the impression was most fresh Given that she just arrived here this past year I think my own religion affected me a lot, especially here Like when I came here, the people they asked me about my religion And when I say I'm Muslim, they were connected to that amateurist or something like that I heard that a lot from different people here I have to explain for the people that no, it's not like that Not all the Muslims like the same thing, it's just kind of hard It affected me spiritually because sometimes I feel mad Because the people they take to your tribe about my religion And sometimes I feel happy because some people they know exactly what is land That the bad Muslim people, they do that from their own self Not because their religion say that to them, they are not part of their religion Also Christianity affected me kind of because back home I lived with a lot of Christians and here also I'm in a Christian school I'm in Bridgewater College and it's a Christian school I know a lot of their traditions, a lot of their habits What they do like on Christmas, what they do in the church I respect these things and I'm really interested in that And because of that, I'm taking a Christianity course next semester Because I want to know more and more about Christianity for knowledge Most professors, if not all, are very open minded They are very understanding, they're very helpful Some students will try to avoid you being a Muslim Some did so Virginia's considered a conservative state in Christian college Most of the people that I met here are Christian conservatives Most of them are tolerant actually Most of them are good people, I like them I like a lot of people here I'd like to consider myself as a Muslim And I'd like to try to prove to people that all religion I believe, that they're tolerant, they preach people good things And some people try to use religion to serve their own purpose, their own goals And some people misunderstand their religions Some people try to think of their religion as the unique truth thing And others are not, and that's where struggle starts That was Muhammad Harun, preceded by Shireen Abu Huran Talking about how being Muslim has affected them Khalid al-Nimir was affected in a different way back in Lebanon Where his family has lived after evacuating from the Nazareth region The Christian Palestinians are already citizens in Lebanon Just because the Lebanese constitution they required to have a certain amount of Christians in the country And I think at some point most of the Christians were leaving the country And they needed to get people in, and they took the refugees to our Christians to become Lebanese citizens Of the three students I spoke with, Shireen is the one who is most definitely on fire For working for international peace and for peace in the Middle East She is very comfortable with the idea of working together with people of other faiths And part of this comes from some of the experience that she's had Including being part of a group called Seeking Common Ground Where she was part of one of their programs, a camp that brought together young people To face their differences, to talk about them, and to seek for solutions of the difficult situation in the Middle East This is a Jewish, Christian, and Muslim organization And this organization, it holds two programs, face to face and building bridges for peace And this is going to bring some guards and boys from the Middle East, from Israel, from Palestine And some also from the United States, from all the states And we stay together for like a month, we talk about our history We talk about how do we feel when we are far away from our countries What do we think about the actions that are going on in Palestine and Israel And then we came up with some solutions Some things that we think can solve the conflict It's really a good program because it just changed you Like the idea that I talk about the Israel when I was living in my place They are tourists, they are killers, we can't live with them But when I really live with them, I knew that they are human beings I knew before judging the person, I had to remember that he is a human being All of us, we have hearts, we have emotions, we have feelings And this is what I learned from this organization In the hills of Ayalon, above the broken earth Two boys shout and play with a ball on a field of sharpened earth Divided sons of Abraham, exhausted and braced Prince of Islam, bride of joy, know each other's face If we met on the sands of Sinai under a molten sky If you held me in your sights and looked me in the eye, what would you do? If we met on the sands of Sinai under a molten sky If I held you in my sights and looked you in the eye Would you do that? 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the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth In the hills of Ayman, above the broken earth This is where we really do, in many ways, in our humble way far more effective ways of bringing peace about rather than all these honchos up in Washington you know, dealing in big items and so forth and so forth I think if I didn't do this, I would not feel good about myself Fahim, I know that you're quicker now but I was wondering what roots you came from Were you raised, Christian? Yes, absolutely, my ancestors were converted to Christianity by Saint Paul We have been Christians for over probably 2000 years in whatever, we were Christians long before Islam showed up The Christians of the Middle East were there before Islam Your credentials on the Middle East include the fact that you've written several books on the Middle East with titles like "Inside the Arab Mind" and "Crisis in Lebanon" unlike many scholars about the Middle East you're writing with a lot of personal experience, aren't you? Right, Fahim's family was originally from Nazareth but he's got relations all over In addition, I kept traveling for many years I was a consultant on the Middle East for various U.S. governments and so forth and I wrote books and I was fairly well known in Washington but I used to travel to the Middle East almost every year I would spend about three, four months going all the way from Tunisia all the way to the Gulf States and the Persian Gulf I had a lot of political training and then of course my background I also speak Arabic, my library here I have five to six thousand books here in my home And you've read them all? Most of them And Nancy read the other ones, right? In fact, I was able to ensnare Nancy when she was at Harvard, she read my book on Lebanon and she was very impressed and so that's how I ensnared her She was working at the Library of Congress with a friend of mine and that's how I first met her And Nancy, you have your own commitment to this, don't you? I mean, you've got some connection to it through Fahim but wasn't it your course of study as well? Right, I have my master's in Middle Eastern studies from Harvard and I've been interested in it, it's a fascinating area but I think also in the whole issue the refugees, the Palestinian refugees have really been the demonized faceless victims of what the Palestinian-Israel conflict has been really about because they have these huge families they're growing in numbers and you've got a real pressure cooker here and also on another side of it the Palestinian leadership really needs new growth there's a lot of corruption in it they need to have new able people that are educated rising from down below which is what we have in this country they need the same thing they need new good people coming up getting back to the Palestinian-Israel conflict whenever you have any situation where an ideology conflicts with the ethical moors of a religion this is a red flag you've got to think something is the matter both the Christian Zionism, the Israeli Zionism it conflicts with the ethical moors of both Judaism and Christianity we're supposed to help and protect the orphans, women, children, foreigners and it hasn't been done it's the Sermon of the Mount exactly, but it's the same in both religions and also in Islam you know, the Jews have contributed a great deal in terms of ethical religion and science the arts, you name it and they were persecuted in Europe and it's a shame that the people who were persecuted in Europe and Germany and so forth have turned into persecutors what the Nazis did to the Jews Israelis are doing to the Palestinians now essentially the Palestinians have their own Holocaust I really feel in many ways I feel sorry for the Israelis the Jews we have Jews writing some of the most ethical writings in the world forget about the traditional Jewish religion Zionism and Judaism are completely separate from each other Judaism is a beautiful religion which is essentially a Christian and essentially Muslim they are obsessed with the Zionist ideology of expansion Israel now is the fifth most powerful military power in the world you're talking about a trip of land you can spit from one end of the state to the other and it's all courtesy of the United States Americans have a responsibility for this because we have encouraged all of this what has been really pushing down at the Palestinians so I think we in this country as Americans have a responsibility to help the Palestinians and to help the Israelis but in a peaceful way not giving them arms I really want to have the Israelis be as secure as they come that security comes from peace rather than from military domination the Israelis have won every single battle except for this last one but they haven't won the peace they still are battling the Palestinians and we did have Jews living in Palestine in the good old days and Palestinians and Jews lived together many people in all cultures [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] That was a song called Ishmael and Isaac and it's by Guy Mendelow you're listening to Spirit in Action I'm your host Mark Helpsmeet and we're visiting today with Fahim and Nancy Kubain of The Hope Fund an effort to connect disadvantaged hardworking students from Palestinian refugee camps with scholarships in U.S. colleges Fahim Kubain has a PhD in international relations and his wife Nancy has a Masters in Middle East Studies In Palestine right now you can't move from one place to the other without running into several checkpoints between Ramallah and Jerusalem for instance we used to walk when I was a friend it takes about 10 minutes by car 10, 15 minutes by caris only about 10 miles it now takes a Palestinian two and a half hours to get from Jerusalem to Ramallah there's a very highly regarded college Bizet a couple months from Ramallah it takes a student from Ramallah to get to Bizet University almost three hours and most of the time they can't even make it because the checkpoints turn them back it really breaks my heart to hear about this or to experience this I really want to have the Israelis and the Jews be better than that they are, they have the ethic and the moral background behind them throughout the centuries Fahim, I'd appreciate it if you talk a bit about your experience with Ramallah friend school in that area of Palestine back when you were there I think you said you graduated in 1942 so what was it like at that time and particularly what was the tenor of relationships between Jews Christians and Muslims and what was it like for you at the time in the Ramallah friend school? Well, in the friend school by the time I got there in 1936 I got a bus from Jerusalem to Ramallah at the age of 12 and I was a boy that my mother had died when I was two years old but Ramallah the friend school became almost like a home and I loved the place I arrived in it I read every book in that library and I have always loved books maybe because I am physically weak but books have been my refuge in addition the Americans there they were American teachers the Kelces for instance were like my own parents the Kelces were part of the early developers of the friend school Ramallah at that time was mostly they were too intermixed town Ramallah used to be almost totally Christian then on the other side only a mile away but connected was beer which was mostly Muslim half of the people in Ramallah had already been to the United States or our citizens of the United States they make their money in the United States come back to Ramallah and it showed Ramallah was a Christian liberal community and that was partly because of the influence of the friend school but the Muslims and the Christians when I was at a border we had maybe about a hundred fifty borders as opposed to the day students it was all in the share of Muslims and Christians and a lot of the Palestinian leadership today the intellectuals and so forth are actually a graduate of the friend school it had a tremendous impact on Palestinian society as it continues to this day the friend school is now has about 900 students and they are graduates they go to some of the best schools on scholarships in the United States into Harvard do you mean that the school has not been closed down like so many of the schools there have been closed down by the Israeli government? No, they can't touch the friend school because on purpose it has not been legally transferred to Palestinian ownership we have a Quaker meeting in Ramallah but the Quaker meeting does not own the school if the school is owned legally technically by the Indiana friends meeting very closely associated with early college it's then on purpose to protect the school from foreclosure not only foreclosure if it was owned by a Palestinian entity the Israelis could come and not only close it but they go over the school and convert it to a settlement anyway going back I loved the school was like my home I stayed there for six years thrived as a young fellow I am lame I had polio when I was two months old it was really I was engulfed in a lot of love there was Mildred White whom I used to follow like a puppy I loved her and then the counselors after I graduated every time I went to Ramallah I stayed at their home which was part of the friend school Thank you both Fahim and Nancy for doing the work with the Hope Fund it is such important labor both in terms of the compassion it shows and the contribution towards peace for that troubled region people can of course find out more about you via your website thehopefund.org and on that site they could find out how to contact you how to make a contribution of much needed cash and they could find out how to help by doing such things as making the initial contact with a college where you could come in and encourage them to offer a Hope Fund related scholarship for Palestinian students or they could learn to be a host family for an incoming student are there any other ways that they could be helping out? As you said we appear to them to see if they can intervene with some colleges all we need is an entry and then we do the work after that but we need every help we can get with a very small organization but we have done a fantastic piece of work with virtually nothing we're very proud of it and not only proud of it but we also feel very good about it it's a labor of love and I wouldn't dream of dying without having done this thing and it was an accident and thank God for the accident and thank you Nancy and Fahim for the work that you're doing the love and the hope that you are passing on is just so important it's so vibrant thank you so much thank you and we appreciate this interview and finally I asked Muhammad and Shireen if they had any prayers or wishes to send out to their family and friends back home I wish that peace come to my land, to my family I wish them to be secure I wish them to have better education happy life and settle their minds and I always pray for them and I hope everything settles down there first of all I want to say thank you thank you very very much for the help fund I know they are not back home they are here but this is my chance to thank them like I want them to hear that this is the most wonderful experience in my life and I promise them that I'm going to do my best to be the girl that they want from me to be and the girl that I want to be and I want to thank my parents I want to thank them a lot because they were the main supporters for me thank you dad, thank you mom you are everything to me and I want to say for my brothers and my sister work hard because if you work hard you can't achieve what you want and I want to tell them that don't worry I'm going to help them I support them I also want to say to my friends and I miss them all and I hope they are living a good life right now I know the situations they are really hard but live your life and everything is going to be ok you've been listening to a spirit in action interview about the hope fund we've been talking with sponsors of the hope fund Fahim and Nancy Kubain and we've spoken with three of the students who benefited from the work of this fund Khaledel Nimmer, Mohammed Harun and Shireen Abu Huran you can hear this program again via my website northernspiritradio.org and you can find helpful links and information including link for the hope fund .org on my website the theme music for spirit in action is I have no hands but yours by Carol Johnson thank you for listening I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit you can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net may you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light this is spirit in action I have no higher cause for you and please to love and serve your neighbor enjoy himself listening to love and serve your neighbor enjoy selflessness . . 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A visit with the founder of The Hope Fund, a project to help connect promising, but poor, young people from the Palestinian refugee camps with special college scholarships here in the USA. Fahim Qubain, himself raised in the Middle East, found his way up via the education he received at the Ramallah Friends School in, at that time, Palestine, graduating in 1942. He labors on, diligently and remarkably, at the age of 82.