BBC: Teaching his native Arabic to students online has been a game changer for Syrian refugee Sami as he makes a fresh start in the UK.The Aleppo University engineering graduate says that working for an online language learning platform in London has helped him find his feet and motivation as he begins life anew.
The tutors at the start-up firm Chatterbox are all refugees and their work helps them to integrate and adapt to their new surroundings.
“I think language is building bridges between people, because the language is not only in the language itself, the speaking or the words, it’s also the culture,” said the 35-year-old refugee, who arrived in the UK about two years ago.The school is the brainchild of Mursal Hedayat, who came up with the idea during a trip to refugee camps in Calais in the summer of 2016.”I noticed that a lot of the people who were there and volunteering, were ordinary British people, but not a lot of them were actually from the kinds of backgrounds that the refugees had come from,” she said.A refugee herself – her family left Afghanistan when she was a small child – she noticed “gaps in how people were helping, both in Calais and back home in the UK.” “One of the gaps I noticed was that not a lot of the ventures helping refugees integrate economically, into work, had actually understood just how educated and skilled refugees in the UK were,” she said.