Courtesy of Watani Magazine
Watani Magazine just interviewed Teresa Samir, a former Big Sister in Coptic Orphans’ Valuable Girl Project.
Teresa is a remarkably young woman.
In high school she volunteered at the Valuable Girl Project center in her home town, El Barsha, meeting with girls in primary school to give them help with schoolwork and mentoring in life. Then, she became one of the site’s local coordinators, a group of volunteers responsible for administering and leading each Valuable Girl Project site in exchange for a small stipend.
She later moved to Cairo to work as a journalist, but came back to El Barsha. Teresa believes that the duty of everyone is to their local community. So she started the Masr Association for Development and Democratic Progress, a local community-building organization based in El Barsha, and started working to build up her town.
TAMKEEN, a new Coptic Orphans partnership that will support the efforts of local Community Development Associations in Egyptian villages and will teach them how to become more effective and efficient, now supports Teresa’s local development work in El Barsha.
You can read the full Watani interview in Arabic here, but do keep in mind that this does not represent the views of Coptic Orphans, which remains dedicated to our work with children who–like Teresa–have the potential to transform generations in their local communities, and not to politics.