She just returned to her Community Engagement Liaison position at the college following two months volunteering in Jordan.
From the beginning of September to early November, she worked at Yarmouk University’s Refugees, Displaced Persons and Forced Migration Studies Center (RDFMSC) through Leave for Change, which is a three-way partnership between NIC’s Office of Global Engagement (OGE), an NIC employee and World University Service of Canada (WUSC).
“For more than 10 years, our office together with WUSC, has supported several NIC faculty, administrators and support staff who have used their holiday time to participate in international projects in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Peru and Jordan among others,” said Mark Herringer, executive director, International Education, OGE. “These projects, built in partnership with education, tourism and refugee support organizations in country, provide participants with an opportunity to make a direct impact on their host organizations’ ability to support the local communities they serve while building life-long connections and friendships at the same time.”
WUSC was founded in the 1920s as part of a global network to support displaced students in post-war Europe and has since evolved into a Canadian global development organization working in more than a dozen countries.
“It’s really all about building capacity in organizations,” Hoogland said.
The focus is on development programs for youth, especially women and refugees.
The RDFMSC was founded in 1997 as the first research centre in the Middle East to focus on asylum, displacement and forced migration issues. They specialize in research, policy development, projects and training, which are areas that Hoogland was keen to support.
This fall, she focused on raising the profile of the refugee research centre within the university, the region and internationally. When their fall semester began in October, Hoogland worked with students to organize and host a “Welcome back to school” event, which also served to connect students to the refugee centre. She also supported research and project proposals and did outreach to other international organizations working with refugees.
She took the opportunity to learn some Arabic. At the same time, the centre’s volunteers offered conversational English classes for students and hosted sessions to talk about overseas study and work opportunities.
“The students are very keen to study abroad,” Hoogland said.
With a turbulent political situation in surrounding countries and a registered population of about 3 million refugees in Jordan, the research centre and the refugee students it serves are facing a lot of challenges.
“Jordan is impacted by the region’s current and protracted conflicts and the displacement of many people,” Hoogland said. “There’s a constant need for research to understand pressing issues to advocate and mobilize resources.”
One example is a recent issue among Syrian refugee women in camps marrying at a much younger age and what this might mean to their well-being.
Now back in Canada, Hoogland has returned to NIC but is still helping the project in Jordan remotely as an e-volunteer, as the experience of working with the Jordanians and the refugees was hard to leave behind. She fondly recalls how every meeting began with Turkish coffee and how the guards at the university would welcome her to work each day and offer her new Arabic words to practise.
“It was a pretty profound experience,” she said. “I can’t say enough about the people, their warmth, their graciousness, their generosity, their resilience.”
