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“When you see a kid [in poor circumstances] and don’t do anything about it, you are participating in their suffering,” Reem Yehya, the Lebanese nominee for the International Children’s Peace Prize says.
In the courtyard of Yehya’s school, students gather round as she speaks with The Daily Star. She flashes a nervous expression at first, then smiles. In just a few weeks, Yehya knows she will face a much larger audience.
On Nov. 20, she will head to South Africa for the ICPP awards ceremony, presented by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The prize is awarded annually to “a child who fights courageously to promote the rights of the child,” according to the award’s website.
Yehya, 17, embodies those aims.
“Children are considered often fragile creatures, who cannot speak for themselves,” she says. “But that’s not true.” She cites Malala Yousafzai, a previous winner of the prize, as an inspiration: someone who both defends children and represents what they can become.
Yehya has tried to follow that example in Lebanon. Working with the Lebanese Association for Human Promotion and Literacy, she conducts art projects with Syrian and Lebanese children and teaches them about their rights.
However, Yehya’s activism truly began in Tanzania, her birth country. There, albino people, believed by some to have supernatural powers, are killed to bring luck or to be sold in dismembered parts for use in folk rituals. The U.N. estimated in 2015 that 75 albino people had been killed in Tanzania since 2000.
So, many albino children are sent to government-run temporary holding centers that, while offering them protection, have health risks and educational deficiencies, according to a report from the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.
As a child, Yehya was horrified by the violence facing albino children. She now returns regularly to Tanzania to speak to children in the centers, donate items and offer other help repairing, for example, the roof of a schoolhouse destroyed by a storm.
“These kids deserve to feel normal, as normal as us,” she says.
“They deserve to live a happy childhood with their families, but they don’t ... [and] they don’t get to live their dreams outside the walls of the center.”
Should Yehya win the competition, she would be given a study and care grant and a project fund of 100,000 euros ($110,000). With that money, she says, she’d like to start an art school in Lebanon and Tanzania, “so kids can get away from their studies,” she says. “They will get enjoyment and they will be happier, I think, and improve their studies because they are happier.”
Longer-term, Yehya aspires to become an English professor, or study international law. But for now, she hopes only to continue her work with students at a local middle school, and connect with those around her. “I love engaging with people, I love introducing myself like, ‘Hi, I’m Reem. Can we be friends?’”
Source: The Daily Star
