When our Year 13 student Shano immigrated from Iraqi Kurdistan to the UK, this was a challenging time for her as she found herself in new country and she did not speak the English language. However, she made great progress and is now completing her A levels at Elliott Hudson College and she is planning for a career in healthcare.
Shano has also been working on a recent campaign to welcome refugees to the UK. Her project shows how something as simple as a conversation over coffee can create greater compassion and understanding. Working together with her team at Fixers, Shano designed a coffee sleeve that translates Arabic phrases to English in order to spark conversations between people. Please see Shano’s comments below:
‘I immigrated from Iraqi Kurdistan to the UK in 2010 with my family. We didn’t speak a word of English so it was hard to get by. I’ve since learned how to speak English, but I’ll never forget how scary it was when we first arrived in the UK.
There are lots of refugees here now, so we wanted to provide something to welcome them. That’s why we’ve made some coffee sleeves with Fixers, which list greetings translated from English to Arabic.
My team and I hope that they will inspire conversations between strangers, help refugees meet local communities and build strong bonds together. I hope that any refugees reading the coffee sleeves will feel welcome. They might even inspire a conversation between people.’’