The post was first published on Sohani's personal blog on Jan 18, 2018
Since the start of the Syrian conflict, several large and small NGOs have been working tirelessly to help the lives of children affected by the senseless war.
Recently, a good friend of mine visited Zaatari village in Jordan. The village is near the Syrian-Jordanian border, and most of the residents of the Zaatari village are Syrian refugees. Acting for Change International is an NGO working with young children in the village, providing them with humanitarian relief, recreational and educational supplies. My friend took the initiative to plan a trip to the Zaatari village, contacted Acting for Change International, and raised funds for these children’s winter wear. Together with these winter wear, she also distributed some handwritten cards with the message of hope and love.
Before her visit, a couple of us got together to make a video with some video messages and photographs. We chose a background song (credit: UNICEF) that delivers a perfect message of strength and hope for these children.
The entire experience of putting together this video was heart-wrenching and heartwarming – heartwarming because I knew that the video was being shown to the kids directly. Heart-wrenching just to imagine the millions and millions of young and tender lives that are entirely uprooted because of war.
From the perspective of creating and editing a video, I have understood the massiveness of work that goes into producing and releasing a video! This is a relatively simple video, but I ended up working 20 hours a day for about 5 days. My only motivation was to show the best possible product to these children – a product that genuinely helps them emotionally and a product that they can keep listening to in the times of distress.
Below is the video: