Roula Al Ajeh was living a comfortable life in Dubai, working as deputy director of a private school, when the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad broke out in her homeland in 2011.
As the authorities used violence to crush the protest movement and people throughout Syria fled their homes, she started collecting and sending clothes to the displaced, most of whom ended up in the countryside in the north-west of the country.
Dozens of fellow Syrians would turn up at her home to help her pack boxes "after I'd barely finished typing a message for help on WhatsApp", Ms Al Ajeh says.
It was the beginning of a humanitarian career that took her for the first time to rural fringes of her homeland, and eventually to Amman, where she has set up a learning centre for the needy that has attracted Jordanian and Syrian students.
Ms Al Ajeh, from an established family in Damascus, is one of thousands of Syrian all over the world moved by the plight of the victims of their country's conflict.
They are mainly city dwellers who previously had little interaction with their generally more conservative rural compatriots, who constituted the core of the protest movement in 2011 and the ensuing armed uprising against Mr Al Assad.
Between 2012 and 2013 Ms Al Ajeh frequently travelled to rebel areas in the governorates of Aleppo and Idlib, where she set up two schools and a system of classes in tents, to try to avoid student deaths from the regime's bombing of fixed infrastructure.
"It was also easier to convince the parents to let their daughters attend classes, because the tents were near their homes," she says.
She had to stop working in the north-west because of advances by the regime and extremist militants who had all but eliminated the moderate armed opposition to Mr Al Assad.
Ms Al Ajeh then focused her efforts on Jordan, home to 670,000 registered Syrian refugees. She helped to provide education to children at the Zaatari camp in the north and university scholarships to Syrian students, funded with her own money as well as from donations.
In 2015, she founded Bareeq, a learning centre housed in a building in Hay Nazzal, a low-income neighbourhood in east Amman.
More than half of its 475 students are Jordanians attracted by the quality of the courses, such as English and mathematics, which help to improve their performance at public schools.
“The accents are so mixed that you cannot tell who is Jordanian and who is Syrian,” Ms Al Ajeh says.
The centre also offers lessons in karate, self-defence for girls, first aid and music, and courses for children with special needs, as well as vocational training for parents.
“My dream is to form a Bareeq corale,” Ms Ajeh says.
The centre's activities are funded by international organisations, as well as Syrians with a long history in Jordan.
Among them are thousands of families who fled Jordan in the 1980s, after Hafez Al Assad put down another rural-based uprising against Assad family rule. They include descendants of Syrians who came to Jordan in the 1920s, when the kingdom was set up as a British protectorate, and who played an important role in the development of the Jordanian economy and society.
Fadia, a Jordanian, was at the centre this week, waiting for her daughter to finish a special needs class.
“At the public school, teachers just ignored her,” she says. "Here she is a changed person and her reading and writing has improved sharply."
The Syrian children who go to the centre are mostly from Syria's rural areas. Some of their families came to Jordan on foot, before Jordanian authorities shut the border to refugees in 2014.
Leen, the director of the Bareeq, is from the southern governorate of Deraa, the birthplace of the uprising. She started by teaching English at the centre after receiving one its scholarships, which allowed her to finish her degree in English literature at the Isra University in Amman.
Uday, a 15-year-old from rural Aleppo, is taking catch-up classes and hopes to obtain Jordanian education ministry approval to register in regular school.
“I want to be able to make it to university,” he says.
Company profile
Name: Steppi
Founders: Joe Franklin and Milos Savic
Launched: February 2020
Size: 10,000 users by the end of July and a goal of 200,000 users by the end of the year
Employees: Five
Based: Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai
Financing stage: Two seed rounds – the first sourced from angel investors and the founders' personal savings
Second round raised Dh720,000 from silent investors in June this year
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Rain Management
Year started: 2017
Based: Bahrain
Employees: 100-120
Amount raised: $2.5m from BitMex Ventures and Blockwater. Another $6m raised from MEVP, Coinbase, Vision Ventures, CMT, Jimco and DIFC Fintech Fund
Greatest of All Time
Starring: Vijay, Sneha, Prashanth, Prabhu Deva, Mohan
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
The figures behind the event
1) More than 300 in-house cleaning crew
2) 165 staff assigned to sanitise public areas throughout the show
3) 1,000 social distancing stickers
4) 809 hand sanitiser dispensers placed throughout the venue
What is an ETF?
An exchange traded fund is a type of investment fund that can be traded quickly and easily, just like stocks and shares. They come with no upfront costs aside from your brokerage's dealing charges and annual fees, which are far lower than on traditional mutual investment funds. Charges are as low as 0.03 per cent on one of the very cheapest (and most popular), Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, with the maximum around 0.75 per cent.
There is no fund manager deciding which stocks and other assets to invest in, instead they passively track their chosen index, country, region or commodity, regardless of whether it goes up or down.
The first ETF was launched as recently as 1993, but the sector boasted $5.78 billion in assets under management at the end of September as inflows hit record highs, according to the latest figures from ETFGI, a leading independent research and consultancy firm.
There are thousands to choose from, with the five largest providers BlackRock’s iShares, Vanguard, State Street Global Advisers, Deutsche Bank X-trackers and Invesco PowerShares.
While the best-known track major indices such as MSCI World, the S&P 500 and FTSE 100, you can also invest in specific countries or regions, large, medium or small companies, government bonds, gold, crude oil, cocoa, water, carbon, cattle, corn futures, currency shifts or even a stock market crash.
The five types of long-term residential visas
Obed Suhail of ServiceMarket, an online home services marketplace, outlines the five types of long-term residential visas:
Investors:
A 10-year residency visa can be obtained by investors who invest Dh10 million, out of which 60 per cent should not be in real estate. It can be a public investment through a deposit or in a business. Those who invest Dh5 million or more in property are eligible for a five-year residency visa. The invested amount should be completely owned by the investors, not loaned, and retained for at least three years.
Entrepreneurs:
A five-year multiple entry visa is available to entrepreneurs with a previous project worth Dh0.5m or those with the approval of an accredited business incubator in the UAE.
Specialists
Expats with specialised talents, including doctors, specialists, scientists, inventors, and creative individuals working in the field of culture and art are eligible for a 10-year visa, given that they have a valid employment contract in one of these fields in the country.
Outstanding students:
A five-year visa will be granted to outstanding students who have a grade of 95 per cent or higher in a secondary school, or those who graduate with a GPA of 3.75 from a university.
Retirees:
Expats who are at least 55 years old can obtain a five-year retirement visa if they invest Dh2m in property, have savings of Dh1m or more, or have a monthly income of at least Dh20,000.
BIGGEST CYBER SECURITY INCIDENTS IN RECENT TIMES
SolarWinds supply chain attack: Came to light in December 2020 but had taken root for several months, compromising major tech companies, governments and its entities
Microsoft Exchange server exploitation: March 2021; attackers used a vulnerability to steal emails
Kaseya attack: July 2021; ransomware hit perpetrated REvil, resulting in severe downtime for more than 1,000 companies
Log4j breach: December 2021; attackers exploited the Java-written code to inflitrate businesses and governments
