Lessons From Lebanon

Lessons From Lebanon

When I boarded the plane to Beirut earlier this Month, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was my second visit to Lebanon, a country that has weathered years of economic crisis, displacement, and, most recently, renewed conflict. I knew I’d see challenges. But I also knew I’d find something else, something that I admire deeply about the Lebanese people: the deep resilience, creativity, and community spirit that seems to run through everything people here do and makes education possible against all odds.

I knew also that I’d return to something familiar: the warmth and welcome from friends who despite everything were so proud of their country and I couldn’t wait to let them show it off again.

Returning to a Country in Crisis

On my first visit, nearly four years ago, I saw a system stretched thin. I had seen how teachers and school leaders were working tirelessly, holding the system together through sheer determination amid incredible uncertainty. This time, the context felt even more fragile, slightly on edge.  The conflict has once again disrupted lives, forcing families to flee and leaving schools uncertain whether they can open their doors each day.  Even though the conflict had paused, there was an anxiety, a nervousness that things could change again very quickly, and yet, in every conversation, I heard the same quiet determination: education must continue. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s essential, a lifeline, a symbol of hope, and a space of safety.

Inspiring Educators, Extraordinary Lessons

I met teachers who had turned damaged classrooms into welcoming spaces filled with colour and light. One had created a reading corner for children who needed a quiet moment to calm and refocus. Another spoke about the routines they use, simple breathing exercises and daily check-ins, to help children manage anxiety and feel calm enough to learn.

These are trauma-informed practices in their purest form. They don’t require special, expensive resources or new frameworks or curriculum; just empathy, understanding, and an awareness that learning begins with emotional safety. In Lebanon’s classrooms, social and emotional learning isn’t an extra; it’s woven into the fabric of everyday teaching. It’s a foundation. Teachers know that children can’t learn if they don’t first feel safe, seen, and supported.

One teacher told me, “We can’t control what happens around us, but we can control what happens in our classroom.” That simple statement has stayed with me. It summed up the determination and purpose that seemed to fuel everyone I met.

Creativity Born from Challenge

One of the most moving visits was to an informal education centre for undocumented children, young people who cannot access the state system. There were no uniforms or desks in neat rows, but there was structure, care, and joy. The sense of purpose was the same. For many of these children, this was their only chance to learn, and to belong. Teachers told me how they adapt lessons daily, blending literacy, art, and play to help children express their emotions and rebuild confidence.

One little girl showed me a storybook she had drawn herself. On the final page, she wrote:“When we can’t go back, we make a new home here.”That single sentence captured everything I felt, that education, at its heart, is about restoration. The power of education in this case is not just to teach, but to heal.

Everywhere I went, I saw creativity thriving in the face of constraint. Outdoor lessons when buildings became unsafe. Art projects that helped children express their fears and hopes. Teachers designing their own learning materials from scratch.

It reminded me that innovation doesn’t always come from technology or training programmes, sometimes it comes from the pure will to make things work. These educators are not waiting for solutions to arrive; they’re creating them every single day.

Rethinking Our Role

As a charity that supports education in communities around the world impacted by conflict, it can be easy to define our work by what we deliver, resources, training, or support. But this trip to Lebanon reminded me that our role isn’t just to bring answers. It’s to listen. To learn. To walk alongside. Not to arrive with solutions, but to arrive with humility.

Too often, the international community approaches crisis response and international aid as if expertise always comes from the outside. Lebanon challenges that idea. The expertise, the resilience, and the creativity are already there, within the communities themselves. Our task is to recognise that, to support it, and to help it grow. The educators I met were not waiting for rescue or instruction. They were leading, innovating, caring, and finding ways forward with creativity and compassion. They were developing trauma-informed approaches long before we used the term. They are designing inclusive spaces that reach children who are otherwise invisible to the system. They are leading, and we are here to listen, to learn, and to support, and to adapt our own practice based on what they teach us.

True collaboration means recognising that innovation, knowledge, solutions and expertise don’t only come from outside. In reality, some of the most powerful ideas are already growing quietly within communities themselves.

Learning Forward

The lessons from Lebanon will stay with me, not only as memories of courage and ingenuity, but as guidance for our work elsewhere. They will reach far beyond its borders. They raise important questions, and they call on us to think differently about how we design and deliver our programmes elsewhere.

How can we better support teachers and integrate more social-emotional learning into their daily practice and also into our global work? How can we help communities design flexible, inclusive models of education that reach children who can’t access formal schooling? How can we ensure that in every project, we value local leadership as much as we recognise local need? And how can we ensure that our partnerships are grounded not in charity, but in collaboration and shared learning?

And lastly, and maybe most importantly, how can we make sure that in every project, we begin not with answers, but with curiosity?

If Lebanon taught me anything, it’s that education in crisis is not only about teaching, but also about learning too. For everyone!

Because the most powerful learning doesn’t happen when we teach, it happens when we listen.

A Final Reflection

I always find coming home from project visits hard. I come back to my ‘normal’ and leave behind theirs. The uncertainty and the challenges continue. But so does the incredible work that I witnessed and experienced in my short time there. I will try to share the stories, mainly to amplify people’s voices, to remind those that I met for the first time as well as those we have worked with for years that we see them, but also to celebrate everything that is being achieved by incredibly talented and dedicated individuals and organisations.

Our work is not only about rebuilding schools, training teachers and school leaders. It’s about rebuilding hope, trust, community, and the belief that learning can and has to continue even in the hardest of times. It’s about standing in solidarity, learning from those who never stop teaching us what resilience truly means.

The teacher who greets her students each morning despite the shelling nearby and drones overhead, with the evacuation plan in the back of her mind; the parents who volunteer so lessons can go on, despite everything believing education is still worth fighting for; the child who draws her new home in bright colours; the headteacher who told me, “We don’t stop because they need us. We keep going because we need them.”. They are absolutely the reason why we exist and our inspiration to continue. Their words, their courage, and their creativity are the real lessons from Lebanon.