Test. Test. Test. I will be sharing this with you. So i was born and raised in syria. The one fact that many people do not know or do not expect is that we had a very normal life. We used to go to restaurants. We used to go to the beach. We used to do everything that you guys do here. We used to go to universities, form friendships, have girlfriends, everything that you can imagine. So it is not the country that some people would imagine, the country, the image that isis might try to enforce right now. I consider myself as a person who had a wonderful childhood in syria. All the memories i have are a very beautiful country that i love a lot and i appreciate a lot and i enjoyed a lot. However, one thing started to happen in 2011 everything changed. This change that we had as individuals and especially as young people is huge because you are from a very safe country where you had everything you wanted. We had worries and worry about our future and everything and a lot of short comings and concerns. You are now living in a war where on a daily basis you experience feelings of fear. On a daily basis i remember like sitting on the news to see if someone like we know died. You would whenever you hear a bombing we would be like checking on facebook and asking each other like do we know anybody who happened to be in the location of the bombing. It turned from a very normal life to very not normal life where it is dictated by fear, dictated by uncertainty, dictated by all other problems that young people like me would have. What am i going to do about the future . What am i going to do if i lose someone i love. What would i do if someone from my family dies . Its just those are very real questions that we had to go through. So i can tell you, i can assure you that there is not one syrian who wasnt whose life wasnt disrupted by the war whether from losing someone you care about or love, whether from getting your building bombed or losing years of your life while you are waiting to the next step that is never there that will never come. All of those changed us as individuals. So for me as a person i was very, very lucky. I still count myself as one of the luckiest because through the same organization i was given the opportunity to move to the u. S. In 2013 to transfer to Illinois School of technology. I was given like just a golden chance of relilding my life. I was given this opportunity along with 32 other students. So here once we got here we always have this feeling that we should do something. We feel that no one really everyone really cares. Of course, you do. Like the governments of the worlds, they do care. In london a few months ago they pledged 10 billion. How would i tell that to one of my friends when they told me that their life is over . I cannot translate the 4 billion that the u. S. Donated for the person who lost every confidence in the future. I cannot say to a girl who lost her parents. I just cant. Its very difficult. So we feel that we i personally feel that as a syrian i have a responsibility and duty to do something to help like create this opportunity for those people. So this i felt that the 33 students who came to chicago do share with me this vision that we do have responsibility. We want to do something. We are all very eager to succeed just to prove that we as syrians are not what you know about us. Its not what you read about us in some news outlet. We are normal people who can do normal things. Those 30 students now some of them got offers from google, from apple, goldman sachs, from every big company. That is very difficult. If you came to the u. S. And tell me you are a Software Engineer at google i probably would not believe it. They are working so hard. They are doing the extra step just to prove to the world. There is this extra motivation for us to prove to the world that we are normal. And at the same time that also drive us to do things, to drive positive change to other syrians, to drive positive that is what drove me to start this petition. I was frustrated that no one was doing or saying anything. It was like a problem that was very isolated from the u. S. Political scene or from the u. S. Humanitarian scene. So i wanted to do this and i did it and i did it with many bunch of groups of amazing people who helped us carry this forward. Im very grateful for the administration for listening to us. Who cares about an immigrant who came from syria two years ago . I felt appreciated and felt that my voice was heard. That is a step in the right direction. Of course, the numbers can always be bigger. At least it was a step in the right direction. So some of the thoughts that i constantly have. Do we deserve as syrians what is happening to us . This is a question i constantly ask myself. Do we deserve the lack of engagement from other countries or the lack of interest like American People or european people in our causes . My answer is maybe yes. We dont have we never had a Civic Society that can carry those causes and those topics forward. But what im trying to say right now is that we need help to create the Civic Society that we never had. And sometimes as governments or administrations they tend to focus a lot on humanitarian response. And they forget about the human aspect of the things. They focus on the humanitarian aspect but not on the human aspect. There is a lot of ill give you an example. For thousands of syrians who are here in the United States it takes years to process their asylum applications. You know how difficult and how challenging this can be for a person who doesnt know if in two years will be deported. On top of everything that you as an individual have to care about, your career, your work, your relationship, your family, you dont really know if you will be deported. It is not the ideal situation that would help those people to do things because they just simply do not know if they can do it. Another example is that we as syrian youth empowerment, an initiative where we help syrian students in syria, syrian High School Students in syria, we offer them free classes and then provide mentorship and work with universities to try to get them scholarships and we have just started but we work with some students informally and there is one yesterday got his visa and he is going to harvard. Another guy to m. I. T. I am very excited. For this very tiny organization that we are obviously trying to do something meaningful for those people to build the Civic Society that we aspire in the future to have the people who are ready, we are facing tremendous, tremendous obstacles. One is the finances. So by finances i dont mean fundraising. If they want to transfer me the money so i can transfer it somewhere else it would be a disaster. I just cannot do that because my name would be somewhere like someone would check my name and as a syrian i cannot do that so the laws doesnt help me to have financial flexibility. The second thing is the visa. So i talk to many visa offices who served in different countries. They told me about the system which is the system im not saying favorable treatment for syrians but it is very, very difficult even if you get like full scholarship from harvard you might be denied easily because the laws that like pass in congress 40 years ago just does not there are a lot of complications that make it way more difficult to give someone a visa from a country that has war no matter how promising he is. So those are the things that i think about. Those are the things that i care about. Those are the things i try to mobilize people to always take actions and do something. What happened to me is in a way or another helping the 45,000 refugees who will come here because our group advocated for those people. Those people who come here maybe one day will build the syria that we aspire. Might be the people who would transfer the western values to the middle east. Those might be the people who would be the next doctors and next lawyers and next journalists and next philosophers that help us build this Civic Society and this platform. So this is what i wanted to share with you. Thank you. [ applause ] george, thank you very much for reminding us that syria is not what we see every day on our screen, that there is a much deeper soul to it. That was powerful. You are bringing us to our next speaker. Today inside syria we will talk about how to give assistance. No foreigner really can dare even take the risk that you would have to incur to go inside syria. Beyond your personal story which im sure you will tell us about, how is this movement of Civil Society developing . Im quite impressed to see how fired up they are despite the tremendous odds they face. Thank you very much. Actually, i love being here in georgetown because when i arrived to the u. S. The first place i stayed in was Georgetown Hotel and conference center. Whenever i came here i have memories about having a future. Just three years ago, lets say first of may, 2013, i will give you like my diary. Lets say you are reading my diary and reading about 1st of may, 2013. I woke up today. I checked my phone to see if there was electricity to charge it because we barely have electricity for one or two hours per day. I opened the tap to wash my face and there was no water. I had to take from our stored water and i tried to clean up my face and be as decent as a human being should be. Imagine that you are leaving your home like kracrossing the building and start running because there is a sniper two miles away shooting every movable object. Just because he sees somebody like me assuming that im with some part who are fighting against him so he is shooting me. And there were many times i hear like the voice of those bullets crossing through my ears even when i was with my mom. They ask why they are shooting nobody knows. Why are you there . Because where can we go . My day usually starts with going to a school where i used to work. Even though i was in the city where there were like huge fights and conflicts, because of my work as an ngo volunteer and many other organizations like i was an intern in syria. I worked with like palestinians, iraqis but i never imagined i would work with Syrian Refugees. I had like always like 12 to 15 hours of working. I used to go to school nearby where there was 1,000 displaced people. We used to give them food and organize them. I dont know how to describe that. It is beyond any imagination. Imagine a big school where each class has at least 25 to 30 people. And i was the person responsible to put them there. Even beyond like they barely can be able to sleep there but we had no other choice since the number were limited and we have to put as much people as we can. People in my city i have to leave because i was a journalist. Even though i was not writing or criticizing the regime or the other part but i was well known and like respected my community. That is why i was offered to work for their regimes as a reporter and offered me to work for them and also i refuse. So actually being in the middle, not being with any part makes the other people think that you are with the other part so you always receive threats. So my goal each day was surviving until the end of the day. And just like in the story but at sunset you have to go home otherwise clashes start over in what we call the party. What we mean by the party is the sound of bullets, the sound of everything. Everything started by the sunset. And last during the whole night until the next day. One of the memories i have there where i stayed in my building where there is a tank next to my building shooting the other part. It was so noisy but i had no other choice because if i want to leave my building i was trapped. There was a sniper. And then after ten days of no electricity and some food and my small cat who was trying to understand what is going on we tried to get our kmachances and start running across the fire of that sniper. I dont know what to add. They said everything. Sometimes i have this memories, flashbacks like those memories like i was remembering when i was covering one of the church that is where i met her for the first time. These memories they always come to you. It always puts you in a bad mood. I feel like anything i will do, any success will be nothing compared to what i did back home. I would like to also to thank the u. S. Government for two things. First, i came in fellowship sponsored by u. S. Department of state called community solution. I was the first and the only syrian accepted into that. We were supposed to learn about the community and then go back and try to adopt things that we have learned here in syria. Unfortunately, when i came here the chemical weapon incident just started and u. S. Threats of intervening in syria. As a journalist who was writing and has like 20,000 followers, im here to be trained on some sort of spying or game so it was dangerous for me to return. So i had to start a new life here. So sometimes when they ask are you a refugee or something, i say im technically a refugee since i have been forced to leave my country. Otherwise i would stay there. Why should i leave . The u. S. Government gave me a future by accepting me here, by giving so this kind of thing, they give me hope otherwise i would be arrested or killed or kidnapped somewhere because i refuse to raise arm against anyone else. Its not my only point of view. There are like hundreds of thousands of People Living the same thing. Which is why i have been here, why my friends and colleagues have been here. We are trying to convince the American People that not all syrians believe in violence. Not all syrians wants to be in a regime. If we have a couple of hundreds making poor choices by being in those doesnt mean that all syrians are bad. Im here. I have a good life now. Im working as a freelance and working and trying to be advocate and promote the syrian cause. I try to take advantage of being here in d. C. To attend events about syrian and Syrian Refugees. I used to stand up in every event and say im syrian. I dont cause any threats. As you can see im not this stereotypical perspective about syria, the people you used to see in movies, the bad guys who will bomb anything. Even seeing silly questions or nothing. I wanted to make people know that they might be syrian among you and might be noticing them and they will not do anything bad to you. I try to do that since joining organizations here in d. C. Like trying to have scores, blaming this part or the other part saying the regime, no it is isis. Its not like this. It has been five years. So i think nobody is right and the other is wrong. There is no ultimate villain who if we eliminate him everybody will be happy. Now, we have a crisis now. We have a civil war with people fighting, trying to kill each other. All we have to do now is try to save those who have potentials and refuse to be dragged into this vacuum of violence. Try to give them the ability to be heard. So i would like to thank you. Im celebrating that just like a couple of hours ago my city aleppo has a cease fire for just 48 hours. So my family is still safe for 48 hours hopefully. I would like to ask you something. I would like all of you to stand up for a moment of silence for all of those who got killed in my city and im hoping that others dont have the same fate. Thank you very much. [ applause ] we would listen to you for much more time if we had. I know it is painful to bring to us the angst that all of you are living thinking of your relatives and Family Living in syria. We all have families. I try to talk about different perspective. My family is still there. Every moment to check if they are alive. They have horrible stories about what has happened and bombs and bullets and everything. Thank you. I forgot to mention when i introduced shelly that he was the head operation for the yu United Nation relief operation in jordan dealing with palestinian refugees. He has experience in the middle east. When things are difficult for refugees, its part of the job description. In the case of the Syrian Crisis i think former high commissioner have tried to raise repeatedly. What sort of challenge did you face when you raised that alarm . What is your experience . It was about a year ago that we were in the same library, beautiful library. The former high commissioner was here. Im afraid that some of the points im going to make he had to make last year and the year before much more eloquently. He was the high commissioner. The new high commissioner is doing the same. The first thing that unites us, i think the whole u. N. System is just one part is the wish for peace. That has to happen. All that we do in cooperation with ngos, nongovernmental organizations and there are hundreds of them big and small, national, syrian and international, american and european and from elsewhere. All that we do is somehow try to relieve the pain but the solution is peace. 48 hours simply isnt enough, thats for sure. Against the background of continued failure to actually come to some resolution to the war and its a mega war, not just in syria. It is next door in iraq and there are risks of spellover beyond until such time as the war does come to an end our montruthat must find ways to find safety, to have access to territory, to be able to move and to be able to make their claim, to hear their story so that theyre not subject to forcible return and theyre able during the time that they are forced to be in exile to have as normal a life as possible. And michelle was talking about 2013 as a watermark year. In fact, it is true that over the last couple of years in the absence of sustained investment our budgets are all under funded quite significantly not withstanding the very generous support from u. S. Taxpayer and u. S. Congress and in particular through the state department. Not withstanding refugees are suffering the consequence. That finally led to impoverishment. We have data from the world bank clearly reflecting that refugees in jordan and lebanon are in a big way talking major 80 to 90 are living below the poverty line. That is a progressive impoverishment and sustained despair that created the situation that led so many hundreds of thousands of people to try to find another place where they can put their children in school. It was not more complicated a motivation as youre trying with Higher Education for families to protect their children just as you or i would. When i was in jordan i went to syria every opportunity i could. It was such an authentic place. Beautiful place, forget the food. What was remarkable about it is that it really was a middle income country. Now by no means it is, a middle income country where like everywhere else people want their children to go t