Together let’s give them a future!

Students from several of Oxfordshire’s leading schools are coming together on Wednesday 5 February to support the education of much less fortunate children – Syrian children in a refugee camp in Lebanon and orphans in the slums of Zambia.

This has a special resonance for our family. We used to live in Syria and loved the country and its people. We were in Syria in 1997 when we heard the tragic news of our daughter Cecily’s death in a road accident in Zambia. She had been in her gap year before going up to Cambridge and had been working with a local NGO in the slums of Zambia’s second city helping the community to look after the thousands of orphans created by the AIDS pandemic. The family decided that enabling destitute children to go to school would be the best possible way to commemorate her. Cecily’s Fund was born, and Syrian friends were some of our first supporters. Zambia is still suffering the effects of the AIDS pandemic and there is still desperate need for Cecily’s Fund’s support if Zambia’s orphaned and vulnerable children are to have a future.

But now Syrians need our help in the same way. We are therefore delighted to be working with Embrace the Middle East to enable Syrian refugee children in Lebanon also to go to school.

Thank you for your support.

Alison and Basil Eastwood