Trailblazing: Sama Wareh shares her unique story

By Helen Deverell '19, Global Scholar candidate (photo by Diego Jaime '19, Global Scholar candidate)
 
Artist, naturalist, filmmaker, humanitarian, and California transplant Sama Wareh shared her experience providing aid to refugees in Lebanon as she spoke to students and faculty from Flintridge Prep, Westridge, and Poly. Wareh, a professor of environmental education at Cal State Fullerton, credits her late uncle, a homeopathic healer, with having been the first to instill in her a love for plants, animals, spirit, and life. One central tenet of homeopathy can be summarized as “the body knows what it is doing,” a sentiment closely aligned with Wareh’s belief that sometimes taking action is something you are compelled to do. “Nothing is as important,” she says, “as just starting somewhere.”

As a child, Wareh and her family often visited Damascus, the capital of Syria. These trips to Syria were ones she remembered vividly when, as a young adult, turmoil and instability began to plague her mother country. Wareh was studying film around the time of the 2011 Syrian massacre, when the government began to bomb their own villages in the north. She revealed that she first understood how bad the situation was when her uncle, "who never complains," turned to her and said, “Sama. We’re running out of water.”

Before Wareh even knew what she could do to help, she knew she wanted to try. She believed steadfastly in the power of art as healing and became interested in filming a documentary for her senior thesis. She knew she wanted the film to have something to do with the people whose suffering she had witnessed firsthand. There were some 17,000 Syrian refugees displaced all across the Middle East. So Wareh packed her camera, trusted that her body knew what it was doing, and went where her passion, talents, and abilities could be put to the most use: Lebanon.

With funding she had raised in the U.S., Wareh was able to provide relief to countless refugees through helping to fund schools, paying struggling families’ rent, and emboldening children to process their trauma through art. She dedicated her time to, among other things, learning about ways in which climate change disproportionately affects developing nations and how corrupt Middle Eastern governments misuse foreign aid. She also learned about disaster capitalism and the progress Sierra Leone made in their construction of new schools. She listened to her neighbors, her art students, her friends and parents, and she began to address their needs.

Following her talk, Wareh left the group with this inspiring charge: "Don’t ask how you can change the world. Discover what makes you come alive. Go do that and you will change the world.” Wareh took her passion and she used it to heal.
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