Shafaki Blog

Having reached 10 years since the day of its establishment, Resala has now expanded its Children with a Future program targeting street children in Egypt.

Resala first started the program with a reception center at its Helwan branch two years back. After the success of the program there Resala has recently expanded its program with street kids in a number of its branches including its Maadi and Nasr City branches.

The program offers children with food, clothing as well as education at each reception center at the branches mentioned. Children also get to paint, draw, play and practice a number of fun and useful activities including trips. Resala volunteers accompany the kids, educate and supervise them.

A Resala Kid

Yesterday was the first Typing Day ever at Resala Nasr City. While sighted people can easily open a printed book and start reading it, the blind need the book to be printed in braille in order for them to be able to read it. While OCR software has gone a long way in converting printed text into computer readable text after scanning, yet most OCR software for the Arabic language have still a long way to go and produce a high error rate. The solution was to use ‘human’ OCR, a group of volunteers doing the typing of the printed books in order to be computer readable. The books then can easily be printed in braille for the blind to read or simply read on the computer using text-to-speech software.

The Nasr City branch of Resala came up with a creative idea which is to designate the first Saturday of each month and call it the typing day during which volunteers flock to Resala Nasr City from 1 pm to 9 pm and start collaborating on typing books for the blind. A nice twist on the monthly event that started only yesterday was to keep life track of how many pages each volunteer has written. This made the day the more exciting having volunteers competing for the highest number of pages being written.

Although I did not score highest in terms of number of pages typed, yet I really enjoyed the day. The nice thing for me also was that there was someone dictating me which made the process for me way easier. Actually five different people alternated dictating me one after the other. It was a fun and useful day. I can’t wait till next month when the second typing day is held.

For more information about the event check out the Facebook group for the Resala Typing Day.

Last Friday two volunteers and myself took a bus full of school students from in front of Resala, Nasr City branch, and off to Fayed. It was an amazing one-day trip. Despite the rain that started a few hours after noon, and ended shortly after that, the kids enjoyed the day greatly.

Fayed beach palm trees

I was taken by the beauty of the chalet we stayed at the momen we set foot out of the bus. It was surrounded with a colorful garden not to mention the soul refreshing air that filled the place, a far cry from the highly polluted air of Cairo.

Boys laughing in water

Today was my first day delivering English language lessons to second secondary school students at Resala on a volunteer basis. I was delighted during the lesson to be blessed with such responsive students. It seems the students as well were happy to have me as their English teacher at Resala. I was rewarded near the end of the lesson with what I considered to be a sincere token of apprication. They insisted on giving me a pack full pack of it.

Mint Pack

Yesterday I was privileged to join a group of volunteers heading from the Nasr City branch of Resal to Bani Swief to explore some of the poor families at villages there.

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On our way to Bani Swief, one of the more experience volunteers in the Poverty Assitance activity of Resala provided us with a brief training session on how to explore poor families.