Al Mahwit, Yemen

Photographer: Ibrahim Malla

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Aisha Mohammad Saleh Al-Abbasy, 28, is a volunteer teacher in Al Mahwit, a mountainous region of eastern Yemen. Every day she walks around a kilometre to work, along rough stone paths in temperatures that in summer can rise as high as 45 degrees Celsius. Aisha started teaching three years ago as part of a Yemen Red Crescent programme to reduce illiteracy. Now, every week she works for sixteen hours giving courses in reading and writing, health and baby care to a group of twenty women and children. She became a teacher after being trained by the Yemen Red Crescent, a humanitarian organisation with similar goals to the Red Cross. At high school, her plan had been to become a teacher in a regular school. But after getting married, she decided she wanted to help other women improve their lives.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Photographer: Imran Ahmed

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In Dubai’s Jadaf shipyard, brothers Hareej and Saleh Al Mari are keeping their family’s boatbuilding traditions alive. Using knowledge passed down from their father and grandfather, they are making one of the biggest seafaring dhows in history. Their vessel, set to weigh 600 tonnes when completed, is being constructed entirely by hand. And instead of plans or drawings, Hareej and Saleh rely solely on their memories to guide the twenty carpenters they have working away twelve hours a day, six days a week. With a crew of forty, the boat will be able to sail up to seven days between ports, enough to take cargo to Somalia, a journey of some 3,000 kilometres. Hareej recalls that he was ten when his father started teaching him boatbuilding. Today, he is passing on his knowledge to his two young sons.

Adiyaman, Turkey

Photographer: Aydin Cetinbostanoglu

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Ferhat teaches in a village school in Adiyaman, near the Euphrates river in south-east Turkey. The school only has one class, and this year just sixteen students. Every morning, Ferhat travels 70 kilometres to the school by bus. After checking the register, lessons start. He begins with his youngest students, then switches to the older ones, then to the ones in between. He often finds himself teaching three different subjects at once. Across Turkey’s countryside, teachers such as Ferhat prepare their students as best they can for adult life in rural areas. The expectations of most of their students are not high. Girls want to be midwives or kindergarten teachers. Boys want to help run the family business. In his spare time, Ferhat studies law. Every summer he travels to Istanbul to take another round of exams, paying his way by working in a restaurant. At the end of the long vacation, another grade completed, he returns to Adiyaman for a new school year with his tiny band of students.

Damascus, Syria

Photographer: Ibrahim Malla

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Aida Shaaer is in her sixties. For five years, she has taught literacy to displaced women at a Syrian Arab Red Crescent centre in a rural area of Damascus, the Syrian capital. Every day, she travels 20 kilometres to work, crossing many check points along the way. Her travel costs take up almost all her salary. The women in her class have all been moved to Damascus after losing their family homes in Syria’s ongoing civil war. Attending Aida’s classes each day offers them a few hours respite from life in the temporary shelters that are now their homes. Many of them are using their new knowledge to teach their own children, who cannot go to school because of the war.

Bir Zayt, Palestine

Photographer: Hamde Abu Rahma

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Raid Hananiya, a Christian born in Jerusalem, is the only person making candles by hand in Bir Zayt, a town in Palestine’s West Bank area. Now in his mid-forties, he learned to make candles in his mid-teens, taught by his cousins who ran a candle-making company. In the early 1990s, he started his own candle-making business. Since then, imports of mass-produced candles have led to most other candle-makers in Bir Zayt shutting up shop. Raid only makes candles on Fridays and Sundays. He spends the rest of the week working as a builder to earn enough money to support himself and his family. To keep candle-making alive in Palestine, he is sharing his knowledge with his fifteen-yearold son, Isa. “I’m very focused on teaching him everything about making candles so that he can teach his children one day,” says Raid. “I hope people will start focusing more on these handmade products again. For me it is not just a business. Candles bring light to the darkness, which is exactly what we need in this difficult life.” Raid and Isa sell most of the candles they make to churches in nearby Bethlehem and Ramallah.

Kawergosk Refugee Camp, Iraq

Photographer: Reza Visual Academy

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

At the Kawergosk refugee camp, near the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, Reza runs a photography workshop for Syrian children displaced by war in their home country. Seventeen of them, aged ten to fifteen, are taking part. Using cameras provided by Reza, an Iranian- French photographer of Azerbaijani origin, they are learning how to become reporters, taking pictures and sharing their experiences with people in other parts of the world. The point, says Reza, is not to teach the techniques of photography, but to show how a camera can reveal one’s vision to others. The project is one of many he has run over the last three-plus decades for young people and women living in or from conflict-ridden societies through his Reza Visual Academy.

Fars, Iran

Photographer: Valerie Leonard

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition)

Yaghoubi Liaghat teaches the children of nomads in southern Iran’s Fars province. His twelve students are all from a Turkic-speaking community. He teaches them Farsi, arithmetic, history, literature and science. In Iran, schools for nomads are known as “white tents”. The reason for this dates back to 1951 and the introduction of a new education system that included providing teachers and tents that would move with nomads as they migrated between their summer and winter camping grounds. Today, Yaghoubi still hosts his classes in a white tent. His teaching equipment is minimal. Most of what he uses he bought himself, paying for it out of his monthly salary of US$350. Ever since two of his students were run over and killed by a truck on their way home, Yaghoubi takes his pupils to and from their classes in his own car.

Valerie Leonard's photo-story won second place in our worldwide open call for submissions.