EMBRACING THE WORLD
Skerry, right, discusses her work helping to provide local young people in Jordan with meaningful skills and opportunities
Working for UNICEF in Jordan, Sylvia Skerry ’14 is giving young Syrian refugees a shot at a better life—BY KATE LAWLESS
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t’s 6 p.m. in Amman, Jordan, and Sylvia Skerry ’14 is a few minutes late for a Zoom call. It’s her day off from her job at United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and she’s just returned from lunch with a friend. Finishing up lunch at 6 p.m.? She explains: “Lunch in Jordan is…you arrive at 1, you eat at 3, you have afterlunch tea, then dessert, then fruit….” Her friend’s mom had prepared traditional maqlubeh—literally, in Arabic, “upside-down”—a dish of rice, vegetables, and chicken cooked in a large pot and then inverted onto a platter and served with yogurt and a cucum-
ber and tomato salad. The labor-intensive dish takes hours to make, and that’s why Skerry says, with a knowing smile, “You just try to get invited over.” Skerry seems at home overseas in this, her third year in Jordan, where she works overseeing three centers that provide skill-building programs and a safe space for youth in the Za’atari and Azraq Syrian refugee camps. Raised in Rhode Island, she boarded at Williston for four years, then attended the College of Charleston, where she took a semester abroad in Morocco and three years of Arabic. However, her blossoming interest in the Middle East began while a student
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at Williston. She took World Religions with Tom Johnson, and loved it. Her family was secular, she said, and she was fascinated to find that religious studies was about more than just faith. “It’s about culture, history,” she said. In college, she kept being drawn back to religious studies, taking a class in Arab and Islamic World Studies and signing up for Arabic language classes. She struggled initially. “Williston prepared me for college,” she said, “but nothing prepared me for Arabic.” Some tutoring helped her get up to speed. After attending Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, to study Arabic (she now speaks the Jordanian
dialect fluently), she began working for UNICEF in early 2019. In her role as youth programme associate, Skerry travels each day from Amman, Jordan’s cosmopolitan capital, to the camps. The teams in the youth centers there implement programs that allow 16- to 24-yearolds to develop soft and technical skills and then take concrete steps toward their goals. Counselors also refer young people to services and help them apply for scholarships for higher education. One program encourages young people to find innovative solutions to everyday problems in the camps,
