In cooperation with the late Dr. Frank C. Laubach, Mohammed Shami established Laubach Literacy, West Bank, in 1955. The organization stopped working after Mohammad Shami’s death in 1986. In 2003, ProLiteracy renewed its partnership with the Mohammad Shami Foundation as the organization launched a women’s literacy, development, and peace initiative in the village of Beit-Ur-Tahta, 12 miles west of Ramallah. To renew their father’s work and legacy and to advance tolerance and peace in this troubled region, Shami’s sons and daughters began the Mohammed Shami Foundation. They have built a girls’ school on the site where their father’s women’s literacy classroom once stood. Today the Mohammad Al-Shami Girls School also offers a Women’s Empowerment Center with three curricular and functional tracks of traditional literacy training, computer assisted job skills, and socio-educational intervention program to return early marriage girls to school to continue their education. Individualized instruction and continuing education are the main methods in reaching out for students.
“I didn’t study or work, then I joined this training program which is very exciting and useful. I learned much from it, most of the software programs which I didn’t know before. Now I have started thinking about getting a job and using my new computer skills.”
-Nesreen Suliman