Aziza Nofal believes age today is not what it used to be. “We are not like our mothers and grandmothers used to be,” she says. “I am 61, and I have no intention of growing old. I have a lot of friends my age, and we are all very active,” Nofal says. An Egyptian translator working and living in London, Nofal was in Cairo last month following a nine-month stint as a volunteer in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon.

She has since returned to Beirut for a 10-day visit to the camps and will probably be in England when this magazine hits the stands.

The obvious questions would be how she found herself in Sabra and Shatila and why is she busily trekking the globe. The answer is volunteerism. Nofal discovered volunteering five years ago, when she decided she wanted to give something back.

It all started when she took a diploma in public service interpreting. “At the time, I was working at an oil company doing admin work and being bored. I am a widow, my kids are all grown up, I thought I would do something different,” she remembers. The diploma would allow Nofal to interpret in courts, hospitals and for the police.

It was during this time that Nofal started volunteering for a medical organization called the Chain of Hope, started by the brilliant UK-based Egyptian heart surgeon Sir Magdy Yacoub. The organization brings children from developing countries to England for complex heart operations.

“The chain means that everybody involved in the process is a volunteer,” she says. Children from Egypt and other parts of the Middle East go to England for the operations, and that’s where Nofal’s part begins. “The parents have probably never left their village before. We volunteer our time to interpret between the medical staff and the parents,” she says. “We take them to the shops and are with them through the whole operation, because it is always a very dangerous procedure where the child may go in and not come out.”

At this point, Nofal was ready to move on and recount what she did next. But the experience with the Chain of Hope sounded fascinating. “It was pretty amazing,” she agrees. “The children are absolute heroes as far as I’m concerned, their parents next. You know what the medical services are like here [in Egypt]. They’ve been through the whole thing, they have been poked, lied to, and they come to us at the end of their tether. This is their last hope. And they don’t complain. They are told: Do this, sit here, take another injection, so on, and they say ‘Okay.’ But halfway through we can see that they are noticing a big difference in the treatment.”

Nofal says that Yacoub, the brain behind the organization, meets every family and talks to the children. “He is so reassuring, so soothing. The night before the surgery or early on the same day he visits them, getting to know the child,” she explains. “Then I go down with the child and the parents. The parents usually stay outside, while I go in with the child until they put him or her to sleep. The professor is usually there throughout this. I stay with the parents during the operation; it is usually a very long process, seven to eight hours, which is very nerve-wrecking.”

Depending on the surgery, families stay in England from one week to three or four weeks. “We had a little girl, baby Aya, who was four months old. She was the cutest little thing, but she had a lot of problems so she stayed in intensive care for three weeks,” Nofal recalls. “After the operation, they kept her open for three days so as not to put her through the trauma of cutting her open again if they needed to. Her mother is a very young woman, and it was her last chance. It was very humbling, what else can you say.”

Nofal also recalls little Mena, an 11-month-old boy from Shubra, whose mother had previously lost nine babies. Mena contracted chicken pox and had to stay in quarantine; Nofal, who never had chicken pox, had to be vaccinated against the disease. As with other heart patients with his condition, Mena’s skin looked blue because of his bad circulation. But the minute he came out of surgery, his face had become a healthy pink. It was stories like this that kept the volunteers like Nofal and her friends going.

The volunteers in the Chain of Hope contribute to all parts of the process, volunteering their time, homes, food or money. “It is a wonderful process. Your average surgery costs 30,000 to 40,000 sterling pounds [LE 247,000 to LE 329,000], but the families end up paying no more than 3,000 or 4,000 [sterling, LE 24,700 to LE 32,900] for admin charges,” Nofal explains. “The Chain also comes here, and they have been around the world. Recently they have been to Mozambique and Zambia. They have built heart hospitals in Mozambique and Ethiopia, and are building one in Aswan now.”

Excited about her newfound passion, Nofal was told by a friend of her son’s that Amnesty International was looking for volunteers.

“That was another incredible experience. I worked with the Middle East program, so we never had a dull moment. It is very intense: We dealt with political prisoners, families of prisoners, dealt with issues of abuse. I did a lot of translation for them. I was made redundant from my work in 2006 so I had more time to spend volunteering. Later I started to do short contracts for them when there was a heavy load of work.”

One of the primary tasks on which Nofal worked involved tallying the more than 1,000 civilians deaths, including women and children, during the 2006 Israeli war against Lebanon. “It was a horrendous assignment because I had to document all the people who got killed, how they had died, where and when,” she remembers.

When this assignment was completed, Nofal put out an email to several organizations in Lebanon, saying she was ready to do volunteer work. “I got responses from three organizations; the one that looked particularly interesting was the JCC (The Joint Committee of Christian Churches). The woman who runs it in Lebanon is called Sylvia Haddad, who is an amazing woman. They run programs in five camps, offering vocational training to the youth: hairdressing, barbering, computer courses, electronics, etc. One of the centers is an agricultural center, and they grow organic produce and sell it.”

Nofal was to work at the Sabra camp. She went for a two-day visit, decided it looked fantastic, and went back to work for three months. She stayed for nine months.

“I worked with children from the age of four to 24. I am not an English teacher, but there is always something new to try. I worked in Sabra Center, which was situated inside the Sabra camp. Sabra is an open camp, so the Lebanese army can go in, whereas Shatila is a closed camp even though it is a few streets away. The Lebanese army is not allowed in there, and it is policed by the Palestinian factions. To take a walk inside Shatila camp can be quite interesting. You see very young men walking with different sized Kalashnikovs.

“One time I went through with a young Englishwoman. She was tall and blonde,” she continues. “We stayed on the main streets, but then I started feeling uncomfortable as I noticed several men with Kalashnikovs following us. One of my students was standing and I waved at him. He waved me away. The next day I told him, ‘Mahmoud what happened, were you ignoring me?’ and he replied ‘No miss, a fight broke out after you left and three people died. We were discussing what to do’.”

Nofal beams when she talks about her students in Sabra.

“There were three KG classes, in addition to the vocational courses. In the afternoon, students from the local schools come over for tutoring and help with their homework. There were two other teachers plus myself, and at any given time we had 25 to 30 kids,” Nofal says. “It was an exercise in futility everyday to get these poor kids to do their work, not to do it for them. They had to study so many of their courses in English, and they were stumped. And then when they graduate they are told ‘We do not hire Palestinians,’ so they opt to drop out and go for vocational training. We were successful in getting a couple of kids to go back to school.”

Financial considerations are a big factor in the dropout rate, so Nofal started raising money to be used towards scholarships.

“We had a little girl, four-year-old Amna, who died, so we have a scholarship in her name for KG students. It is silly money in the larger scheme of things. Various other things at the center needed to be done. There are three-hour power cuts in Beirut. So if you are sitting at the center learning hairdressing or electronics, or trying to do your homework, the power cuts can be very discouraging,” she recalls. “We wanted to raise $1,800 but ended up with $5,000 so we bought two generators, built a room for them in the back, installed eight ceiling fans, and bought enough fuel to keep them running until January.

“I want to go back and leave them some more money. The playground needs attention too; it is a tiny room with one plastic slide that the kids take turns on. We’re hoping we can brighten it up, buy some toys, etc., since we still have some money left over. Throughout the time I was there, my friends kept sending small sums saying, ‘Aziza, buy books, buy supplies,’ so I did. We also got some drawing materials so the children can draw instead of chasing after each other as they wait for homework assistance.”

Nofal says her work in Sabra is not done. “It is not a relationship that has ended. I am going to spend 10 days there, then I am traveling but will go back to Beirut to see if there’s anything that needs to be done.”

Volunteering has given new meaning to Nofal’s life, and she keeps wondering why more people are not doing it. “Volunteering is something people in the Arab world need to do. Yes you need the checkbooks, but you also need the actual physical involvement. In the US, women go around hospitals in their striped aprons distributing books and seeing if people need directions,” she points out. “We’re talking about simple things. Loving your country is not just words. It is time to put your money where your mouth is.”

Before we part, I ask Nofal whether she is ready to move back to Egypt and maybe spread the idea of volunteerism, but she says she is not ready to come back, since she has become an international citizen.

“I left Egypt in 1963 as part of a student exchange program. I was in high school, and spent a year with an American family. There were four of us, and the experience unlocked something in all of us. I have not stopped traveling since,” she says. “Now it is easier for me to continue doing what I am doing the way I’m doing it. I do what I do for whoever needs it without looking at who they are. The idea of doing something for your community and not just for yourself is something that needs to be more widespread in the Arab world.”

“What I would like to see is the older people getting more involved. They have more time and more experience. A lot of the older people think, ‘I can’t do anything.’ My mother’s generation sat back and grew old. We are not growing old — Sixty years old is no longer what 60 years old used to be.” et