Organization: Questscope,
www.questscope.org.
What it does: Provides education, mentoring and entrepreneurship training to at-risk
youth in the Middle East and
northern Africa.
Founded: 1988
Where: Based in Amman,
Jordan, with programs in
Jordan, Syria, northern Iraq,
Sudan, Egypt, Yemen and
Mauritania.
Participation:
65 to 70 staff;
20,000 people served directly,
200,000 indirectly.
Annual budget: $4 million to
$5 million
Motivation: “After I finished
a whole bunch of endeavors,
including three years in
Southeast Asia in the mid-
’70s, I went to the American
University of Beirut as the assistant dean of public health. I was
there during the ’ 82 invasion of West Beirut. I also
worked in a volunteer clinic, and during the invasion
I would go to underground car parks and determine
who among the refugees, sick or injured, needed what
level of care and either get them to it or it to them.
Many of these Palestinian civilians later returned to [the]
Sabra and Shatila [refugee camps], where they were
massacred [in September 1982], and that’s when I
decided I didn’t want to be an academician anymore. I wanted to be involved
in the communities where invisible and voiceless people lived, and Questscope
was born in my head.”
Carolina connection: “When I went to college at Chapel Hill, my grandmother was very interested in knowing I hadn’t changed. Chapel Hill was a
very wicked place. Those were the days of the free speech movement, and my
family wanted to be sure I carried the values they put in me, those very solid
North Carolina values, where the community matters, the way you treat people matters. North Carolinians carry a fierce independence but a fierce sense of
equity and fair play.”
Advice for others: “Make sure there are a couple of people that can talk
to you about anything they see, whether it’s pleasant or not. This will also
protect you from your successes. Usually we think of the need to be protected
from failure, but actually it’s our successes that can mislead us the most.”
— Lucy Hood ’ 83
‘I can tell you about two young guys —
Imad and Iyad. At age 14, they came to me
after having dropped out of school. They wanted
an education, and they realized they’d be
making tea for guys in body shops for the rest
of their lives if they didn’t do something.
That’s when I started a two-year process
of drinking tea with people from the department
of education, and we came up with an
Curt Rhodes ’ 76
