Syrian who made UAE his home gives back to his war-torn country

Dubizzle worker has helped launch two initiatives, iGive and MyDoctor, in the past two years that aim to help Syrians with career advice and with confidential medical advice.

Bashar Bahra, Founder of iGive, and his team provide free training courses for fellow Syrians. Jeffrey E Biteng / The National

DUBAI // Bashar Bahra is one of more than 100,000 Syrians, according to government figures, who have made a home in the UAE since the start of the civil war in Syria.

With a bachelor’s degree in IT engineering and a master’s in business administration, it did not take the 29-year-old long to find work as a customer relationship management specialist at Dubizzle after he moved from Damascus to Dubai in 2012 but he was aware that the situation was much worse for millions of other Syrians.

So, in the evenings and on weekends, he devotes his time to the two non-profit initiatives he has helped to launch in the past two years: iGive, which provides Syrians and others in Damascus, Dubai and Beirut with free, face-to-face professional training; and MyDoctor, a free internet service through which Arabic speakers can message doctors and receive private, online consultations.

“We wanted to support the community to support each other,” Mr Bahra said of iGive. “That’s where the idea was born. Education is a way to do something positive under very, very bad circumstances.”

Demand is high: an upcoming course Mr Bahra is teaching had 56 people apply for 12 spaces, and about 400 students have already benefited in Dubai alone from coaching in skills such as business, English, CV writing and project management.

One of them is Rahaf Jalanbo, 27, who moved to the UAE from Damascus in 2013. She is now an administrative assistant at Dubai toy company NewBoy. She advises Syrians in the UAE “to attend every course that they can, to get better chances when applying for jobs”.

While Mr Bahra was instrumental in getting iGive off the ground, it was Nour Alsharif, 29, a Syrian doctor working at the University of California’s Irvine Medical Centre, who came up with the idea for MyDoctor.

“I wanted to continue my dream in medicine,” he said, “but I wanted to feel I was doing something for my family and my friends who stayed in Syria.”

MyDoctor launched in August last year with the help of several other Syrian doctors, as well as Mr Bahra, who worked on the project’s organisational structure and now leads an online support group for others like him, who suffer from multiple sclerosis. Similar groups relating to cancer, stroke and diabetes are in the works.

Dr Alsharif has even more ambitious plans in mind. He is trying to persuade physicians in Syria and other Arab countries to offer discounted examinations and treatment to patients referred to them via MyDoctor, and he would like to form partnerships with hospitals and universities. MyDoctor is unfunded, and all the physicians and administrators involved offer their services free, but “at some point”, he said, “you need money, you need supporters”.

The rules that all trainees must agree to sign up will remain the same: “No politics, no religion.”

For more information, visit igive-syria.org and www.facebook.com/mydoctorsyria.