A Coquitlam entrepreneur is helping lead a Canada-wide effort to collect donated laptops and tablets for children whose schools were devastated by a massive blast in Beirut last month.
The Aug. 4 explosion was set off when a fire ignited both fireworks and 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored at the site for years. The powerful explosion levelled the city’s port and cut a massive swath of destruction that has left over 200 dead, 6,000 injured and roughly 300,000 homeless.
“My British friend lived in Lebanon for 20 years,” said Coquitlam’s Mohammad Darwish. “His entire life was destroyed in a flash.”
During the day, Darwish runs hi-tech company that sells software to Fortune 500 companies. But on the side, he volunteers leading the Vancouver chapter of Lebnet, a organization that links professionals with Lebanese roots across Canada and the U.S.
After the explosion, the members of Lebnet came together to try and figure out how they could help, eventually focusing in on three schools caught in the blast.
Students are preparing to return to classes at the end of September, but with so much property damage and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many are finding they don’t have the technology to teach students in a safe and effective way.
In what many have described as a “triple crisis,” the people of Beirut had already been struggling through an economic collapse when COVID-19 hit.
“There’s instability. Then COVID hit. Then this hit,” said Darwish, who fled Lebanon with his family in the 1970s at the outset of the country’s civil war, later settling in Coquitlam in the early 1990s.
“It wasn’t easy to get the education,” he added. “That’s one reason why my parents decided to move.”
Now Darwish is collecting laptops and tablets — anything that runs Office 365 so the students can do their homework — from across Metro Vancouver.
When the group receives a donated laptop or tablet — they clean them up and send them off to Montreal where they’re being collected. So far they have about 30 devices, and once they collect 150, they plan on sending them all over to the students in Beirut.
“The whole idea here is we’re trying to help children and kids go back to school and get an opportunity,” said Darwish.
“So when they grow up they can make the right decisions and move the country forward.”
Anyone looking to donate a laptop, tablet or other device can contact Darwish directly by phone at 604- 816 1215 or by email at [email protected].
