Social workers assisting more than a quarter million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East have an ally in Hussein Soliman.

Soliman, a professor in SIUC's School of Social Work, developed a two-year program to upgrade the skills of about 320 social workers affiliated with the United Nations Relief & Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. The program's goal is to have better-trained professional social workers providing improved services to individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities.

The program, which is being taught in Arabic, consists of eight courses. Last December and January, Soliman spent nearly six weeks with another professor teaching the first two courses to social workers in Amman, Jordan; Damascus, Syria; and Beirut, Lebanon. Social workers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will participate for the first time this summer.

The international collaboration between SIUC and the United Nations is unique, according to Beth Kuttab, the director of the Relief and Social Services Department at the Amman headquarters of the U.N. agency.

Kuttab eagerly took Soliman up on his offer last summer to assist her group.

"The social workers comprise about 40 percent of the staff, and are the agency's key link with the most vulnerable segment of the refugee population," she says.

"Better-qualified social workers will enable us to provide higher-quality services to refugees who are the most needy and have no other sources, or insufficient sources, of social safety net assistance."

Most of the social workers are Palestinians who have caseloads of about 250 refugee families apiece. The majority of these staff members have a degree in sociology or the social sciences, but lack specific training in social work skills and methodologies.

The training that Soliman designed includes group interaction and role-playing--quite a contrast to the straight lectures and memorization most commonly used in the Middle East, he says.

Soliman, who has citizenship in both Egypt and the United States, spent summer 2004 conducting a needs assessment and meeting with social workers and refugee families in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

That established credibility with the staff: Soliman did not design the eight courses for the training program until he had an in-depth understanding of the kind of training the social workers needed.

Soliman has selected six international faculty members to teach the courses during the summer and winter breaks over the next two years. The program, Kuttab says, will "really revolutionize our entire approach to social work/social services."

--by Pete Rosenbery, Media & Communication Resources

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