My friend Mohammad (Patreon)

Want to see one of the most embarrassing photos ever taken of me? Buckle up your eyeballs and cue the self-deprecating drum roll.

The competition is tough, but no, it's not this one:

Or any of these:

Or any freeze frame from when I was in that Chinese sitcom.

The photo that I'm more embarrassed about than all the ones above, is this one:

Why? Let me tell you the backstory.

Six Swedish students painting a door in Nairobi - the backstory

It's 2008 and I have just finished a year as an exchange student in China. I'm fresh off the airplane, sitting on my bed in my childhood home, trying to process what my parents had just told me. While I was out traveling, they had gotten a divorce*, and our house was up for sale. They hadn't wanted to tell me, because they were worried that it would ruin my year in China.

Like a giant piece of shit clogging a toilet, the news completely obstructed my tear ducts. So I sat there, dry-eyed and disoriented, in what was about to be my former bedroom. And I made a plan: I was going to move to Kenya. I didn't want to be home for the divorce, and there was a Swedish boarding school in Nairobi open for enrollment.

*The divorce was a really good decision! They're both so much happier now and both have amazing new partners. I'm actually heading to my dad's wedding in Italy this weekend, and my mom is getting married this autumn.

Fast forward through awkward boarding school life, constant sunburns, falling in and out of love with every classmate, learning Kiswahili, and then one day loading up in a chartered bus to "go help build a rural school."

For two hours, thirty Swedish students took hundreds of photos while moving dirt around in wheelbarrow and painting doors and window frames. When we had finished helping, we went back to our walled boarding school campus, and jumped in the pool to cool off.

It's a small, lived example of something that I see a lot of on YouTube today. It's everything from filming giving unsheltered people sandwiches, to family vloggers making exploitative content about their adopted children. Or say, six Swedish students painting a school door in Nairobi. It's being helpful purely for content, and it begs to ask who is actually helping whom.

All of this is to say that I've avoided making any type of content where I'm positioned as "helping" someone in a vulnerable position, and whenever I've been approached by charities to collaborate, I've almost always said no. As much as I want to wield my internet powers for good, I'm terrified of perpetuating harmful narratives and of portraying myself as the hero in somebody else's story.

(Moreover, I think charities often help uphold the very systems that make the people they help vulnerable in the first place, and it can be more of a cul-de-sac than a path to significantly changing systems and lives. I'm more of a fan of work focused on recognizing the interdependence of people and building power rather than polishing up the short end of the stick, but that's a story for a different day.)

Ok, time to climb down from my high horse, standing on a soapbox, on a hill I'm not sure that I want to die on. Enter Mohammad.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from the UNHCR, telling me about a Syrian carpenter who lives in a refugee camp in Jordan. His name is Mohammad, and he has spent the last couple of years building toys for all the kids who live there.

Did I maybe want to go there and build something with him? I said yes. The premise just felt so different from all the other things I had gotten pitched. It wasn't one person helping the other, or being a tourist in the pain of somebody else's life. Just a meeting between two people with similar interests and very different stories.

So I packed my bag and flew to Jordan, and spent 30 sweaty minutes in an interrogation room trying to explain why I was trying to bring so many weird contraptions into the country.

The body position of "dear border patrol agent, I promise my intentions are pure"

One of the things I brought was this sign that I made as a gift for Mohammad. It says "Mohammad's toy shop" in Arabic.

I can't tell you much about the shoot, but what I can say is that meeting Mohammad was absolutely nothing like I expected it to be. I laughed, I cried, I was angry, I was happy, I couldn't wait to leave and I was so sad when I did.

Mohammad referred to me as his daughter at the end of our time together, which would have been more special if he didn't have 28 children already. But I have so much genuine love and respect for that stubborn old man. I'm so grateful that I got to meet him, and I'm working on ways to keep being in his life even after leaving Jordan.

The video will be out on June 20th, for World Refugee Day. Can't wait for you to meet my new friend.

XOXO
Simone