Dust Astronauts: Teen’s Nonprofit Makes a Difference for Refugees in Za’atari
Za’atari Refugee Camp sits fifteen minutes from the Syria-Jordan border. The facility was designed for 5,000 people, but currently struggles to support 80,000 Syrian refugees. It has been over 12 years since the beginning of the war in Syria, which displaced more than 12 million people. Today, more than half of the refugees in Za’atari are under the age of 17 — most of them have spent their entire lives in the camp. With limited career opportunities, these children are growing up into an uncertain and unstable future. When 13-year-old Scratcher Tiger learned about the challenging conditions in Za’atari, he was moved to help. He founded Dust Astronauts, an organization dedicated to running Scratch coding camps for young people in refugee camps like Za’atari to open up their career prospects and help them achieve their dreams.
Building Blocks
Tiger was first introduced to Scratch while attending school in Abu Dhabi. Though he appreciated the user-friendly interface and ability to share with peers around the world, he quickly discovered that the capabilities of Scratch went deeper than his curriculum provided. Tiger dove into more advanced Scratch functions like loops and variables on his own, and he soon became confident enough to teach his peers in school clubs.
Tiger’s interests aren’t limited to computer science. As an aspiring filmmaker, he makes documentaries about pressing social issues. He’s particularly interested in producing films that shed light on humanitarian crises, especially those that it seems like the world has forgotten. He learned about the ongoing challenges in Za’atari on a fact-finding mission in preparation for a documentary. Without Jordanian citizenship, refugees were limited to seasonal jobs that were physically taxing and low-paying. They could aspire to “borderless jobs” — roles that could be done globally from inside the refugee camp, like app engineering or website development — but they did not have access to the job training or infrastructure they required to help them develop technical skills and achieve sustainable employment. After Tiger’s first trip to Za’atari in October 2023, he was motivated to catalyze his empathy into action.
“It truly gave me a grasp of how fortunate I am, and I wanted to use this opportunity I have to give back,” he says. “Since I have the training and requisite skills, I want to use them to improve the lives of others.”
Ready for Liftoff
Emily Harburg, Tiger’s aunt and the co-founder of the women-focused coding education nonprofit Brave Initiatives and the incarcerate individuals training program Brave Behind Bars, is one of Tiger’s biggest supporters. When Tiger shared more about Za’atari with Emily, she committed to supporting his work. Their shared interest in coding shaped their approach to helping the young people in the refugee camp. By teaching young people to code, Tiger and Emily hoped to give them the skills they needed to obtain borderless jobs and realize a brighter future. Because Scratch is easy for beginners to grasp and is translated into Arabic, it was the perfect tool to teach in their coding camp.
In their first visit to Jordan in October 2023, Tiger collaborated with nonprofit MercyCorps to learn more about the challenges facing the students, including technology infrastructure deficits, social barriers for female education, and work permit issues. “We were surprised that there were so many people in this very small camp, but with so much optimism, positive energy, and constructive potential to give to the world,” says Emily.
In footage from this first trip (later made into the documentary Dust Astronauts), young people share their dreams with Tiger: they hope to be doctors, artists, and surgeons; to become engineers to “rebuild Syria”; or simply to be financially independent and earn their own income “without needing help from anybody.” They also share their fears — because of the volume of humanitarian crises competing for donors’ resources, MercyCorps was at risk of running out of funding for inclusive education in Za’atari, and refugees worried that their education and aspirations would “fade to dust.”
One student shared her dream to become an astronaut. Her story inspired the nonprofit’s name, Dust Astronauts: a way for young people to rise out of devastating conditions and accomplish their goals.
The Sky’s the Limit
Tiger and Emily returned to Za’atari in December of 2023 to run a coding camp for 40 girls and boys aged 14–16. Based on Emily’s research, they knew that approaching projects from a social impact lens helps excite and motivate people, especially women, to problem solve and figure out how to build things — as Emily puts it, “If you care about the why, you’ll figure out how to make it happen.”
At the start of the camp, young people shared the social issues they were passionate about: they ranged from clean water and recycling to supporting children with disabilities. Practical concerns like limited, outdated devices and unreliable WiFi posed challenges, but Tiger and Emily creatively imparted the building blocks of coding through unplugged activities, like imagining, “How would you teach a computer how to make a pita sandwich using a step-by-step process?”
The students were resilient and resourceful in the face of technical difficulties, mapping storylines and code sequences on paper before implementing them in Scratch. “They were always bubbling up with creativity,” says Tiger. “They were really serious about this. People would grab random objects from the room and use them as rulers. They came up with some highly ambitious ideas.”
Though most students had never seen code before, they quickly grasped the Scratch basics and created games that educated others about their social impact topics. Tiger says, “They kept collaborating: I teach them a skill, they start spreading the skill. It underscores the virality of how easy it is to learn the [Scratch] language.” Emily credits Tiger’s student-centered teaching style for the “mutual respect” and confidence-building that helped students flourish.
As they wrapped up their camp session, an aspiring translator expressed her gratitude by giving Tiger a thank-you note that was translated into three different languages. “I don’t know how she did it,” says Tiger, “but it was very inspiring for me.”
You can see more scenes from camp, including emotional footage of students’ final departure, in Tiger’s second documentary, Dust Astronauts: Liftoff.
Charting a Course for the Future
In the future, Tiger hopes to continue his documentary filmmaking and further his interest in technology. When he’s not busy running Dust Astronauts, you can find him starring in his school plays — he says the skills involved in acting help him “put himself in other people’s shoes,” building empathy that’s “essential to becoming a better person.”
He has big dreams for the future of Dust Astronauts: his goals are to place shipping containers in the Za’Atari Refugee Camp with computers and reliable internet access to enable remote career services and coding education, and to expand the program’s offerings to locations like Bangladesh and Sudan.
In footage from camp, one student says, “I want to thank you because you gave us optimism that nothing is impossible, and that we can do something outside the camp.” As Tiger shares, there’s “so much talent” going unrealized in the Za’atari Refugee Camp, if only because the young people there are not given the opportunity to share their gifts with the world. Thanks to Dust Astronauts, they have a better chance to launch their dreams even further.
Dust Astronauts would love to explore strategic partnerships with aligned organizations and educators to support their mission. Visit the Dust Astronauts website to learn more.
