By Peter Holmes à Court | April 18, 2019 | South Sudan

Forced to leave their homes for unfamiliar communities, refugees often struggle to secure very basic survival necessities. But with a unique knowledge of the culture and language from which they were uprooted, displaced Syrian citizens have found support — and employment — by teaching others their native language.

Life of a refugee Moulham Ibrik is an atypical master's student. He's pursuing degrees in prosthetics engineering and intercultural business communications at universities in France and Slovenia. He sleeps between two and six hours each night, and takes French lessons in addition to his college studies. He is separated from family and friends forced to flee their homes because of the five-year-old Syrian civil war.

Ibrik is one of the almost five million Syrian refugees displaced by war. After leaving Syria in February 2015 as violence and extremism ravaged his country, he spent eight months in Turkey, home to almost two million refugees.

Ibrik, 27, now lives in Paris, and tutors Arabic to students around the world in his spare time. As a conversation partner on NaTakallam, an online platform that matches Arabic speakers and learners to Syrian refugees, Ibrik is teaching more than conversation skills.

NaTakallam is not a traditional online learning platform. Conversation partners aren't certified instructors working off structured syllabi — they're Syrian refugees making a small income by talking to people who want to learn or practice Arabic. Sometimes they go weeks without a reliable Internet connection or place to live and work.

Designed for students who already know some Arabic or are supplementing traditional Arabic classes with a native speaker through NaTakallam, students practice Levantine, a spoken Arabic dialect. Conversation partners speak French or English in addition to Arabic. Some conversation partners are willing to work with beginners, too.

My teacher, a refugee also living in France, tended to her young child while chatting with me on Skype. The cacophony of cartoons and crying echoed in the virtual classroom, interspersed between lessons on the Arabic words for "want" and "have." She declined to be interviewed for this story, but our 30-minute session did not just focus on pronouns and conjugation. I asked about her day, her husband, and her children. She asked me about San Francisco and what it's like to be a writer.