Zainab Mahdi was a little girl who found herself on the other side of the world.

Her family in Jordan had moved back to the country two years earlier because of war and had moved into a tent in a park in the heart of Amman. This was not the girl from a refugee camp who sought safety in her new country, where her family had been living for two decades.

Instead, this little girl was not from another planet. She spoke little English and it took the family two years to learn how to speak Arabic.

Mahdi was brought into a home filled with tears and anger. Children who would not eat or leave the house.

The family had to fight tooth and nail to get things like food or the most basic clothing for the children — her name was Amal, sometimes shortened to Amla or Am-lee.

But Amal was determined. She found a new school nearby that offered education to children displaced by war. She attended her classes every day. So, her mother had to come and help clean the school.

It was there that she met Mohammad Al-Mufi, a Syrian refugee who had recently returned to Jordan for the third time.

He had been in America for five months. The couple had been unable to reunite because of the fighting in Syria in 2012 when Al-Mufi went with his wife and children to fight and to escape. They traveled to Turkey before traveling home, but the refugee situation had deteriorated there.

Al-Mufi returned to Syria as a refugee. He spent time in Syria with his daughter and was eventually forced to leave to seek safety in the United States.

When a relative who was a refugee with a son in Iraq passed on the news of the Syrian refugee children, Al-Mufi knew he wanted to open a school in Jordan. He couldn’t find an area that could fit the children’s needs — the boys needed to learn English, but the girls weren’t learning. The school needed to focus on helping the child get back on their feet and improve his English, as well as teach their parents in the language. To get it going, the children had to learn the language.

In his new American homeland, Al-Mufi took the school name and his wife worked to get it approved, securing the land — a large plot in the northern part of town — and establishing the school for