Who I am and what I do.

I think that it's safe to say that this may be one of the unusual introductions that you will read today.To sum things up in a 'tl;dr' fashion, I am a Scottish Aerospace Engineer who retrained as a Private Military Contractor to support  Education and Science in Iraq, Turkey and to a lesser extent Syria.

I am not a charity, nor am I an 'activist', virtue signallers grind my gears and I am not a great supporter of mass migration, and I strongly believe that the best for the Refugees is for them to stay in the Middle East retrain, and eventually rebuild Syria and Iraq. So I'm probably one of the last guys you'd expect to do what I am doing. You're probably wondering why the hell I'd bother? Throwing ones self into chaos is not the type of thing you do when life is going well..I can safely say that it wasn't a case of being bored of the Scottish weather or depression from waiting for Half-Life 3.

The roots of what I am doing stems back from when I was CMT (Medic) In the British Army, ever since then I kept an eye on Iraq, the rise of AQI and it metastasising into ISIS. I felt that I had to do something, in some capacity it is said that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.".

Despite this, I was unable to raise support from the UK Gov, or any charity, so went and did my own thing, despite  a lack of support, and being hounded as 'racist' for calling out I.S before most people knew of its existence but yet felt entitled to attack a man's life and income.

One of the greatest challenges that I faced was to retrain as a Private Military Contractor, PMC, at the European Security Academy. To this very day I am thankful for all of the help, advice and support that I have received from them and other contractions.

PMC Training at ESA

The Projects... 

As you can see, for lack of imagination and being an Engineer by trade I have decided to call the various activities as projects...

The 'projects' are bespoke to the area which they are running and vary from town to town. They involve Arab, Kurd, and Yazadis alike. And have involved different ethnic groups working together at once. They run in Schools and Universities within the Middle East.

 These projects covered a wide range, with the majority focusing on education and science, some other projects  focus on AID and infrastructure such as "Books and Bears" provide support for schools by proving books, notepads, stationeries to schools on the Iraq/Turkish and Syrian/Turkish border, some of which are deeply impoverished.  There are some infrastructure projects being set up to help mainly refugees get work and for them  to help the community that they have migrated to in Turkey.

Books and Bears: Support for Schools and kids.

The STEM projects come in all shapes and sizes. From Video Conference lessons by colleagues from groups such as NASA and ESA who host lessons for schools in Iraq. An example of which can be seen in the first such lesson here.

Colonization of the Moon & Mars, with Philip T. Metzger & Robert zubrin. Science talk for Iraq

These run monthly and I hope to involve more schools within IRaq

Other projects include hands on science and astronomy lessons, this can be at a school, or at a neighbouring University/Observatory for school students .

Also, STEM materials for schools (telescopes, microscopes, books etc), support for teachers to teach STEM subject, and if I can get help with funding then I hope to help with setting up Science Clubs in a Refugee camp in Turkey.

Astronomy lessons for Refugees in Turkey

Depending on resources, I would like to run more hands on projects within Iraq and Turkey. Alas, I am struggling for any support.

This is very much a brief overview but I hope to post more on Steemit. Let me know your thoughts and suggestions, I'm looking at ways to involve others and even ways to raise support and funds.