The Ultimate Upcycle: Saving Syrian Children’s Lives in Jordan, With Hats

In Ireland we know about cold bones. This is a story about how we started collecting hats in Ireland for cold kids in a Syrian refugee camp.

I confess! Not all of the previously mentioned “4,000 hand made hats” that we sent to Syria for kids were actually hand made. It is true that more than half of the donated were lovingly knitted and crocheted by local crafters in Ireland and around the world.

But several hundred warm hats were collected and rescued from the depths of drawers and the bottoms of bureaus to be repurposed from forgotten to fantastic!

It all started with an innocent email from a friend, Green Prophet contributor Laurie Balbo. She was volunteering at Zaatari UNHCR Syrian Camp and felt the cold of these children in her bones. She asked for help. My name is Virginia. My partner Brian is a writer for Green Prophet.

Laurie emailed me to ask if I could manage to gather around 200 hats for her husband to carry back in his suitcase?

In Ireland we know about cold bones. The rain and the damp of an Irish winter will chill the hardiest souls. So, we hoard hats. But we might not have known about this particular need if it weren’t for Laurie’s first-hand experience at Zaatari. People who’ve never been to Jordan often imagine the entire Mideast as a place of eternal warmth and sunshine. They forget that the winter nights in the high desert can be colder than even the worst Irish winter.

So, I told a few friends, who told a few friends, who told a few friends. Parenting networks, School groups, charity groups, children’s clubs churches and private business owners all asked their friends and members and clients to donate “hand made and gently used or new hats” for Syrian Refugee Children. A Facebook page was created.

The first donation of 19 children’s hats came in the same day from a mom in my six-year-old’s school with five children of her own, who had sorted through and found all the hats her kids had outgrown. She was delighted to see them go to good use, and personally asked her friends to do the same. Small children were handing me hats in the schoolyard for the last four weeks.

A local teacher told her teenage students and 296 hats were quickly collected from Irish homes. A note was posted on the Cuidiu Facebook page, a national Irish parenting network, packages came in the post from all 32 counties of Ireland, with lovely hand-written notes. “This was my daughter’s favorite hat, I hope another child will like it too.”

CGI, the Irish Girl Scouts organization, has collected hats from Dublin to Wexford. My daughter’s local Malahide troop collected 127 hats in two weeks.

A nearby childcare center owner put an appeal out to the parents of the kids in her creche, who donated 96 gently used hats.

The local Presbyterian church put a notice in their bulletin and church members brought in hats in the one’s, two’s and dozens. One church elder donated over a dozen hats from his life-long collection of souvenirs from his many world travels. Each hat had personal meaning to him.

All told, 3229 hats were collected during the 40 day drive. That’s 80 hats per day. The purpose of upcycling is to give an unused item a new lease of life, and to save it from the landfill. Well played Ireland, you Rock!

The hats were sent to Amman, Jordan and were merged with the hats that Laurie had been collecting. They were just delivered to the refugees. For more donations and collection points in the US, Canada, Ireland, Turkey, Jordan and Israel, please email [email protected]. 

Author: Brian Nitz

Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...

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