Skyler is originally from the United States and grew up in the multicultural city of Houston, Texas. She completed her bachelor’s degree in English at Yale University, where she focused on Non-fiction Creative Writing. After graduating in 2017, she was awarded a year-long university fellowship, which brought her to Israel-Palestine. Her fellowship project, Intractable, was a podcast investigating the Israel-Palestine Conflict through audio storytelling. Following her work on Intractable, Skyler was drawn towards GLOCAL, as a means of exploring further the intersections of conflict, peace-building, economic development, and migration. For her GLOCAL internship, Skyler worked at Mesila, a south Tel Aviv-based organization working with families from the city’s asylum-seeking and migrant worker communities. Her main internship project was an internal review of Mesila’s work with the parents of children with special needs. Her final report analyzed qualitative feedback from parents in order to suggest new community programming, adaptations to Mesila’s internal functions, the development of community resources, and potential new collaborations with other non-profits in relevant fields. Because of her background in journalism, the personal narrative remains a key component in Skyler’s understanding of development-related issues. 

 

Founders of the Neve Shaanan Tigrinya Daycare | Skyler Inman

 While I didn’t take this picture myself, this image of Mesila’s work is the one that most embodies the word “empowerment” for me. The women pictured here worked with Mesila’s Early Childhood team to open the only Tigrinya-language preschool in Tel Aviv. If it’s not immediately clear why this is such a big deal, I’ll give a brief background. Tel Aviv is home to around 30,000 African asylum seekers, the majority from Eritrea. Growing up in Israel, the children of these Eritrean families are faced with a difficult developmental situation. At home, they hear their parents’ mother tongue, Tigrinya; in the streets, they hear Hebrew; at their daycare facilities (usually run by women from West African countries), they hear a mix of English and the daycare workers’ own mother tongue(s). This critical early stage of language acquisition, means that very often, the children of Eritrean asylum seekers in Israel face significant language delays across the board; with limited Tigrinya, communication between parents and children is difficult. Mesila worked closely with a group of Eritrean women to provide training in early childhood development, and to help equip them with the resources they needed to open their own Tigrinya-language preschool. Empowerment, for me, is when members of a disadvantaged community are seen not as recipients of aid, but as the people most suited to solve their community’s challenges. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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