In 1990, SDCLC was born in a humble three-room apartment rented by Mojo and Umjoma Batu – a Sudanese couple. They noticed that there was a huge gap in the education of the Sudanese refugee and displaced community living in Cairo, so they started inviting friends.

Unsurprisingly, they quickly outgrew their capacity and needed to “upgrade” to a few stone huts in a location named Kilo Arbaa Wa Nos, which is on the east edge of the Cairo metropolitan area. Since then, this mostly desert location has been stuffed with eight-story, low income apartment buildings and poorly kept streets. Long gone are the straw roofs of the early days. Our center has now taken over an entire building – complete with a library, computer lab, and aquaponics garden on the roof! We have endured many challenges, including economic uncertainty, cultural tension, and even an Arab-spring revolution.

In 2020-22, what started with a simple stair-addition revealed structural concerns about the building, which was not surprising due to the poor construction of the surrounding area. Before long, we ended up reinforcing the entire foundation and remodeling the interior and exterior! But God provided the perfect engineer to help us through this time, and he said that he needed to pull from the experience of his entire career to find solutions to our many structural issues. The project was miraculously paid for by many donors and was completed without any serious injury or issues from the authorities. If you visit SDCLC today, you will see a modern, beautiful building sticking out very obviously in the midst of a chaotic part of Cairo, almost as if to say, “This is a different kind of education.”