The doctor who stayed, and the scholarship in his name

Kamal Adwan Hospital is in the north of Gaza. Its head is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya. When the hospital was surrounded, he did not abandon it, and he did not abandon the patients inside it.

Dr Abu Safiya is still held by the Israeli occupation. A recent Human Rights Watch investigation reports that he has been tortured in detention. The scholarship runs in his name while he is imprisoned, and we hope for the day he is free and back among us.

It is one of the named programmes run through the MeducateED Scholarship Fund, and it is among the plainest of them. It does not ask a student to win an essay competition. It asks a student to show what they have already done for communities that are marginalised or caught in a war.

What follows is what the programme asks, why two of its criteria are written with an or in them, and what it does not promise.

The six criteria

An applicant is expected to be:

• Of Palestinian descent, or able to demonstrate a proven commitment to Palestinian humanitarian causes
• Enrolled in, or accepted to, an accredited medical school
• Exceptionally dedicated to serving marginalised or war-affected communities
• Courageous in adversity, shown through activism, medical service or advocacy
• In financial need, or holding a proven record of academic distinction
• Able to write a personal statement on how they embody Dr Abu Safiya’s values

Two of those six lines are disjunctions, and that is the part worth reading slowly. Descent is not a measure of commitment. A student born in Gaza and a student who has spent two years on relief work are both inside the first criterion, and neither is asked to prove they are the other. Need is not the only route either. A student with a strong transcript and no hardship to report is considered on merit; a student in genuine difficulty is considered on need. Written as an and, those two lines would have quietly excluded most of the people the award exists for.

What the form separates, and why

The application asks for your name, your email address, your mobile number, and your university and year of study. Then it asks three things in prose, in this order: your connection to Palestinian humanitarian causes, your service to marginalised or war-affected communities, and the personal statement. An academic transcript is uploaded alongside them.

The first two of those boxes are separate on purpose. Connection and service are not the same claim, and most students have more of one than the other. Keeping them apart means a Palestinian student with little field experience is not pushed to inflate a week of volunteering, and a student with two years of clinic work and no family link is not pushed to manufacture one. Answer each box for what it is. A short honest answer in one does not weaken a strong answer in the other.

Evidence, and what to do when you have none

Attach whatever substantiates the service you describe: a letter from the organisation you volunteered with, records of medical or relief work, published advocacy. A good deal of this work leaves no paperwork at all. Where yours does not, the programme’s own guidance is to describe it honestly rather than overstate it. An unverifiable claim written plainly reads better to a committee than the same claim dressed up, because the dressing is the part a reader notices first.

No deadline, and no advertised figure

The programme has no closing date. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, which means there is nothing to miss, and no reason to rush a statement to beat a clock.

There is also no published sum. The award is made at MeducateED’s discretion, on need-based or merit-based grounds, and the decision email states what a particular award covers. If you are weighing this against a fixed bursary somewhere else, that is the honest difference between them: this one is fitted to the case rather than advertised as a number.

One further point, because it turns people away before they start. The published criterion names an accredited medical school in Egypt. If you are studying elsewhere, the programme’s own guidance is to apply anyway and to say so plainly in the statement. A form field is a poor reason to lose a case that nobody read.

Before you open the form

Write two paragraphs offline first.

The first is what you did, with dates and places in it. Not what you care about, and not what you believe: what you did, who you did it with, and for how long. The second is who it was for. Name the ward, the camp, the clinic or the campaign, and say what was different afterwards. Almost every weak personal statement is weak for the same reason. It argues for the applicant’s values instead of describing the applicant’s week, and values are the one thing a committee cannot check.

Then open the programme page under Community, in the Scholarships section, and read the six criteria against your two paragraphs. Mark the ones you can evidence. The ones you cannot are not the ones to leave out of the application; they are the ones to be straightforward about inside it.