In 2016, when Hannah Hong received a phone call from a friend urging her to use her skills to teach refugee women, she packed her bags and travelled halfway across the world to the capital city of Jordan. Fast forward to the present and she’s helped establish a successful beauty therapy training facility, complete with two new beauty schools and a full-time training instructor for the classes.
However, things weren’t always easy in the beginning. In fact, the founder and CEO of Lemon Beaker shared that she wasn’t quite sure what to expect when she first made the trip to Amman.
"There were classes being run for these refugee women who had fled their homes,” she began. “We decided to teach them different classes; facial treatments, nail art, soap making.”
Armed with determination and 50kg of beauty equipment, she decided to visit the local markets to see available ingredients for herself. Using her skills and knowledge about skincare and soap-making she began teaching the classes and saw that it was an instant hit.
"Everyone loved what they were learning and they wanted to find jobs,” Hong shared.
The beauty industry in Jordan has gone beyond helping women to find jobs and receive an income. Today, it sees women experience fun and laughter for the first time in months since fleeing their home towns without food or losing a loved one from the war. In one training session, Hong recalled, “The women were practicing their massages on each other, and all the sorrow they had experienced from war, the famine and the hardships they had endured, were all released”.
The Lemon and Beaker founder still travels back to Jordan whenever she can, sending friends and colleagues in her place when she can’t leave the lab in New Zealand. To this day, the beauty facility in Amman is run and staffed by women refugees, some of whom have become full-time employees of the beauty school. Last January, the natural skincare brand celebrated its first anniversary since its debut. The full range of Lemon and Beaker product is available for high-res download on BD.
