Palestinian refugee Shehadeh Shamdin Atwa, born in 1959, has compiled a special dictionary of electrical and electronic terms to facilitate vocational studies at Swedish institutes.

Shehadeh Atwa, was a resident of Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus. He is the father of five children. He graduated from the Faculty of Economics and Commerce in 1984 and arrived in Sweden in 2014 fleeing war-torn Syria via Libya.

He joined a vocational institute teaching electricity and electronics. “I faced enormous difficulties when I arrived in Sweden due to linguistic and cultural differences. At first, I felt a kind of frustration, but I decided to start from scratch, even though I was over 50 years old at that time.”

From his very first months at the institute, Shehadeh was able to compose a dictionary of electrical and electronic terminology for Arabic and non-Arabic speakers. The dictionary is made up of 2,144 terms in three languages: Arabic, English and Swedish.

He later opened his own project, programming car keys, a specialty he was able to master after intensive courses in Holland and Sweden, with the help of his eldest son Amer, a student of electronic engineering at a university in Goteborg.

Shehada Atwa and his family obtained Swedish citizenship in 2019. He currently resides in the city of Kamar and his children are pursuing their studies at Swedish universities. His eldest daughter Farah obtained a master’s degree in engineering and automatic control.