CANTON, Mich., July 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Houston Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair spent a week in Jordan with the Human Development Fund (HDF), meeting families across the country. The visit included a wide range of community projects, from a skills exchange with Jordan’s national rugby team to prosthetic fittings for children and time spent with displaced Syrian families living in the desert.
Al-Shaair opened the week with a skills exchange alongside Jordan’s national rugby team, trading techniques and drills between the two sports.
One stop on the trip was the Suleiman Center, an orphanage HDF co-founded with Dr. Omar Suleiman. The center is home to fifteen families, and Al-Shaair and the HDF team spent time with more than half of the households living there. The group distributed food, sat down together for a hot meal, joined an afternoon of sing-alongs and spent hours playing soccer with the children on two turf fields nearby.
Throughout the week, Al-Shaair also joined HDF’s team as displaced children from Gaza were fitted with new prosthetic limbs.
Later in the week, Al-Shaair traveled to rural communities in the Al Mafraq governorate to sit with displaced Syrian families living in tents in the desert near the border. He spent time hearing directly from families about daily life and shared hot meals with them as well. Raised by a single mother of eight, Al-Shaair said he would relive everything he went through a hundred times over for the chance to sit with a family the way he did that day. His visit reflects the kind of experience HDF Witness makes possible, one week, one country, one family at a time.
Learn more about HDF Field Visits: https://hdfund.org/horizons-for-humanity/
More about HDF: https://hdfund.org/
About HDF: Human Development Fund is a humanitarian nonprofit serving communities in more than 30 countries. HDF leads its own work on the ground, from emergency relief, orphan care, WASH infrastructure, to food distribution, and long-term development programs.
SOURCE Human Development Fund