Melissa Fleming head of communications for the UN’s high commissioner for refugees writes about her encounters working with Syrian refugees ... When I speak to refugees from the crisis in Syria, I’ll often ask them: “What did you take with you? What was that most important thing that you could not leave behind?” The answers vary: one man took a photograph of his wife in happier times. A young girl carried a piece of jewellery worn for celebrations. Hany, a Syrian teen now living in Lebanon, told me he didn’t hesitate when fighting came to his neighbourhood and he had to flee. “I took my high school diploma,” he told me “because my life depended on it.” In the Syrian city of Homs, Hany had already risked his life for that piece of paper. He braved some of the most dangerous streets in Syria just to get to classes. Young male students like him were prime targets for snipers or forced conscription, he told me. Bombs nearly destroyed his brother’s school. But when his mother pleaded with him to stay home, he told her simply: “All the students are afraid. But we still turn up.” His will to learn was far stronger than his fear. Hany is desperate to continue his education. That diploma is both proof of what he had accomplished and the key to higher learning. He took it with him because he sees it as they key o helping him to emerge from this crisis. “If I am not a student, “ he once told me. “I am nothing.” And yet though Hany arrived in Lebanon two years ago, the diploma remains carefully wrapped and unused. He is starting to despair. We correspond from time to time, and in a recent e-mail he sent this poem, a summary of his state of mind: “I miss myself… :-( My friends Times of reading novels or writing poems Bird and tea in the morning My room… My books Myself And everything was making me smile... Oh… oh !! I had a lot of dreams which were about to be realized…” More than three million Syrians are now in neighbouring counties, making them the biggest refugee population in the world. It is a population that grows by an average of 100,000 a month. Infrastructures in the areas where they live are already overwhelmed, and served by aid agencies like mine that are underfunded and overstretched. What worries me most is the fate of the more than one and a half million Syrian refugee children. Far too few are in school. In Lebanon, a country with the largest per capita concentration of refugees in the world, only one in five Syrian refugee children are attending classes. At the secondary level, the number drops to less than 10%. Efforts to get them there include double shifts at local schools and mass hiring of teachers, but for most children it’s either too far away or costs too much. Thrown into poverty, many families send their children to work in nearby fields and factories or selling goods on the streets. And yet refugee children almost always tell us that education is the most important thing in their lives. Why? Because being in school allows them to think of the future, rather than dwelling on the horrors of their past. It gives them a chance to fill their hearts with hope rather than hatred. When I recently asked a refugee girl named Taif in a tented settlement in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley what she had escaped with, she showed me her school text books. She’d read them so many times she had practically committed them to memory. Unable to enrol in school, she works in the fields picking vegatables for $4 a day. When we gave her a gift of a few books in English, she burst out crying. This was the richest gift she could imagine, she told us. It is time that we did more for children like Taif. Aid agencies, stretched to the limit, have focused their limited resources on meeting the material needs of fleeing refugees, blankets, food and shelter. But more needs to be done to cater to the dreams of Syrian children as well. We need massive investment to help them to continue with their schooling. Refugees, after all, have the greatest stake in rebuilding their war-ravaged country. They can stop the cycle of violence. They can put their country back on its feet. And if equipped to do so, they could become agents of change, reconciliation and social transformation. How about thinking of refugee camps and settlements as more than just temporary population centres where people wait for the war to end? Should we not, instead, consider them places of excellence where refugees can triumph over their trauma, contribute to their communities and train for their return home? For Hany, once destined to be an engineer, university is becoming a distant dream. Left to languish, he will become a member of a lost generation. A generation of uneducated, unskilled and dangerously frustrated kids. Is this the future of Syria the world wants? Melissa Fleming is head of communications for the UN’s high commissioner for refugees.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 17:49:07 +0000
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