Some children back at school following quake

As the first homeless families started arriving in one of the three main camps in Bam on Monday, the first school opened its doors since the earthquake struck on 26 December. In mobile portacabins about thirty children gathered to register their names - the first tentative step to re-establishing education in the devastated city. At the site of what used to be a girls secondary school, children of all ages had travelled from across Bam and the surrounding villages to ensure a place. The quake killed an estimated 32,000 people and left around 100,000 people homeless and destitute. The children are eager to return to school, and they have been reading school books handed out to them by the Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS). Keeping up with their studies has proved quite difficult - many of them cannot read at night as large parts of the city does not have electricity. During the day they are expected to help their families collect aid and search for their belongings in the rubble. "This is all I have left," sixteen-year-old Nasreen told IRIN, pointing at her clothes. "I've lost all my friends and I've lost all my teachers. The earthquake's ruined everything, but at least I can try and do something about my future. That's why I'm here." But the girls are uneasy at the prospect of sharing their classroom with their male counterparts - all schools in Iran are segregated. "Girls and boys shouldn't be together - it's against the rules of Islam," Fereshteh Ramezani-Nejat, who lost her two brothers and her father in the earthquake, told IRIN. Marc Vergara, a spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), told IRIN that the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), in agreement with the Iranian authorities, had decided that boys and girls should not be segregated in day centres, giving siblings a chance to be together and other children a more extended network of support. Mansoor Azarbendar is an English teacher and is one of two teachers who are also registering with the school. Fifteen of his colleagues were killed in the earthquake and he is concerned that basic needs should be met before schooling recommences. "Some teachers aren't ready to teach yet - their families are dead and their living conditions in the tents aren't good - they have no toilets and the only food they have is tinned. It's still too stressful - these problems must first be solved and then they can teach," Azarbendar told IRIN. It is not certain when proper teaching will begin - the children here have no pens or paper and five hundred computers were destroyed in the earthquake. Mohammad Taghir-Zadeh, the head of the education department in the provincial capital of Kerman, 175 km northwest of the stricken city of Bam, has said that out of 4,000 teachers in Bam, 1,200 were killed in the earthquake along with 10,000 students. With the exodus of homeless people from Bam to nearby cities, there is a fear that there will not be enough teachers left to work with the survivors. Incentives are already being offered - Taghir-Zadeh has said that all teachers will receive a grant of US $50 and that they will be given housing priority.