Thousands of children back at school

Many tented camps dot the main road along the Jehlum Valley, one of the worst-hit areas of the 8 October quake. When the road approaches Ghari Dopatta village, half an hour’s drive from Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, one can see children studying in the open air. Naqqash, 12, is one such student attending a government pilot school in Ghari Dopatta. Like many of his peers in the area he is happy to be back at school. “Although we lack many things at school, it is good to be with my classmates again,” he said, smiling. Ghari Dopatta is in the lower Jehlum Valley, where the 10th brigade of the Pakistani army is also stationed, a unit which has been instrumental in getting the area’s schools up and running again. According to the Pakistani military, there are about 250 schools, including some 75 in the valley itself, with the rest in mountain villages of the adjacent Chikar area. “The demand for education is colossal in the area. There had been a lot of schools in [Pakistan-administered] Kashmir before the earthquake,” one army officer in Ghari Dopatta said on Tuesday. Ellen van Kalmthout, a programme officer for education with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Muzaffarabad, elaborated. “It is encouraging that communities, families, teachers, and children are so committed to education and that they have restarted schooling," she said, adding: "This is particularly important because getting children in a structured situation which schooling offers provides them with routine and a sense of normalcy." The earthquake struck Pakistani-administered Kashmir and the country's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) just before 09:00 local time, when many schools had just opened, killing over 17,000 children and injuring scores more, according to UNICEF. The UN children's agency said that more than 2 million children were affected by the quake. “The children have been affected tremendously. We estimate that half of the deaths were children, but many more were injured. They have also been affected emotionally,” Omar Abdi, country representative UNICEF in Pakistan, said earlier. Indeed, government estimates indicate that 6,700 schools were destroyed in NWFP and 1,300 in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, with many others badly damaged, while UNICEF estimates almost 1 million school-age children need support, of which 450,000 are of primary school age. Van Kalmthout emphasised the need to alleviate the psychosocial impact of the quake on the children. “When you see the children in schools learning, even if it is out in the open, the fact that they are with other children, the fact that they are with their peers, with their teachers, means life has restarted a little bit in the way it was,” she said. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), almost 500 schools had reopened, with over 32,200 children enrolled in the quake-affected areas with the support of the international community. However, one of the more pressing issues is a lack of winterised tents suitable for schools, one Pakistani army officer in Ghari Dopatta said. "There are not enough shelters for schools because classes vary in terms of the number of children and often they cannot fit into tents available. There is a lack of school materials, including textbooks, school furniture and other things as well,” he added. Many children have their classes sitting on mats or a few chairs that had been salvaged from under the rubble of their former schools. “Many schools lost all their assets, equipment, furniture and textbooks. Children were lost when the buildings collapsed so there is a great need to revitalise and rebuild the whole system,” van Kalmthout explained. In an effort to get an overall picture of the situation in and around Muzaffarabad, UNICEF and the local authorities are conducting a rapid assessment of more than 2,000 schools in the area, with the initial results set to come in phases shortly. Along with the school tents already provided in the area, another 2,500 are in the pipeline. Moreover, UNICEF distributed 'school in a box' sets for some 16,000 children in Pakistani-administered Kashmir as well, with each set providing education supplies for 80 children and two teachers. “It is a very sturdy aluminum box that can be used as a blackboard at the same time. It has the whole range of materials for schools. We’ve also ordered textbooks that are due to come very soon,” van Kalmthout noted. Meanwhile, some reports suggest that some children had dropped out of school after the quake. “It is clear from just visits to schools here in the [Muzaffarabad] city and outside that in many cases enrollment has indeed significantly dropped,” the UNICEF official said, adding, however, that in some cases where families seemed to have more or less stayed where they were, there hadn’t been such a significant drop. “We also see schools where it’s more or less equal, so we need the assessment to get the overall picture,” she said.