Children overjoyed with school renovations

It's not easy to concentrate on your school work when you're three to a desk and the wind keeps blowing your papers onto the floor. Up until last month, that was the situation for the children of Kizqala, a village an hour southeast of the northern Iraqi city of Dahuk on the fertile Shekhan plain. "We had blackboards and chalk, but not a lot else," 14-year old Behrem Mohamed Hasan told IRIN as he stood in the rain outside the village primary school. "The windows were broken, the tiles had gone from the floor, there was even a family of sparrows nesting in the corner of one of the classrooms." "The walls were daubed with pro-Saddam graffiti too," remembered 10-year old Umar Abdulkerim. "Up, up with Saddam, down with American imperialism, that sort of thing. All written with multi-coloured pens." Like other formerly Kurdish villages on the northern edge of Nineveh governorate, Kizqala was subject to one of the Baathist regime's first waves of Arabisation early in the 1970s, which moved Arabs into oil-rich areas, forcing Kurds to leave. According to UNICEF, a post-war assessment indicated that 12,000 schools across Iraq need rehabilitation. Some 80 percent do not have functioning water and sanitation facilities. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has rehabilitated 2,500 schools and has provided almost 80 million school books to date. After nearly 30 years spent in IDP camps for Internally Displaced People further north, villagers were only able to return last April. They say the Arabs from around Mosul who had been given their houses had already left when they returned. "I felt a bit sorry for them, to be honest," said village headman Abdulkerim Abdi. "Once he'd dumped them in our houses, Saddam seems to have done absolutely nothing for them." Others talk darkly of looting, and say the Arabs deliberately sabotaged what they could before they left. They point to the ruins of mud houses dotted among the 60 or so concrete buildings they now live in. "When we visited Kizqala immediately after the liberation, it was immediately clear the school needed urgent renovation," Peace Winds Japan (PWJ) project manager Kawa Sami Sabri told IRIN at his office in Dahuk. "The clinic too, because it had basically been converted into a stables." Working with funds provided by Japan Platform, PWJ set to work this February, once the children had taken their mid-year exams. They re-roofed, re-plastered and re-tiled, and brought in seats, desks and schoolbooks for the village's 120 primary school children. Like the school, the clinic next door is now pristine, with two consulting rooms and a vaccination room. As a sad indicator of the tense atmosphere in this district, that lies on the cusp of Kurdish and Arab areas, three guards patrol both buildings to ward off thieves. Parents say they are happy they no longer have to travel seven kilometres to Ain Sifni for medical attention. Their children, meanwhile, are slowly getting used to classes half the size they used to be - four more teachers have joined the school since renovation work finished, shipped in from Dahuk in one of the many examples of the Kurdish authorities' tendency to move into the administrative vacuum to their south. "We can't daydream like we used to," said Umar Abdulkerim. Both, though, hope the clinic and school will be connected to their houses by a proper track. At the moment, they are obliged to trudge 100 metres through mud.