Refurbishment of schools in the south continues

Salah Sabah, a maths teacher and an assistant at Irshad Primary School in the southern city of Basra, has been visiting the Educational Directorate regularly since the year 2000 to ask for help to rehabilitate his school. "We only have two rooms in which to teach the students. Our school was bombed during the 1991 Gulf War. We used to have around 500 students. Now we only have 48 students," he told IRIN in Basra. Three years on, and after another war, the school still stands in disrepair. "Things have got worse at the school over the past few years. A couple of classrooms fell down four years ago and since then we have been using only two classrooms. We also use the headmaster's office for teaching," Sabah explained. An international NGO visited the school last summer to assess the damage and Sabah hoped that his school would be one of those to be rehabilitated this month. The new school term has already been delayed this year due to insecurity and teachers hoped that Irshad Primary would have been in a better state. "Because of the violence in Najaf, Karbala [in the south] and Sadr city [the majority Shi'ite district in Baghdad] we delayed the opening of the schools," Hizam Hassan, at the education department of the Basra authorities, told IRIN. Some schools also delayed lessons and the transfer of students to a nearby school until rehabilitation work was completed. Several NGOs are working to rehabilitate many school buildings in the south of Iraq, Hassan said. Most of the repair work should have started in May 2004 but insecurity, particularly following the kidnappings of foreigners, delayed work until August. Many international NGOs have left the country due to the precarious situation. According to Hassan, many schools in Basra are in a dire state of disrepair. They don't have electricity or water, and the classrooms are in a very poor shape. "The schools in the south didn't have any sort of rehabilitation for many years, especially during the UN sanctions when building materials such as like cement were scarce and very expensive," Hassan explained. There are 924 school buildings in Basra but not all of them are open, local officials explained. Some were bombed during the recent war and now 870 schools are operating, but many are in need of rehabilitation and some were not built with good materials, making repairs more difficult. Al Rasheed Ali al Jilany, a boys school, was used by Iraqi Marines during the recent war and is now a pile of rubble. "It was the second time the school was bombed. It was also bombed during the Iraq/Iran war and was rebuilt during the 1990s," Hassan said. She added that there were not enough schools in Basra to cope with the amount of students in the governorate, which has a population of more than two million. Dunia Adel, a teacher at a preparatory school, said that her school, like most others in Basra, was working in two shifts to meet the demands of the local population. "The school opens from 8 am to noon in the morning and then again from noon until 4 pm, which means that students have only a few hours to learn, which affects educational standard," she told IRIN, adding that they were lucky as other schools were working on three shifts. Students also complain that Iraqi contractors do not do their job properly. "Five water tankers have been built in our school but there is no water, we don't have a playground and there are no labs," student Ashraf Salah told IRIN. At present, work on rehabilitating another 30 schools was underway, local officials said. An assessment was made of 174 schools in the southern governorate of Basra, of which 105 were chosen for repair work. "We have already signed contracts for 36 schools in which work has begun. Problems in 21 schools are being identified and nine schools have been offered for bidding to local building contractors," one aid worker told IRIN. In total some 95 schools will be rehabilitated, while the few left are ones that have to be completely rebuilt. "We are working under time pressure and a limited budget for this project. We wanted to finish earlier before classes started but it wasn't possible because of the security situation and many procedures to take up with the educational directorate," one aid worker told IRIN. In addition, the Multinational Division (MND) forces, formerly known as the Coalition forces, are also repairing buildings. Work has been completed on the al Mujahed primary school, in the Al Atiyah district of Basra, where 550 boys attend in the morning and 350 in the afternoon. In total, 24 classrooms were replastered, new lighting and fans were installed and the roof was repaired. "The yard has been cleared and made safe for the children," an MND spokesperson told IRIN.