When Rama and her family came to Lebanon from Aleppo a year ago, she had never even been inside a classroom. “All the schools in Syria were closed because of the war, so we couldn’t send Rama,” says Rama’s mother Bouchra.
Her parents enrolled her in first grade in a Lebanese public school, but this year her parents won’t be able to afford the fees. “The buses cost a lot, and the school is far away,” Rama says. “The curriculum is also quite difficult.”
Luckily for Rama, however, the Norwegian Refugee Council has managed to set up a makeshift school right in the gathering where she lives in Nabatieh, South Lebanon, to help educate Syrian refugee children.
In Lebanon, NRC implements a non-formal education programme, opening schools in local communities, in coordination with the municipality, for Syrian refugees who are unable to access formal education. NRC also provides catch-up programmes for Syrian students to prepare them for formal schooling in Lebanon. As the programme is implemented in local communities, families don’t need to pay transportation fees.
“I love everything about school. I love all of my subjects,” Rama says with a smile. In the classroom, she recites the human body parts in English as the other children clap cheerfully.
“I love this school, not just because my daughter goes here, but because my son, who is 5 years old, will also get to go to here and learn,” says Bouchra, says as she cradles her youngest.
“We’ve lived here for a year and we don’t want to move. We feel safe and secure. I also want to stay here because my daughter can go to school. My husband, who is a construction worker, had a good job lined up in a different area but the other gathering didn’t have a school, so I refused to move,” Bouchra adds. She has three other children, and hopes all of them will get to go to school.
Aya, 28, has been a teacher in Lebanon for six years, and is teaching English at the NRC school.
“These children have been deprived of their childhood; they’ve lost all of their innocence. They need to feel like they belong somewhere. It’s very important to have these classes,” Aya says.
This project was made possible through the generous funding of the government of Germany.
