Aljazeera, Dec. 9, 2020
Of the 50,000 people who fled their homes after violence erupted in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, nearly half are children.
An Ethiopian girl sings to her classmates, who are huddled together on a straw mat on the sandy ground of a refugee camp in neighbouring Sudan.
Shielded from the hot mid-afternoon sun in a makeshift classroom built from wood and straw, the children sing back in unison.
When they finish, they laugh as they break out into noisy applause, with nods of approval from their teacher, Bereket Weldgebriel.
.
“Education is the light of the world,” says Bereket, a 35-year-old English and music teacher.
He and the children in his class are among the almost 50,000 people who fled their homes after Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government launched a military operation against the forces in the northern Tigray region on November 4.
They have found shelter in a string of camps along the Sudanese border, where they live in tents and straw huts.
According to the United Nations, 45 percent of the refugees are children.
“When I came here, my heart was broken,” says Bereket, a graduate of the Academy of Music of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa who used to run an English-language academy and teach at a public school in the Tigrayan town of Humera.
Now, he and his colleagues at the temporary Um Rakuba school have found meaning to their new lives.
“If we teach these children, they will be happy,” says Bereket. “If children have an education, they can solve their problems.”
.
No comments:
Post a Comment