PAKISTAN: Kashmiri children go back to school as they struggle to cope with the aftermath of the devastating earthquake

It's back to school for more than 100 children displaced in Muzaffarabad by the devastating South Asia earthquake. As dawn breaks in one of the many tent cities set up as relief centres, children gather to start a day of learning. They don't have much to learn with - a few notebooks and pens. But they have the enthusiasm and determination to move on. This makeshift tent school is set up by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) near the city's local cricket stadium. And it's a welcome respite for the children as they start to fill their days writing on their textbooks, basking in a world of alphabets and numbers. But as the teachers welcome an ever-increasing class population, it's not such a smooth start for those boys and girls who have not had a prior education. "There is a big problem with the children because a lot of them are uneducated. They have come from remote villages. Today is the sixth day that we have opened school here. The first day there were only a few students, some 20 boys turned up. Slowly, numbers started increasing and now we have about 100 students," said volunteer teacher Mohammad Rifaqat said. For some children, the memory of the earthquake is too hard to forget even as they meet and make new friends in their new "school." "It (my house) developed cracks but it did not collapse. It did not collapse!" said seven-year-old Shabab Akram Usmani, who was among the lucky survivors of the October 8 earthquake which killed tens of thousands of people in the region. For the new school, which is being run by a group of volunteer teachers, teething problems still remain to be resolved. Iqra Siddique, a nine-year-old who is taught in a tent for girls next to Shabab's, said that when she showed up at her school, "The teacher was not there. Madam told us she would open the school tomorrow so tomorrow, I will go there." Despite that, the children and teachers are finding hope back in school amid a gradually worsening crisis over international aid for Pakistan's earthquake victims. The quake inflicted a particularly cruel toll on children. It hit on a Saturday morning, which is a school day in Pakistan, and classes had just started. There is no tally yet of the number of schools destroyed and children killed, but across the region, hardly a school or college is left standing. Aid worker say perhaps half of the dead were children. The death toll in the October 8 earthquake so far stands at more than 54,000, with some 75,000 people injured.

ITN Source | October 29, 2005

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