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| Sunday, 6 April 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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New schools rise from the ashes in the Wanni : Healing through education by Jayanthi Liyanage The epilogue to war is long-drawn, painstaking resettlement. Every war-ravaged society faces a massive task of rebuilding, but resettling is not a mere reconstructing, but more, a re-integrating of physical, economic, political, cultural and psycho-social elements. Repairing cannot stop at houses and trading buildings, but has to move on to repairing the torn lives and psychic fabric of the re-settler, encouraging him to move in, with re-commenced schemes to provide the basic human needs of drinking water, sanitation, transport, an income generation activity to keep the home-fires burning and schooling for the children. The farmer should have land to cultivate, the fisherman waters to fish in, and piecemeal worker his daily labour. The process is all about social mobilisation. What is the secret of successful social mobilisation? Eberhard Halbach, Team Leader of Jaffna Rehabilitation Project (JRP) carried out by the German Technical Co-operation (GTZ), reveals, "Our perception has been that reconstructing schools encouraged resettlement as the moment a school is rehabilitated, people settle around the school." Enabled by a 17 Million Euro funding for the period 1996-2005 by the German government's Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development (BMC), JRP re-built 54 schools and is building another 18, while erecting houses and sanitation facilities and rehabilitating war-abandoned water supply schemes, to service the resettlers moving into the area. And the influx of people continues to grow. But GTZ's most ambitious undertaking has been the Wanni Education Rehabilitation Project (VERP) which tries to compensate for the lost primary and secondary education of wanni's children and restore the psycho-social health of its war-traumatised young, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PSTD). Not so long ago, Graca Marcel, noting the impact of armed conflict on children, stressed the vitality of education during and after conflict, "as it offers a sense of continuity and stability for children and the whole community. Education gives shape and structure to children's lives when everything around is chaos and schools can be a haven of security to the well-being of the war-affected children.." The war has certainly destroyed more than buildings and bridges. Sundaram Divakalala, Project Manager, GTZ-BECARE, says, "25 per cent of children in the war-affected North and East suffer from severe psycho-social trauma and 51 per cent from general trauma, by experiencing and witnessing the harsh realities of conflict such as killing of their parents." Healing through education (a highly-prized possession in this region) has begun its first step here. And the school could truly prove to be a tool to restore a twisted childhood. The VERP has identified 13850 children in the wanni, as slow learners and over aged, through years of lost schooling. "Some of the traumatised children require clinical care, but only two psychiatrists are available for the entire North and East," complains Divakalala. "You cannot tell a traumatised child by appearances. You begin to realise something is wrong when you see that he/she has lost retentive power and tends to forget things or cry for no apparent reason." The VERP has planned its own strategy to distinguish the traumatised children while allowing them to study in the same classroom as that of healthier children, in order to maximise the healing process. "The pilot phase begun in August last year has been training teachers to spot traumatised children," said Dr. Gerhard Huck, Senior Adviser-Teacher Education, Basic Education Sector Programme, GTZ. Of them, 150 teachers will act as "counsellors" to school children in the five wanni Zones of Kilinochchi, Thunukai, Mullaitivu, Madhu and Vavuniya North, while an additional 1,000 will be "befrienders" to children throughout the North and the East. The training is aided by a special manual, named "Joyful living", prepared by Prof. Daya Somasunderam, head of Department of Psychiatry, University of Jaffna. "While the current project targets traumatized children in schools, subsequent programmes will focus on school drop-outs, also including child soldiers," said Divakalala, touching a query lurking in many a mind. The VERP's other arm prepares text books of mother-tongue, English and mathematics to wanni children, with the National Institute of Education. "Peace education is a cross-cutting issue, embracing all subjects and we have been mindful of it when preparing study material," says Dr. Huck and assures that the German government intends to extend the project by two more years. Despite these goodwill attempts, Wanni is hit badly by a teacher shortage, currently running to 2,000, says V. Elankumaran (Baby Subramaniam), head of LTTE Education Council. "One teacher in our area teaches about eight classrooms and there are no teachers at all for some subjects." He also points out that while the average teacher-shortage in the North and East has remained about 6,000 for the last ten years, the Sinhala medium teacher-excess was in the region of 15,000 teachers. Though somewhat facilitated by the services of 1,000 volunteer teachers, the wanni calls for more teacher appointments, as schools slowly rise from the ashes. Till then, teaching continues under trees, cadjan roofs and within hastily erected wooden walls as children lap up the healing fruits of education. More than in other times, in the post-conflict reconstruction of the North and East, education has become the most singularly precious restorative humanitarian need. |
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