‘I want to study’: Lebanon crisis cancels school for many

BEKAA VALLEY, Lebanon: In a camp for Syrian refugees in east Lebanon, Mohammad and his three sisters fear they will be out of school for a third consecutive year because remote learning is out of reach.

"Look at my phone. How do you expect my son to study on it?" asked his father Abdel Nasser, sitting cross-legged inside the family’s tent in the Bekaa Valley.

"The screen is cracked... and I have no internet." Eleven-year-old Mohammad and his siblings are among tens of thousands of Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian children who have been left for months without schooling due to coronavirus restrictions.

An accelerating economic crisis means they may never return to school in what rights groups are calling an "education catastrophe", especially affecting refugees who already struggled to access learning before the pandemic.

"We can’t afford to buy a cellphone for everyone. We must first be able to feed our children," said their mother Shamaa. Mohammad arrived in Lebanon from Syria in 2012 -- a year into an ongoing conflict that has killed 388,000 people and displaced millions.

But he wasn’t enrolled in school until 2019 because Lebanon’s public school system didn’t open its doors to Syrian refugees until 2013, and even then only to a limited number. Mohammad’s first school year coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought all classes to a halt by the second term.

"He doesn’t even know how to multiply one by one," his father said. Mohammad’s older sisters Hind, Sarah and Amal -- aged 12 to 14 -- had already been in school for four years when the education ministry in March 2020 said it was shifting to online learning.

"I was happy before," 14-year-old Amal said, sobbing. "I was studying Arabic, English, science and geography. "But now my parents can’t afford to give me an online education."

More than 1.2 million children in Lebanon have been out of school since the country’s coronavirus outbreak began last year, the UK-based charity Save the Children says. It warned last month that a large number of children may never get back into a classroom, either because they have already missed so much school or because their families can’t afford to enrol them. "Education for thousands of children in Lebanon is hanging by a thread," it said.