🔗 Share this article

'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

Juwayriya Adwan, 12, al-Mawasi

For the past two years since I was last inside a learning environment. Two years since I listened to the school chime at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, took my seat and answered questions during my beloved lesson. At times I still clearly recall the sounds and smells: powder from the board, sharpener leftovers, laughter echoing down the halls. But my educational institution is gone; it was bombed soon after the hostilities erupted. My learning materials incinerated, and several classmates lost.

I was in elementary level on that fateful day: the last day I attended classes. That beginning of the day, alert signals blared through the corridors. Some students wept, others gripped each other. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even she sounded shaky. I remember wishing for a ordinary day; lessons, intermission, a verse presentation. Instead, that day became the last page of my previous existence.

The war has taken so much. But the toughest sacrifice of all is education, because that is the loss of the future itself.

Now I live with my guardians, male relatives and female sibling in a crowded shelter in Khan Younis. The tent walls sway with breezes, failing to insulate. We line up for nourishment and hydration. Power is imaginary and seclusion is unavailable. Hope feels fragile.

At night, I look up at the stars through the holes of my temporary home and ponder if my peers see the comparable vista. Some reach out when they are able, saying they long for education and have preserved their old notebooks; like relics of a vanished time. I feel guilty because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once dreamed of pursuing pedagogy to assist local youth study, even when existence was challenging. Now I dream of being a writer – to draft, to talk and to demonstrate the world what it signifies to be a young person in the Strip. I want to narrate our accounts of apprehension and need, but also fortitude. Because even in this place, amid fatality and debris, our words continue.

When online access exists, I attempt learning digitally. Other times, I visit a modest shelter where aid workers teach us math and Arabic. The lessons are short – the power fails or the attacks recommence but in these instances, I feel alive. I recollect who I was: the girl who loved numbers and poems, who thought learning could change the world.

Conflict has claimed innumerable things; our homes, educational institutions and relatives. I grieved for my uncle, his partner, and their children. I said goodbye to my cherished hometown, my previous home, which is only ruins now. But the hardest loss of all is learning, because without it, our prospects disappear.

To the global audience, I express this: don’t let our dreams die. We seek no sympathy, we demand measures. The youth are entitled to literature, learning environments and security. Education is not an extravagance, it is a basic right. The territory is not just ruins; it is minors who persist in hoping under aerial surveillance at evening. It is my account and I will persist in composing, even if my only possessions is a fractured utensil and a fragment of ripped sheet.

'They message: "are you OK, teacher?"'.

An educator, forty, instructor in central Gaza

I have been educating in Gaza for more than a decade. First in Khan Younis, then in a different town, and now in the central camp in the middle of the territory. Prior to hostilities, I typically educated six classes of about fourty pupils per class, almost two hundred forty individuals enthusiastic about knowledge.

Teaching them was my mission and happiness in reality, and I still remember the gleam in a learner's look when a new idea clicked; the sort of occasion every instructor lives for.

I always believed education should be dynamic. My teaching space was a space of play, creativity, and activity. We created cartographic art, dramatized bygone episodes, and converted teaching into tales.

Joy always filled the room as interest replaced anxiety. Certainly, even before the war, children in Gaza were always scared. My teaching space was a secure location but after that day, everything changed.

My learning center became a shelter for households escaping the explosives. Not long later, it was attacked and entirely ruined. There are very few learning institutions still erect in Gaza now. For 24 months, all has been unusual. The hostilities has destroyed every aspect of our existence: safety, homes, schools, dreams. Anxiety and sorrow are constant companions.

Numerous of my pupils are now deceased – minors who talked about dreaming of doctors, artists, and educators. They were refused even the privilege of living. Those who are still here endure starvation, eviction and fatigue – and yet, they still maintain the will to learn.

At times, when the online access permits, I receive messages from a small number of them. They write inquiring: “Are you OK, teacher?” We exchange concise phrases, short lessons, small glimmers of interaction amid the turmoil. They inquire if circumstances will ever go back to normal. I tell them I have no answer.

All over Gaza, instructors, aid workers and non-profits endeavor education in all available spaces: in temporary structures, destroyed learning spaces, or congested safe zones. Education has become an gesture of resistance, a way to say: “We are still here.” And as long as we persist in education, we will endure.

A significant number of us are also guardians. I am a guardian of {three|several