Syria Today | One Step Back

Two villages struggle to send their children to school.   

By Jennifer MacKenzie
Photo Oussama Alauwi

When they were first offered a bus to carry them to secondary school in 2006, many of the children in Huir al-Hoss village close to Aleppo were more excited about the chance to travel beyond their village than the prospect of attending classes. Until then, no public transport had been available. Only a few students walked or hitchhiked the 15km to the nearest school and the high school graduation rate for the village was an abject 7 percent.

"I told the children, you must study hard. If you don't study, you can't go on the bus," recalled Heike Weber, originally from Germany, who funded two-thirds of the transportation costs with profits from Anat, her high-end handicrafts shop in the Bab Sharki neighbourhood of Damascus's old city, along with sponsorship by her customers. And so the children studied. Until now, that is. Because of the absence of tourists since unrest began in March, Weber's profits have decreased by 90 percent, leaving her unable to fund the programme.

As the new school year gets underway, the families of sixty students are now faced with a stark choice: give up on their children's progress or pay for their transportation themselves.

This disruption reverses the progress of Weber's 9-year effort in the area. The bus project was a natural extension of her economic partnership with the Jebel al-Hoss region which incorporates Huir al-Hoss. In 2003, Weber, who began developing Syrian women's handicrafts in 1988, established four women's embroidery cooperatives in the Jebel al-Hoss area. As profits accumulated - reaching SYP 500,000 (USD 10,417) in 2009 - the women in Huir al-Hoss began to imagine ways of investing the money in their communities.

"They said their children couldn't go to school, because there was no transport," Weber said. "So the idea was to sponsor buses. The parents paid one-third, and Anat and our customers paid two-thirds." In 2008, the neighbouring village of Um Meial joined the scheme, and by 2010, 60 students were being bussed to school from the two villages.

Poverty hurdle
It is unclear how many of these students will attend school this academic year. "The main obstacle to education here is poverty," said Abu Luai, a resident of Um Meial and father of four, in a phone conversation. "No one from here has a lot of money to spend on schooling."

The UNDP has identified Jebel al-Hoss as one of the poorest regions in Syria. To put the slenderness of its resources in a Damascene perspective, residents struggle to meet the monthly cost of transport for one student from Huir al-Hoss of SYP 300 (USD 6) – roughly equal to the price of two coffees in one of the swanky cafés in Abu Roumaneh.

This economic gap has an educational correlative: while the national literacy rate for 15 to 24-year-olds reached 94.5 percent in 2008, according to the UNDP, in Jebel al-Hoss, in the same year, anthropologist Mette Kirstine Torslev found that 58 percent of residents over 13 were illiterate; for women, the illiteracy rate was 85 percent.

One reason for this discrepancy is that there are only three secondary schools for the region's population of 250,000. The lack of buses affected female students in particular, because they were not allowed to walk or hitchhike like the boys. In Um Meial, some girls walked to school with their brothers, but in Huir al-Hoss all girls had stopped attending school past the sixth grade until 2006.

For those boys who made their own way to school, the trip was time-consuming and exhausting. Younes Adnan al-Houmaid, a student from Huir now studying law in Aleppo, recalls how taxing it was to walk the 30km round-trip. "I wouldn't have passed my baccalaureate if there wasn't a bus," he said.

Once group transportation became affordable, Weber said, the social pressure for village children to pursue higher education increased. "Because other people say, 'the son of so-and-so is studying in university, and we are not less than he is,'" she explained.

Abu Luai agreed. This autumn, his oldest child, Hala, will become the first girl from her village to attend university in Aleppo. He estimated that almost half of the children bussed to school from Um Meial have their sights set on the same goal.

The future
With the plummeting of Anat's profits, it is unlikely the programme will resume anytime soon. Weber has had to cut all funding for the buses. She has also halved the amount of paid embroidery work distributed to the cooperatives. It is unclear if the families will be able to bear the financial burden to keep the programme running.

Weber hopes that the villagers' strengthened sense of initiative and autonomy will help them to find solutions to the problem. But in Huir al-Hoss, where Anat was paying 100 percent of the transport costs for four families, the children in these families will probably have to drop out.

Students from Um Meial have a greater chance of continuing their schooling because the village owns its own vehicle. Their "bus" is a small used car purchased collectively by villagers who pooled the first year's funding from Anat. With a hand-built trailer hitched to it, the car can tow all 25 students to and from school.

Abu Luai, the delegated owner of this car-trailer "bus" said that the village would act together to help everyone who wanted to go to school. "The trip is still difficult, but it makes all the children study hard and work hard for their futures, because they have high goals now," he said. "They see that if they study well, their future will be better."