Education: A Ticket to a New Future

Season 1, episode 1

Education: A Ticket to a New Future

In this episode you'll travel with us to Lebanon, South Africa and Uganda as we take a look at the importance of education for children, particularly girls; and children who have been uprooted from their homes due to conflict.

Producer: Victoria Ptashnick

Episode Transcript

 [00:00:00.79] I'm [INAUDIBLE]. I'm 15 years old. I live in [INAUDIBLE]. My life is good but not all that. I went to school. It's nice because I do get friends. I learn the languages that I don't know. I have to go to school to learn to be a big person working in office, to be a lawyer.

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[00:00:31.37] Hello, I'm David Morley, the president and CEO of UNICEF Canada, and I'm the host of our UNICEF Canada Podcast Thank you for listening.

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[00:00:44.09] When you think of the urgent, necessary things children need who have been uprooted from their homes due to conflict or an emergency, we often think about food or water, maybe shelter from the elements. But there's something else that's less obvious that is so key to keeping children's dreams alive and providing them with bright futures, and that is education.

[00:01:07.82] Because without it, children will lack the knowledge and skills to rebuild their lives and chart a more peaceful path for themselves, their communities, and the world. The urgency around educating children who've been uprooted has a new significance today because the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes is the highest since World War II.

[00:01:31.40] And nearly half of those people who've been uprooted are children. In today's episode, we will delve deeper into those issues by taking you into a refugee camp in Uganda, where we'll hear from children about what education means to them. We'll hear a harrowing story about how education impacted a woman who received her schooling in the middle of a war zone in the Middle East. And we'll learn why girls, in particular, face so many barriers to accessing a quality education.

[00:02:03.92] Before that, though, I just want to share a reflection because whenever we talk about girls education, my mind always goes to Grace. Grace was 13 years old or so when I met her, and I met her at a school in South Sudan. Her town had been just about entirely destroyed by the Civil War in South Sudan.

[00:02:29.66] She'd fled across the Nile to find safety from armed groups but kept on coming back to her town because that's where her school was. Somehow, I don't know how, the teachers kept the school going, and when I met Grace, we were in the playground of the school. The school building around us. Yellow paint that was pockmarked with bullet holes. And Grace was still coming back to study.

[00:02:57.66] She was getting ready for her grade eight exams, and I said to her, why? Why do you do this? Why do you put your life at risk to come back here all the time, and she looked at me like I was crazy. She said, it's obvious. I want an education because education will bring peace. And when I think of girls in education, I think of Grace, and I think of the important role that education has in bringing peace.

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[00:03:40.41] Like the girl in my story, nobody knows how important education is to children in conflicts than the children who lived through them themselves, and [? Byanyamut ?] is one of those children. Welcome, [? Byanya. ?]

[00:03:53.01] Hi, David.

[00:03:53.82] Hi, it's now-- you're not a child anymore, of course, but let's start from the beginning of your story. Where were you born?

[00:04:00.31] So I was born and raised in Beirut in Lebanon in 1976. Now, you know my age. So the war, the Civil War started in 1975, just before I was born. So during the war, the downtown core was completely destroyed. The infrastructure was badly damaged. Water was contaminated. We missed many school days.

[00:04:22.96] So, unfortunately, my entire childhood years were spent in a conflict zone. Our days always started by listening to the radio report to see where the fighting is so that we were able to determine if the schools are going to be open or closed. And sometimes, we risk our life to go to school. And often, I'm asked, was it worth it?

[00:04:44.83] And I always said, absolutely, yes, because at school is where we felt the normalcy of our life, and we felt we were kids, and we belong to school. And sometimes, we would play hide and seek with the sniper by taking the alleyways instead of the major roads when walking to school. Life was challenging, but we're kids, and we were good at what kids do best, being resilient, and loving to play and learn through play.

[00:05:17.82] How did that make you feel growing up in war?

[00:05:21.51] So the feeling changed from when I was a little child, and then later, when I started my teenage years, but throughout, I felt the frustration and anger of being stuck in an underground shelter and not to be able to go to school and play with my friends and learn new things. Later in my teenage years, I knew that a girl's voice can get quieter if she is not armed with education. These are my parents' teaching.

[00:05:48.31] So I had to fight to get this education even at times when it meant risking my life to go to school. And what's harder is when you're born into all this chaos, so you didn't see peace, and you didn't feel peace. And I think for me, it took well into my later in life to experience what living in peace, not to be afraid of hearing that someone you love got injured, or someone you love has been kidnapped. Just this feeling of peace was very strange for me to understand.

[00:06:29.88] I think of children today, and I think of my own grandchildren. If they could never go outside, as you're saying or if you're fearful, and you feel trapped inside, to say nothing of being a teenager and all of those feelings that come when we're teenagers anyhow. How did you come through it, do you think?

[00:06:50.97] Even in the shelter, we played games. If we had access to a paper and pencil, we would play tic-tac-toe. If we played cards, we played a game called [? bergis, ?] and I still play it with my kids now. But also, we played other games that I hope no child will ever have to play, which is trying to sometimes count how many rockets had fallen in a minute and try to match that with the radio reports or even try to guess the name of the rockets by the sound of them.

[00:07:22.98] And we knew all of them from the 120, from the RPG, 150, the Grad rockets. These are the bad ones. We even called for the gunshots French fries. We gave them names. It's humor is what helped lift us up from this darkness. I keep remembering the day when we were stuck for maybe two or three days, and sometimes, you lose track of time.

[00:07:49.02] You don't even know if it is day or night outside. Because in the shelter, we had only one small window. And with every explosion outside, all the dust comes and full the shelter. So I remember that day when I had my math textbook, and all I was doing is just solving equations, one after the other after the other.

[00:08:08.40] And you know, David, I remember our neighbor, she whispered something in my mom's ear. She probably thought I was going nuts because thinking like people are dying outside, and I'm doing math. And I have to also be frank, I'm not really good in math. But it was a way for me to just make bubble for myself and stay inside this bubble and do something that was meaningful for me.

[00:08:33.60] I understand that your mom was actually a volunteer teacher who worked with UNICEF, and she'd go to shelters to teach children so that their education wouldn't be interrupted either, and you'd get to go with her. Can you tell me a bit about that?

[00:08:48.52] So my mom used to be a teacher for children with special needs, and she lost her work at the beginning of the war. But then during the wars, she noticed that so many children were missing school days, and she felt that she had to do something about it.

[00:09:04.51] So she started a group of other volunteers, and most of them were teachers, and they would go from shelter to shelter across the city everywhere, even under the bombs. They would go, and they would deliver these amazing recreational activities, arts and crafts. She did puppet shows. These kids they were hungry for all kinds of educational and fun and recreational activities.

[00:09:30.48] And when you watched her, what did you learn about the way children value education?

[00:09:35.76] When my mom comes with all the puppets and starts setting up, the first thing that you see the kids are intrigued by what she has in her bags, and what they are going to see, and what they are going to sing or the stories that she is going to read to them. For them, this was extremely important, and through those activities, my mom was delivering the social emotional support that these children badly needed.

[00:10:06.63] She knew that these children are children first, and they've been out of school and most of them even haven't left the shelter for many days, many weeks, and many months in certain times. So what brought to them is brought to them this hope, and the opportunity just to have fun and to play, to connect with each other, to just learn a new language through the puppet shows.

[00:10:39.75] Listen to the stories, start thinking about fairy tales, and things that are far from the daily talks about violence and the politics and the assassinations and the killing. So it's just gave them the language that they should be hearing as children.

[00:10:58.08] How about you? Why was education so important to you as a child?

[00:11:04.11] So for me, education was more like an act of defiance against those who wanted to silence us. When you're living in war, and you don't have access to education, and you're a girl, your choices are really very, very limited. You can get married at very young age and start a family, and I did not want that. My parents did not want that for me.

[00:11:27.48] They believed in education even at times when they knew that by sending me to school, and it was the same for all the other parents. Sending their kids to school did not mean that they are going to see them at the end of the day. It was a risky business, but they had to do it because they believed in it. And without education, you won't even know what's outside of the walls of this conflict zone. You want to explore other topics. You want to explore science, history. You want to learn new languages.

[00:11:57.03] The driving force behind my courage and the courage of all the kids who lived through war was the determination and the resilience to become strong leaders and strong women, in my case, who could lead the future. We had dreams. We don't want anyone to be stopping us from dreaming. We wanted to achieve those dreams, and that was the power behind my determination to go to school and learn.

[00:12:23.31] I wish everybody who's listening could see the fire in your eyes when you talk about that.

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[00:12:40.69] [? Byanya ?] just told us why getting her education while she was a girl growing up in a war zone was so important to her. But is it still important in the same way to children growing up in conflict today? We wanted to find out. So we asked our colleagues in Uganda to have a few conversations with children living in a refugee camp there.

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[00:13:08.01] I'm [INAUDIBLE], 18 years. My mother was the first person to come here. I came to stay here with her now. How was school actually? About our school, we have all right-- we are liking some teachers, but they [? broad ?] teachers and education is going on well. What I think of those who don't go to school is to advise them or to talk to their parents because some of their parents are the one making their children not come to school, stopping them. Some, OK, because of early marriage, they are missing school. Some of them are married.

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[00:13:52.46] Girls, in particular, face more challenges in accessing education around the world. To explain why that is, we have Rowena Pinto, UNICEF Canada's chief program officer here to explain. So, Rowena, why is it that girls face greater challenges in getting an education?

[00:14:11.22] Well, there's a number of reasons for this, and we see a lot of the girls who aren't getting education in sub-Saharan Africa. It's estimated, for example, that across Africa, about 28 million girls between the ages of 6 and 15 are not in school, and many will never even set foot in a classroom. There's a number of reasons for this.

[00:14:31.08] A lot of the countries are in conflict, and we know that education is one of the first things to disappear when a child is displaced, and one of the last things to return. And then there's a lot of societal norms and cultural norms that are keeping girls behind. We're seeing a lot of girls who are forced into child marriage at a very early age.

[00:14:49.94] There's gender based violence. Girls often are forced to take care of younger siblings and are kept back. There's issues around access to water and sanitation, which have an impact on girls being able to attend school, early pregnancies. All of those societal norms are harder to change, but when you do have an impact, you see a huge change.

[00:15:11.96] You were most recently in South Africa with UNICEF and what kind of challenges did you see girls up against there as they tried to access their education?

[00:15:21.08] South Africa is very interesting. It's one of the richest African countries on the continent, and in actuality, they've got great participation when it comes to school. But what you actually see is that a lot of girls while they get into primary school, there's a huge drop off in secondary school. Unfortunately, there's huge gender based violence against girls in South Africa. There's rape, domestic violence, and often, they are having to stay home and take care of brothers and sisters.

[00:15:52.04] Clearly, clearly, helping these girls is the right thing to do, but assisting girls in sub-Saharan Africa get the education they should has many benefits for the world and for all of us. Can you tell me a bit about that?

[00:16:10.28] What we know is that the longer that girls stay in school and the more likely that they are to finish secondary school, the less likely they are to enter into early marriages. The more opportunities they have to continue their education. They bring to their communities a different perspective, which then changes the social norms around them. And they themselves are able to deliver income, which is sometimes a lot of the reasons that they drop out of school actually.

[00:16:37.62] And so it really is a multiplier effect and really focusing and investing in girls, if anything, there's so much loss potential there. Girls that I met there, incredibly smart when given the right supports were able to go into disciplines such as chemical engineering. So if you can imagine how much lost potential there is out there that we aren't harnessing for the world in general, it's quite amazing.

[00:17:02.41]

[00:17:05.31] So after hearing about how important it is to educate girls in crisis, I thought I'd put it back to [? Byan ?] as she was one of those girls that UNICEF educated.

[00:17:18.89] So you know, David, one should never ever underestimate the ability that a child has to recover and heal from war. I think that's why we should always be there to help children who lived through conflict zone because they are capable of recovering and healing. You will never be able to forget what you went through. I still have flashbacks every day. I have nightmares, but I was able to live with them and be what I wanted to be in society.

[00:17:52.26] And that's because I had access to education, and often, when I hear people talking about children who right now as we speak are living in conflict zones, I see people talking about, wow, they need a lot more than just a paper and pencil. Actually, this paper and pencil, they are almost like water and food because they are able to recover, and they are able to make it and just give them a chance. And they will be amazing leaders for tomorrow. Don't we all need amazing leaders in this world.

[00:18:27.35] [? Byan, ?] tell us what you've achieved after receiving that educational support from UNICEF and going to school in those very difficult, difficult circumstances?

[00:18:38.36] Just before I started university, it didn't take me long to decide what I wanted to be. I really wanted to be a teacher, and a teacher for children with special needs because I was seeing so many children who got injured during the war, and special education was not very common in Lebanon. I was one of the first 10 special education teachers in Lebanon who graduated. So I live in Toronto in Canada, and this is where I teach. And I love my job. I think it's the best job on Earth.

[00:19:09.03] Now, here you are. A country at peace. How do you bring the lessons that you learned as a little girl in Lebanon to working with children with special needs here?

[00:19:21.55] So as a teacher, some amazing profession, it gives me all the skills that I need to be able to make a difference in the life of children here and abroad, and I'll explain. In Canada, I have my students, and I talk to them about social justice. I talk to them about their rights and how to advocate for those rights. But I also talk to them about their role as global citizens, and what they can do to help children who are like them, but they live far away and in places where their rights are not being respected.

[00:19:55.59] And that's through raising awareness and raising funds, of course. We do it on the local level and on the global level. And on the other hand, being a teacher also gives me the skills to go back to Lebanon and to the refugee camps and work in the field. And I've been doing this every summer with my family where we go back to the refugee camps, and we deliver educational and just fun activities. We just go to the refugee camp and have fun with the kids.

[00:20:26.28] And I feel this very strong connection because I have so many things in common with them. We both slept on a very uncomfortable surface. We both lost loved ones. We both heard the piercing sound of rockets very close to our ears and not from a TV but in reality. And I can connect with them this way, and I often share with them that I am a war survivor too.

[00:20:49.47] You are an example, [? Byan, ?] showing what the resilience of those children of what it means as you grow up. It's not only helping them now, which is incredibly important as a humanitarian piece of work that we must help them now morally, but also looking to the future to build the future, to build that peace. And I look at you as an exemplar of somebody who is building peace.

[00:21:16.08] Thank you. Yeah, you're absolutely, helping them is-- it's never too early. It's never too late. It's something that we have to do, and we must do. One story, this refugee camp I went to a couple of times, and there was a girl. Her name was [? Nishmi, ?] and she used to help me. She was one of the oldest girls, and this last visit, this past August, when I went, and she did not come to help me. And I was surprised, but then she came at the end of the day when we were wrapping up all the activities.

[00:21:46.53] And she looked at me, and her first question to me was, [? Byan, ?] are you coming to my wedding? I froze, but I was not surprised. [? Nishmi ?] is 14 years old. She's getting married in December, and she stopped going to school a long time ago. So that's why I think education is so important. I wonder how many more girls are going to get married before they reach 18 and missed opportunities in life and knowing what are the rights first and how to advocate for them. I think that's very important.

[00:22:25.30] So if the [? Byan ?] of today could go back and talk to little girl [? Byan, ?] what would you want to tell her?

[00:22:35.40] That's very hard, but I think I would tell her that war is going to stop, and eventually, I will have a taste of the real world without war and not to stop trying to go to school.

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[00:22:59.21] That's a wrap in our first podcast episode. We so hope you enjoyed listening, and we'll be back soon with a second episode. If you'd like to support some of the important education-based work UNICEF is doing, please go to our website and consider buying an education-based survival gift or become a monthly donor. But when you visit UNICEF.ca, you'll learn more about what UNICEF Canada is doing to help children access an education around the world.

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