Saturday, 13 February 2010

Teaching at the UNRWA school

This morning i did three lessons at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school in Abu Dis. I will be doing this every saturday alongside my teaching at the community center and the Arab Institute.

I started off by getting the students to write down, and then present to the class, 'Five things i want to do in my life'. The most common answers were: to be a teacher, to be a doctor, to see the Aqsa mosque and go to Jerusalem, to travel the world, to free Palestine, and to get married.

Like the Arab Institute, the UNRWA school is a good school. But it made me realise that the best schools in Abu Dis rely on external funding. Of what i have heard, the Palestinian Authority schools are generally overcrowded and under resourced.

What does this say about the 'peace process'? The fact is that after 16 years of agreements, negotiations, accords and so on, Palestinian children still cannot go to a well resourced comprehensive school.

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