Cambodia

Several of my illusions about working for a UN agency have been shattered during my time here.My work is extremely interesting- advising UNHCR and its implementing partner NGO on education for the Vietnamese Montagnard refugees here in Phnom Penh, and having a hand in providing that education.

Unfortunately, the Cambodian government has ordered the closure of the refugee site by January 1st. UNHCR have asked for a three-month extension in order to get the refugees resettled, but we'll see how that goes.

Gleeful Teaching

I am up to my eyes in last-minute thesis work, and do not feel like being Serious about Education Issues.

So on an unserious subject, I was amused by Gwyneth Paltrow's guest appearance on the television show Glee, as a substitute teacher who goes to great lengths to make subjects 'relevant' and engaging for her students, seen above teaching history as Mary Todd Lincoln, urging students to 'Practise your own bi-polar rant! See, history is fun!'

After Haiti

It was an intense experience. As far as my research went, it didn't go according to plan- the hurricane and the cholera outbreak, meant that I did not get to do as many interviews as I had hoped. But I had a very positive response from so many people from the education cluster in Haiti, who were very generous with their time and ideas, and some of whom I managed to interview from back in Ireland.
But I was busy. I made some visits as a representative of the Andrew Grene Foundation, and saw a potential site for a school. And I got to visit a number of schools, and talk to some education professionals there.

I found volunteering with EDV to be an amazingly positive experience. I thought their projects were thoughtful, community-based and sustainable- I have rarely been so impressed by a volunteer organisation, which can tend towards good intentions that are badly informed. I got to teach a little bit, and to write up a bit of a guide which volunteers can use in future for tips on teaching. I had the privilege of working with some really amazing people.
I had many of my assumptions turned on their heads- as assumptions should be. I wish very much that I could have stayed longer, but I am very certain that I will be back at some point. The graciousness, generosity, courage and strength of Haitian people that I encountered was phenomenal. It was so much beyond what I expected to find, and I was so humbled by it.

In Haiti

The last week has been intense. Community health training on cholera prevention, visiting an orphanage, schools, teaching, evacuating for the hurricane, and unevacuating again. These beautiful children were at a small orphanage which the NGO here works with.

I'm very glad I came here. So far I have achieved very little of what I came here to do, but I still feel it was important to have come.

Moving on

My time at Help the Kids will come to an end this week. I will be leaving for a two-week trip to Haiti, where I will be doing some research for my thesis, volunteering for a grassroots organisation, and representing the Andrew Grene Foundation. I hope to have some pictures and some account of the trip to post while I am there.

At the end of my trip, I will be going back to Ireland, and locking myself in a room for two weeks of frantic thesis finishing. After which I will be heading off to Cambodia to begin a new adventure with UNHCR in Phnom Penh, working on refugee education.

As seems to happen so often, the frantic preparations for the next chapter supercede the ending of the one I'm currently in. My feelings about my trip to Haiti and the excitement/anxiety/confusion that I feel have left me very little time to evaluate my time with Help the Kids. I do feel that it has been an amazing opportunity, and that I have learned a lot. It is an amazing organisation, and I one I would dearly love to work for, though not in the capacity that I'm now in. I have learned a lot about communications, and how this kind of organisation works from its central office, and it has made me more than ever convinced that I want to be in the field, working directly with programmes.

The Island of Saints and Scholars

The Irish education system is, to me, filled with paradox. I have to say that I consider it a pretty good one, as education systems go, and I believe that there is a certain traditional veneration and respect for education in Ireland, that has seen us through some grim times, and will be instrumental in getting us out of the mess we are currently facing. On the other hand, I am passionately opposed to so many things that are intrinsic to the way education is managed in my country.
Religious schools. The overwhelming majority of schools in Ireland are faith schools. National schools have a religious patron.The overwhelming majority of those are Catholic schools. Which means not only that religion is taught in schools, that classtime is spent preparing children for their 'Holy communion', but that children whose parents can't produce a baptismal certificate get put way down the list for a place at school. Many parents who otherwise don't trouble a church have their children christened so that they will get into a decent school. This system implements a kind of institutional racism. Children of parents from other countries, where Catholic is not a default setting, are discriminated against under this method of selection.
There is an organisation called EducateTogether who are working to counteract this. They support multidenominational, co-educational and child centred schools across Ireland.
What really baffles me is the resistance shown to their work. The first school of this kind, the Dalkey Project School, was set up in 1974, by a group of parents who wanted their children to attend a multidenominational school. The awesome Dr. Aine Hyland was one of the co-founders. She wrote;

"Those of us who had given a lot of thought to what we were doing and who could see the issue in a broader European and international perspective felt that there was nothing revolutionary about the request to have the option of multi-denominational education available in just one area of the country. But this was not how the rest of the population saw it, or so it seemed to us at the time. It was as if we were in some sense dangerous radical subversives about to undermine the structure of society. A pamphlet which was distributed in the Dalkey area called on the electorate to contact their members of parliament or to write to the Minister of Education registering their objection to the proposed school and it stated as follows: Atheistic interest in the Dalkey School Project is clear. Ireland's system of education is denominational by Constitutional guarantee ... we submit that there is no need for such a school as this which can only be divisive. It can only be hostile to religion in an age when it was never more needed ... Dalkey could be a precedent for major trouble in other areas." Seriously? A precedent for major trouble in other areas? Catholic kids and Protestant kids, and kids of no religion, and other religions going to school together?!? Yes, that's divisive. That was back in 1974, and things have changed since then. But not that much, and a lot of people still feel this way, or at least see no reason why the system of religious patronage in schools should change.

Education at the MDG Summit

Monday to Wednesday of this week was the Millenniumm Development Goals Summit in New York. Country representatives gathered at the UN Headquarters to discuss the progress of the MDGs ten years after they were conceived  and with five years to go before they should be realised. For me, I'm not sure what I'll do now the Smmit is over- just about everything I've been doing so far in my internship has been in preparation for the Summt, research for an advocacy brief, selecting photos for a presentation, ringing all the printing companies in New York to find out who could print us 75 lovely copies of our advocacy brief, like, NOW. I very much enjoyed most of what I've been doing, though have not yet had any account of how the education event actually went.
According to who you talk to, MDG 2, achieving universal primary education, has either;

a) fallen off the radar and no-one cares about it any more even though it's so important,
or,
b) been central to the debate of all the MDGs because it's so important.

Education did not get as much coverage as health, it seems to me, but I can't agree that it has fallen off the radar.
Kevin Watkins , who edits the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, published a piece in the Guardian demanding that we keep the promise made to the world's children, and international dignitaries such as Queen Rania of Jordan, and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown have continued to champion the cause of education.
For next week, I'm not sure what I'll be doing- beginning preparations for the MDG Summit in 2015, perhaps?

If it's cultural, it's not human rights violation.

'Cultural sensitivity' is a concept much touted (though rarely defined) in our line of business. The idea that humanitarian workers should respect the culture in which they work, and, if that culture is not their own, that they should make an effort to understand it, is one generally agreed on. But I find a certain amount of doublethink, and occasional excursions into extreme idiocy based on fuzzy and misguided efforts at cultural sensitivity.
First of all, I find my fuzzy opponents referring to culture as if it were a static thing, and homogenous within national, religious or other delineations, instead of the constantly evolving and complicated thing it is. 'Muslim culture', 'African culture', and, a pet hatred of mine as a term' Western culture' are described as though each could invoke an identical set of values and customs. Thus, a humanitarian colleague of mine with an extreme case of the fuzzies, pondered on whether it was ethical to design education programmes targetting in girls in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, since, she said:
 "They don't go to school, and they're happy like that. It's not their culture to go to school"
When I pointed out that education was the right of every child according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, she countered that the Convention was ' a Western concept' and only subsided when I informed her that Afghanistan was a signatory to this 'Western' Convention. Of course, there are so many things wrong with her initial statement that I could have argued from so many different angles; such as the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that women and girls are 'happy' to be deprived of education in Afghanistan, or the validity of cultural traditions which exclude half of the population from basic services. Or whether culture really should trump human rights, even if they are a 'Western' concept.
As I said, this colleague was an extreme case -she also came up with the classic line, during a discussion on bribery;
        "If it's culture, it's not corruption"
I feel that a well-meaning but uninformed rush to be culturally sensitive can lead us into the same basic errors as those committed by bigoted or prejudiced people, therefore rendering such attempts perfectly counter-productive. To be elaborately 'sensitive' to a national or religious culture while assuming homogeneity and accord among all the people of that country or faith to me smacks of the same kind of ignorance as racism, with better intentions.

Humanitarian Workers and Securtity

In the throes of an essay on international humanitarian law and the protection of humanitarian workers, I came across a very interesting paper. Attacks on humanitarian workers have increased substantially in recent years, with the latest horrific example of the ten people working with International Assistance Mission murdered in Badakhshan, in Afghanistan. These murders were claimed by the Taliban, and then denounced as ‘a crime’ by a senior figure in the Taliban.

The security of humanitarian workers is something I think a lot about, pour cause, and this paper, based on analysis and not only theorising, exploded some assumptions.

Figures for humanitarian workers who have been killed have risen in recent years. World Humanitarian Day, below, is held on the anniversary of the Canal hotel bombing , which happened seven years ago, and killed 22 people in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq.

 While many humanitarians blame the increasing militarisation of aid and the blurring of boundaries between armed forces and humanitarian agencies; the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan are an example of this, there is no actual evidence to suggest that terrorists, criminals and murderers distinguish between agencies that cooperate with the military and those who comply strictly with a policy of neutrality. The motivation of those who carry out these attacks is not clear to those working in the humanitarian sector. Though we may theorise that cooperation with foreign military powers makes targets of civilian workers, we don't know it through empirical evidence. We may deplore such cooperation for other reasons , such as the clear contradiction of humanitarian mandate ( I certainly do), but we can't prove that such organisational intricacies are important to those who murder humanitarian workers.

Andrew Grene

Andrew Grene was a political officer with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. He died on January 12th 2010, in the earthquake when the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince collapsed. Andrew had some influence on the decisions I made to do what it is I try to do. He was a genuinely good person, and I have not yet learned  how to accept that he is gone.

Andrew's twin brother Gregory set up the Andrew Grene Foundation  in his memory, together with their friend Tim Perutz; a secular charity providing educational assistance to the people of Haiti. Andrew loved Haiti and believed in the country.

World Humanitarian Day

This Thursday, the 19th of August, was World Humanitarian Day. This day is a celebration of the work of humanitarian aid workers, and a day to raise public awareness of the work they do. On this day last year, I was in the Dublin office of Scheme, where I was volunteering, and this year I was in the international office of Help the Kids. It has been an intense year.

I love this video.

A right and a basic need

In case you were wondering what education in emergencies is, and why it's important.
Many people that I've come across, including humanitarians, who should know better, don't consider education to be a basic need. I concede it's not as immediate as water, shelter, health and food- but it is a basic need.

,

And a lot of people also see education as a development issue which has no place in humanitarian relief work.
This attitude of 'children need education, but not until things have calmed down' makes me crazy. Every child, everywhere, has the right to an education, and if you're going to wait till you judge the development phase to have started, in some countries you're going to be waiting a long time.

The Interview

Just a week ago, I arrived in London, from my native Ireland, to start my internship at Save the Children.
I was thrilled to get the internship with Save; it's an organisation I would be happy to work for, and it is one of the leading agencies in the area of education in emergencies, and my role is pretty perfect for what I'm writing on, giving me access to people and information that can really help with my thesis.
When I was offered the internship, I was quite surprised as I had thought the interview had gone dismally badly. It was a phone interview with two people, and I prepared by having my soundbites about How Passionate I Am about Education in Emergencies ready, and was prepared to explain my experience of working on education projects in developing countries, and other fearless exploits. But the role is actually in communications, so their questions tended more toward the 'What experience do you have of website management?' variety. For some reason, I was quite thrown by their not unreasonable questions, and my memory of the interview is of myself mumbling,
   "Umm... uh.. yeah, uh.. the internet, yeah.. I use the internet, um, I send, like, emails...' and sounding like a complete technological incompentant. Now, I cannot claim to a technolgy expert but I live in the modern world, and I am not a moron, so I can usually come to grips with technologies that I need to use. So I felt I had not aquitted myself well in the interview. My impressions about the interview were acutally entirely wrong, as one of my interviewers subsequently gave me a call-back and checked that I was clear that this internship wouldn't be managing an education programme, and would I be content with doing humble database management and the like?