Refugee Education

My projects in Phnom Penh have diversified and I am now also working with the refugees who have been granted asylum in Cambodia, and those seeking refugee status. This has opened my eyes to a lot of issues surrounding refugee education. While the Montagnard refugees live at one site, and cannot leave without permission and supervision, the other refugee population, called 'urban refugees' live where they choose and have fewer direct provisions made for them. The Montagnards have food baskets delivered to them, whereas the urban refugees have more autonomy and the freedom to work.
The urban refugees that I work with come from Vietnam, Myanmar (both Rohingya and Burmese) Pakistan, and Somalia.  I have set up a programme for the women refugees, with the goal of empowering them by fostering a sense of community, as well as local integration, and exploring opportunities for vocational training. Because they live throughout the city, the logistics of meeting with all of them are difficult. There is one place outside Phnom Penh where a relatively large number of the Muslim refugees live, and I have met with some of the women there. One of the central difficulties is communication, and the visits become like the game we used to call 'Chinese whispers' (for politically correct reasons, while teaching I now call it 'Telephone') where a sentence is whispered from one person to the next around the room until the garbled final form is said out loud and compared to its original.  My English is translated to Urdu to Burmese to Rohingya and who knows what my original sentences become. Language is a central issue in refugee education, and even more complicated than I knew it to be. Few of the refugees speak Khmer, some because they can get by without it, and some because they are hoping to get to another country, and are unwilling to make the investment in learning a language that won't be of use to them. The kids go to English classes, as it seems all kids in this country do, and then, since English has become a common second language among the refugees, the children who have studied English and picked up Khmer become the family translators and negotiators, putting a lot of pressure on them, and leaving the women dependant on their husbands for money, and their children for communication. My project for empowerment has some way to go.

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.