Be grateful for your education
Term has started, university is back, and thousands of students have come to invade Leeds again. Some of us are here for the first time, while some are returning for our second or final years. Among both groups there are the enthusiasts, the ones who turn up early for lectures and consistently hand in perfectly crafted essays with a smug little smile, 3 weeks before the deadline. Then there are the rest of us, who perhaps party a bit much, don’t get started reading quite early enough and finish up the term as bleary-eyed, nocturnal beings, addicted to caffeine and totally disenchanted with this place of cruel torment they call Academia.
If you belong to the first group, good for you, but if you’re part of the second, it’s good to take some time out every once in a while to look at the world with a broader perspective. When exams are approaching, it’s easy to forget how lucky we are, but we shouldn’t forget that the vast majority of the world’s population never get the chance to go to university, indeed in developing countries only about 60% of 15-19 year olds are enrolled in secondary school, and among these far fewer are actually able to attend full time, let alone progress to university.
Statistics, of course, only tell a rather abstract story, so it’s good sometimes to connect with stories on a more direct, personal level. Of course we can’t all hop off to Zimbabwe or Peru every term for inspiration to work a little harder, but we can all go to the cinema, and there are some great films out there which portray desperate realities of poverty and hopelessness about which many of us have no idea, or have simply forgotten exists.
Thursday saw the end of the ‘Bite the Mango’ International Film Festival in Bradford, which tried to give ‘a glimpse of the world through film’, showing documentaries and dramas from places as widely varied as Havana, Allahabad and South Africa. Two days of the festival’s programme were devoted to films about children in difficult situations, including documentaries on street children in Moscow, orphans in Kashmir and children fleeing forced recruitment by rebels in Uganda. The one which caught my eye however was by a film by Syed Ali Nasir, called ‘The Miseducation of Pakistan’. It tells of the hardships faced by schoolchildren in Pakistan – ‘Schools with no teachers, schools overflowing with garbage, schools under the open sky, without drinking water or electricity’, along with a corrupt network of officials who together prevent a whole generation of children from getting even a basic education.
Another film, Death in Gaza, was intended to be one of two documentaries focussing on the lives of children in Occupied Palestine and Israel respectively. Tragically however, the director (James Miller) was shot dead by an Israeli soldier towards the end of filming in Gaza and the planned sequel about Israeli children was never made.
Death in Gaza was one of the most disturbing films I have seen for a long time. It tells, in graphic terms, about the lives of children in Rafah, a city on the border between the Gaza strip and Egypt, a place dominated by sniper towers and barbed wire, home to Ahmed and Muhammed, both 12 years old, and Najla, 16.
Ahmed and Muhammed are just like any other 12 year old kids; they like playing football with their friends, they go to each others’ houses and play in the streets with toy guns. But there is a sinister side to these war games – a few streets away a real war is happening, and every day it takes away a little more of Ahmed and Muhammed’s short, violent childhoods.
Death is commonplace here, whether voluntary, as in the case of hundreds of desperate young men who strap explosives around themselves and detonate them over the border in Israel, or otherwise: constant Israeli incursions here have affected everyone. Najla, our sixteen-year-old, seems to have lost count of how many family members she has lost since the start of the second intifada. She names at least 6. ‘In Rafah’, we are told, ‘it’s common for kids to write letters to their families in case they’re killed’. House demolitions are common. ‘Life’, says Najla, ‘is all despair’. And we’re complaining about essay deadlines?
Ahmed is only 12 years old but his face already gives away much of the hardship he and his family have suffered under occupation. His talk is full of anger – he talks about killing as many Jews as he can and being prepared to die if necessary in order to fight against them. He has fallen in with a group of militants, acting as a lookout for them during their nightly street fights with the Israeli military. We are taken inside one of their safe-houses, where men with balaclavas brandish their rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs and play ‘mercy’ with Ahmed, who they call ‘our little brother’.
When the interviewer questions the morality of using young boys such as Ahmed to do such dangerous work for them, one of the militants answers her: ‘Don’t worry about responsibility, sister, when we say goodbye to Ahmed, there are a thousand others like him in the streets’. Life has become so hopeless here, so expendable, that any hope of a better life in the future seems almost beyond the imagination of most of the children we meet. They play football, then go home and draw pictures of bombs and rocket launchers. Najla dreams of becoming a lawyer, ‘so I can judge fairly between people’. It would seem that everything around her is against her.
So it may seem like a drag to be back in classes again. You may feel depressed and intimidated at the thought of lectures, essays and deadlines. But spare a thought for those millions of children who will never have the chance of such a good education as yours. I’m not asking you to feel sorry for anyone, nor to give money to charity, though I’d be the last person to stop you. I’m just asking you to be grateful for what you’ve got.
If you belong to the first group, good for you, but if you’re part of the second, it’s good to take some time out every once in a while to look at the world with a broader perspective. When exams are approaching, it’s easy to forget how lucky we are, but we shouldn’t forget that the vast majority of the world’s population never get the chance to go to university, indeed in developing countries only about 60% of 15-19 year olds are enrolled in secondary school, and among these far fewer are actually able to attend full time, let alone progress to university.
Statistics, of course, only tell a rather abstract story, so it’s good sometimes to connect with stories on a more direct, personal level. Of course we can’t all hop off to Zimbabwe or Peru every term for inspiration to work a little harder, but we can all go to the cinema, and there are some great films out there which portray desperate realities of poverty and hopelessness about which many of us have no idea, or have simply forgotten exists.
Thursday saw the end of the ‘Bite the Mango’ International Film Festival in Bradford, which tried to give ‘a glimpse of the world through film’, showing documentaries and dramas from places as widely varied as Havana, Allahabad and South Africa. Two days of the festival’s programme were devoted to films about children in difficult situations, including documentaries on street children in Moscow, orphans in Kashmir and children fleeing forced recruitment by rebels in Uganda. The one which caught my eye however was by a film by Syed Ali Nasir, called ‘The Miseducation of Pakistan’. It tells of the hardships faced by schoolchildren in Pakistan – ‘Schools with no teachers, schools overflowing with garbage, schools under the open sky, without drinking water or electricity’, along with a corrupt network of officials who together prevent a whole generation of children from getting even a basic education.
Another film, Death in Gaza, was intended to be one of two documentaries focussing on the lives of children in Occupied Palestine and Israel respectively. Tragically however, the director (James Miller) was shot dead by an Israeli soldier towards the end of filming in Gaza and the planned sequel about Israeli children was never made.
Death in Gaza was one of the most disturbing films I have seen for a long time. It tells, in graphic terms, about the lives of children in Rafah, a city on the border between the Gaza strip and Egypt, a place dominated by sniper towers and barbed wire, home to Ahmed and Muhammed, both 12 years old, and Najla, 16.
Ahmed and Muhammed are just like any other 12 year old kids; they like playing football with their friends, they go to each others’ houses and play in the streets with toy guns. But there is a sinister side to these war games – a few streets away a real war is happening, and every day it takes away a little more of Ahmed and Muhammed’s short, violent childhoods.
Death is commonplace here, whether voluntary, as in the case of hundreds of desperate young men who strap explosives around themselves and detonate them over the border in Israel, or otherwise: constant Israeli incursions here have affected everyone. Najla, our sixteen-year-old, seems to have lost count of how many family members she has lost since the start of the second intifada. She names at least 6. ‘In Rafah’, we are told, ‘it’s common for kids to write letters to their families in case they’re killed’. House demolitions are common. ‘Life’, says Najla, ‘is all despair’. And we’re complaining about essay deadlines?
Ahmed is only 12 years old but his face already gives away much of the hardship he and his family have suffered under occupation. His talk is full of anger – he talks about killing as many Jews as he can and being prepared to die if necessary in order to fight against them. He has fallen in with a group of militants, acting as a lookout for them during their nightly street fights with the Israeli military. We are taken inside one of their safe-houses, where men with balaclavas brandish their rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs and play ‘mercy’ with Ahmed, who they call ‘our little brother’.
When the interviewer questions the morality of using young boys such as Ahmed to do such dangerous work for them, one of the militants answers her: ‘Don’t worry about responsibility, sister, when we say goodbye to Ahmed, there are a thousand others like him in the streets’. Life has become so hopeless here, so expendable, that any hope of a better life in the future seems almost beyond the imagination of most of the children we meet. They play football, then go home and draw pictures of bombs and rocket launchers. Najla dreams of becoming a lawyer, ‘so I can judge fairly between people’. It would seem that everything around her is against her.
So it may seem like a drag to be back in classes again. You may feel depressed and intimidated at the thought of lectures, essays and deadlines. But spare a thought for those millions of children who will never have the chance of such a good education as yours. I’m not asking you to feel sorry for anyone, nor to give money to charity, though I’d be the last person to stop you. I’m just asking you to be grateful for what you’ve got.
posted by Adil / Paul | 5:48 PM
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