Tamil children learn letters, numbers, songs and dances at a preschool in northwest Sri Lanka. Jesuit Refugee Services runs several such preschools with funding from Catholic Relief Services. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

By Laura Sheahen,

“When the bombing was bad, we didn’t go to school. We were in the bunker,” says 10-year-old Anthony.* “I put my fingers in my ears to shut out the shelling.”

Huddled in a hole dug quickly in the ground, with sandbags to protect them from blasts and tree branches screening their “bunker” from view, Anthony and his mother waited hours with their neighbors until the bombing stopped. Across northern Sri Lanka, thousands of children were doing the same thing, over and over, day after day.

A decades-long civil war in this island nation near India brought tremendous suffering to both sides. It also robbed children of an education. Bombardments destroyed schools and frequent evacuations uprooted students. Eventually, even makeshift classes held under trees became impossible.
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As her classmates look on, a young girl in the village of Bahar-e-Olia completes an art lesson on the white board. CRS organized this class through its Community Based Education program, which launched in Afghanistan in 2006 to make education accessible to Afghanistan’s children, many of whom were cut off by mountainous terrain and poor roads from formal education institutions. Photo by David Snyder for CRS

By David Snyder,

I’m wrapping up five days up here in west-central Afghanistan with CRS, and I have to say it’s been an amazing week. I’ve been to Afghanistan once before but I was only in Kabul. Ghor Province, of which Chakhcharan is the capital, is like a different world.

CRS has been working here since 2006 and much of their programming centers around water and education. From a photographer’s standpoint they are amazing projects to photograph—clear running spring water against a parched and seemingly desolate landscape, and the cherubic faces of Afghan children in dimly lit village classrooms.

But beyond the visual elements of the last few days, the work being done here helps to put Afghanistan in a different context for me. Before this trip I knew only the TV news version—suicide bombings and casualty figures, nightly tragedies that run the risk of inuring us to the plight of human beings in this country.
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CRS helps women’s groups make dresses, jam, and other products. The money they earn helps buy food, clothing, and school supplies for their children. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

“It’s like we were sleeping and now we’ve woken up.”

Rahima, a woman in western Afghanistan, is talking about what it’s like to be able to read: to read a medicine bottle, a sign at a vegetable market, your own name. In Afghanistan, where many men and vast numbers of women are illiterate, learning to read feels life-changing.
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Children attend an outdoor school in Malawi. A CRS sponsored Malawi Education Symposium brought together government officials, the church, NGOs and civil society to discuss the changes needed in Malawi’s current education system. Photo by CRS staff

As I lifted the last box of poster board and markers into the truck, it suddenly occurred to me that it was over. The two day education symposium titled “Solidarity in Action to Improve Education” I had helped organize as part of a CRS Malawi taskforce was now in the past. Upon my arrival in Malawi to begin my assignment as an International Development Fellow, I was immediately assigned to assist with the organization of a symposium focused on pre-university education.

Since 1990 Malawi has witnessed a 136 percent increase in primary school enrollment. While this increase is encouraging, student-teacher ratios have exploded as a result. Currently there are 80 students to every 1 teacher, which means a decrease in the quality of education and subsequent learning achievement. Actual learning time is low. Each year 20 percent of Malawian students repeat a grade. That’s the highest among the countries monitored by the Southern African Development Community. School attendance expectancy in Malawi is only 7 years. It is not uncommon to find a group of 100 or more children competing for shade in their outdoor classroom, with their teacher sparingly distributing what few books they have.
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Matthew T. McGarry, CRS country representaive for Afghanistan, is featured in a Ken Ross story posted at masslive.com

The article includes a video interview with McGarry who shares compelling insights about his life and work in Afghanistan.

CRS’ West Africa information officer, Lane Hartill, traveled to villages in eastern Sierra Leone last week to see how CRS is helping pregnant women living in isolated areas.”

Hawa is someone you don’t easily forget. When I met her the other day, she’d woke up at sunrise, ate a few wild bush yams, then hiked 5 miles, barefoot, through the rain forest to a health post that CRS had constructed. This wasn’t a stroll through the Boboli Gardens either. In the mountains of eastern Sierra Leone, not far from the Guinea border, you will find rivers of biting red ants that fizz across the ground, nasty thorns as long as your finger, and rocks that like twisting your ankles. All of that is no match for Hawa: she made the trip 8 months pregnant.

Hawa and Bokarie outside their house in Gundama village in Kailahun District in Sierra Leone. Hawa is 8 months pregnant and receives nutrition advice from CRS. Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS

She has that hand-on-her hip, stomach-forward sway that’s part of being 8 months pregnant. But Hawa doesn’t complain. She’s happy to be able to live near a health post and have people like Sylvester Amara, CRS’ health field agent to tell her about the finer points of feeding herself and the baby when it arrives. She loves the nutrition advice; nobody has given her that before. She now knows that she should be eating fruit and fish and peanuts. She knows what protein is. She knows that when the baby comes, she needs to exclusively breast feed for six months. All this is simple stuff. But for a woman like Hawa, who never went to school, hid for months in the forest as the civil war in Sierra Leone flattened her village, and then fled to a refugee camp in Guinea where she lived for 11 years, it’s vital information.

Sierra Leone has the highest child mortality rate in the world. The statistics—270 child deaths per 100,000 children born—are cold and obtuse to most people. But when Hawa tells you she’s given birth nine times, and seven children have died including her 5 year-old daughter, Iye, the one she put on her back and ran into the jungle with as the war arrived, the numbers turn into Hawa’s toddlers.

And Hawa, the woman sitting in front of you with the sweet smile and kind eyes, becomes someone who has run the gauntlet of giving birth in one of the most risky country’s in the world if you’re pregnant. All nine times she gave birth in the village. Not this time. She will be in the government clinic, she says. She’s going to go early, a week early if necessary. And her child is going to survive this time. She just knows it will.

On the sixth day of the Frontiers of Justice visit, the group visited the Notre Dame Minor Seminary/High School in Navrongo, Ghana. This entry was written by Gary Meyerl. (more…)

Many of the children spent the night of the cyclone on what is called a “talla,” or a man-made hill, just under a mile from the school. Photo by Debasish Shom for CRS

Caroline Brennan, CRS’ regional information officer for South Asia, sends this dispatch from Bangladesh:

It may be hard to believe, but a certain mound of dirt in the Bangladeshi village of Tiakhali is special. It’s not for any historical significance and, should you make it here — which requires six ferries round-trip and a tractor ride through mustard-yellow rice fields — you may start to wonder if it was worth the hike. But, after stretching your legs and being generously offered a fresh coconut, you’ll turn around to see why it is.

Standing on top of this dirt mound are about 100 elementary-school children, who see this muddy swath as nothing less than their school. While most of us might hone in on the empty space where walls and a roof should be, or the missing desks, chairs and chalkboard, the students and teachers stand defiantly in the space of what Cyclone Sidr pulled to pieces one night in November. They have exams, they say; the cyclone should have thought better.

The view on all sides feels like a tropical twin of Kansas: it is flat country. Bangladesh is so flat that most of its land mass is less than four feet above sea level; with sea levels rising, the country’s population density is one of the highest in the world. (Imagine roughly half the U.S. population — 140 million people — squeezed into the state of Wisconsin.) Finding places of high ground during a flood is not easy or, in some places, possible. In villages like Tiakhali, these places have to be made by hand and are known as tallas (man-made hills), where people or animals can flee when waters start to rise.

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