One of the challenges Liberian teachers face is how to help older students whose education was interrupted by the war—or who never had a chance to go to school at all—gain the skills they need to support themselves. Teacher Fertiku Harris, who’s now an IRC education manager in northwestern Liberia, shares this recollection of a teenager named Hajah whose drive to learn was so strong she wasn’t afraid to start at the very beginning—in preschool:

Due to the civil war in Liberia, Hajah, a teenaged girl, fled with her family to Guinea in 1990. Despite being much older and uneducated, Hajah overcame many obstacles and received an education through the IRC. Previously Hajah never had any formal education. As part of her family’s religious beliefs, only boys were allowed to go to school.

In the Lola refugee camp, Hajah’s mother built a small restaurant in a hut to support the family. Hajah was her mother’s main helper. To earn more money Hajah regularly took food to sell at the Lola Refugee School. Hajah’s frequent visits to the school piqued her interest in education. She admired the teachers. She stopped by the ABC class, which was for the youngest children, to observe. After class, Hajah would ask the children to teach her the alphabet. To encourage the children to teach her, Hajah offered them free food. Hajah began to spend more time studying the alphabet. This did not please her mother, who expected more money. Hajah’s mother complained that Hajah was not putting in enough time helping.

One day, two of my friends and I were eating in Hajah mother’s restaurant, when Hajah brought us a small paper and asked us to drill her on the letters E to O. That was what the children gave her to practice reading and recognizing. While I started to help, her mother shouted, ‘Hajah! Come here. You don’t work anymore. Come and serve the people!’ Hajah quickly heeded her mother, and didn’t have the chance to come back for the drill.

The next day Hajah left to sell food at school, and this time she entered and sat with the ABC children in class. At 15, Hajah was much taller and bigger than the other students. We offered to allow Hajah to go to school for free. One of the female teachers followed up with Hajah’s mother who argued that Hajah could not accept. The mother said she needed Hajah to help with work. Hajah insisted that she wanted to go to school, and promised her mother that she would continue to help with the work before and after school. After much persuasion, Hajah’s mother finally agreed.

Hajah began school in the ABC class in 1992 at the Lola Refugee School. At first some of the students in different grade levels made fun of Hajah, but she ignored them and soon won them over. Hajah became part of the school family. Hajah took her education seriously. Her eagerness to learn and to make up for lost time allowed her to move ahead quickly. She skipped grades on two occasions and eventually graduated from high school in 2003, when she was 26. Later Hajah got the opportunity to continue her education when she was resettled in the United States by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Hajah is a shining example of how an overlooked child can succeed with educational opportunities—the same opportunities the IRC is offering to more and more Liberians today.

The ads have been appearing on subways, cabs, buses and bus shelters in Chicago and New York. With headlines like “If you thought escaping the rat race was hard, try escaping a war zone” and “What if you were catching this train to avoid being killed instead of to avoid being late,” the ads capture the plight of the refugee and the core goal of the IRC — helping refugees move from harm to home.

If you catch one of the ads, why not snap a photo and post it to our Flickr group?

But many of these refugee crises are more often not life or death situations, he says, and argues that devoting resources to education isn’t diverting them from life-saving work.

Instead, educating children in emergencies gives them a lifeline out of an otherwise hopeless and purposeless existence in refugee limbo. “It’s not uncommon to find a generation of children raised without any access to education among the world’s refugee ‘warehouses’” Gerry says. “We must shift our obsession from how people are dying to how people are living.”

Article: Educating Children in Emergency Settings - Gerald Martone [PDF]