IBB, Yemen, Dec 26 (NNN-XINHUA) – The war in Yemen forced more than two million children out of school and put 3.7 million others at high risk, because of the non-payment of teachers’ salaries, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
But for those who can return, they will risk everything in order to go back to the classrooms, even to sit on the rubble of airstrike-hit schools.
On the early morning of Sept 4, 2015, while the parents of Mohammed Othman were preparing to walk him to the nearby Shuhada-Alwahdah School, to enrol him in the first grade, they suddenly heard a loud roar of planes hovering overhead, then explosions shaking the ground and people screaming.
The warplanes struck the school in Al-Radhmah district in Ibb province, about 193 km south of the Houthi-held capital Sanaa.
There were no military installations near the airstrike-hit school, but it was not the first time that a school has been mistakenly bombed during the war in Yemen, that has lasted for more than four years, which has since pushed many parents to prevent their children from going to school, amid fears of such airstrikes.
The war erupted after the Houthi militias stormed the capital Sanaa in late 2014, and forced the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile, which triggered a military intervention by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in early 2015.
Four years after the airstrikes hit the Shuhada-Alwahdah school, the now 11-year-old Mohammed Othman, along with dozens of his classmates, returned in Sept, to the classrooms of the bomb-out school.
The Shuhada-Alwahdah school is like many other bombed-out schools in Yemen, where there were no tables or chairs for the students or the teachers, who have not been paid for over two years. They all sit on the cold ground or the rubble left from the ruined windows and doors, or on the bricks that fell down from the walls.
The teachers in Yemen suffer greatly, along with their families, for not being paid for over two years now. However, many have been keeping the good job in teaching the young generations, in order for hopes of helping build a bright future.
Issa al-Dhamini, one of the teachers in the Shuhada-Alwahdah School, stands high when he talks about his national duty to educate the young generation.
“Targeting a school is targeting the nation’s future,” al-Dhamini warned.– NNN-XINHUA