[Schools in Nepal were woefully inadequate even
before the quake, and the country’s literacy rate of about 66 percent is among
the lowest in Asia. Teachers often fail to show up for school, and families
often decide that schooling is not worth the loss of labor around the farm,
especially since many of the farms in Nepal are on steep slopes that require
constant tending.]
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Children
attending a class provided by an aid organization at a primary school in
Sankhu,
near the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, on Monday.
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CHAUTARA, Nepal — The concrete walls of the
high school here shattered like a mirror, leaving a latticework of fissures
that crisscross every wall and pillar.
Engineers have condemned the school, Shree
Gyan Mandir Mamuna Higher Secondary School, fearing that the continuing
aftershocks from the devastating earthquake last month could cause at least one
of the structure’s two floors to collapse. That is what happened to the house
next door, where the second floor is now the first.
While information is still sketchy about the
extent of the damage acrossNepal,
officials say that thousands of schools have been destroyed and that tens of
thousands of classrooms need replacing.
“Almost one million children who were enrolled
in school before the earthquake could now find they have no school building to
return to,” said Tomoo Hozumi, Unicef’s representative in Nepal. “Prolonged
interruption to education can be devastating for children’s development and
future prospects.”
While the government hopes to finish
constructing 7,000 temporary learning centers made from tents and bamboo this
week, officials say they cannot hope to replace all of the damaged schools in
time.
Officials do not plan to re-open schools
before May 29. “We hope this will create a school environment where students
will get to reunite and share personal experiences in a post-quake scenario. It
will help us overcome the disaster,” said Khagendra Prasad Nepal, an Education
Department spokesman. More than 5,000 schools were damaged in the April 25
earthquake, and as many as 1,000 schools collapsed in Tuesday’s quake.
Aftershocks have continued to rattle Nepalis,
including a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that killed at least 65 people on Tuesday.
Here in Chautara, local officials continue to
use the high school for storing and distributing relief supplies. Last week, a
line of at least 150 people snaked around the schoolyard, and the school’s
deputy principal repeatedly ducked into a damaged classroom to retrieve giant
bags of rice.
But officials say they will not allow the
school’s roughly 350 students back into the building when classes restart on
Sunday after a three-week national holiday in the wake of the disastrous 7.8
magnitude earthquake that destroyed some 90 percent of the buildings in this
impoverished mountain district and killed more than 8,000 people across Nepal.
Where classes will restart has yet to be decided, officials said.
“We can’t decide what to do,” said Krishna
Prasad Dangal, the school’s economics teacher. “The government is going to have
to make a decision.”
Children’s advocates fear the earthquake could
reverse decades of steady progress in primary school attendance, which stood at
95 percent just before the earthquake, up from 64 percent in 1990.
Schools in Nepal were woefully inadequate even
before the quake, and the country’s literacy rate of about 66 percent is among
the lowest in Asia. Teachers often fail to show up for school, and families
often decide that schooling is not worth the loss of labor around the farm,
especially since many of the farms in Nepal are on steep slopes that require
constant tending.
Nepal’s dropout rate is high, with some 1.2
million children between the ages of 5 and 16 having dropped out or never
having attended school even before the quake, according to Unicef.
High teacher absenteeism is widely seen as
endemic in rural schools, and corporal punishment is routinely administered.
With so much work to be done in reconstructing
villages and rebuilding damaged schools, children’s advocates fear many
children will never return to school.
Even schools that are still standing have in
many cases been taken over by homeless people who will be difficult to dislodge
in the coming week as tents have been slow to arrive in the most seriously
affected districts and the monsoon season is due to start within about five
weeks.
“It will take at least three years to overcome
the earthquake’s damage and run classes in permanent structures,” Mr. Nepal of
the Education Department said.
The disaster would have been far worse if the
earthquake had struck any day besides Saturday, the only day schools and
offices in Nepal are almost universally closed. Some 31 teachers, including one
at Shree Gyan Mandir Mamuna, and 200 students died in the quake across Nepal,
according to Mr. Nepal.
In Chautara, children were playing on the one
corner of the playground left to them where a rusting metal slide gave respite
to the unrelenting agony of the past weeks.
Watching the children play, Gopal Dangal, an
elected representative from the district, said that even more than
instructional materials, the children from Chautara needed ways to play so they
could somehow forget the lives and property lost in repeated temblors that have
shaken their confidence in the world.
“Tell them we need balls, toys and other
things for these kids,” he said. “Just tell them that, will you?”
Bhadra Sharma
contributed reporting from Kathmandu, Nepal.
