CENGELLI, Turkey: If they let their eyes wander from the blackboard, a handful of children from Kobane can watch their town being bombarded from the windows of their new Turkish school.
The thud of battle for the besieged Syrian border town can be clearly heard in the classrooms of the village school just 400 metres from the frontier, where children struggling to get their heads around being made refugees, must now learn not just a new language but a new alphabet as well.
The teacher stands next to the blackboard, teaching first his usual pupils in Turkish. Then he approaches the refugee children, speaking with them in Kurdish, and begins to explain the basics of Turkish.
School is continuing — where possible — for the children among the estimated 200,000 refugees who have fled the assault by Islamic State (IS) jihadists on the mainly Kurdish town of Kobane for the relative security of Turkey.
But the challenges are huge in Cengelli’s village school—the children do not speak Turkish, the language in which all state education must be conducted in Turkey, even in Kurdish populated regions like the southeast.
No one knows how long the children will stay, it could be weeks or years. Their first big obstacle is the Latin alphabet used in Turkey, having been taught the Arabic script back home in Syria.
It helps that most of the refugees and Turkish locals on the other side of the border are Kurds, with a shared language and heritage.
After getting a roof over their heads — and almost every house in the village has taken in Syrian families—the refugees next priority is usually to enrol their children in school so that they can be taught Turkish and be guaranteed at least one meal a day.
But the village school of 240 pupils can only admit limited numbers and has had to turn many refugee children away.
“Syrian parents want to enrol their children but we have restricted resources, and there are not enough rooms to teach them in. We are trying hard to engage students in large classes of 40 to 50 students,” the school’s principal Kamil Kurultak said.
AFP
