Thousands of children find hope in tent schools in Gaza: ‘We try to make the students smile’

Ahmed Abu Riziq was walking through the streets of Gaza last year, searching for a school – or any environment where he could teach – when he noticed a little boy with a school bag running ahead of him. He wondered if the boy was late for school and decided to follow him.

But Abu Riziq soon realised the boy wasn’t running to school. He was chasing parachute bags. Parcels of food which were being dropped from the sky by humanitarian aid workers. There was no school.

A teacher and father of three young children, 29-year-old Abu Riziq realised then that he had to act to help ensure that children in Gaza can receive an education and life beyond atrocity.

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“I felt I needed to do something,” he recalls. “I’m a teacher, and I’m supposed to change this – as with doctors, when they see the injured, they go quickly to help them.”

There are no longer parachute bags delivered in Gaza. Children are starving and malnourished. Many have lost homes and loved ones. But in a glimmer of hope, thousands of children now go to ‘tent schools’ and get lessons from Abu Riziq and his team of teachers at Gaza Great Minds Foundation.

Abu Riziq told his friends about his plan and together they set up a tent for the school, expecting no more than 50 pupils to come on the first day, but there were more than 200. He realised they needed money and resources, and they officially launched Gaza Great Minds in May last year.

The group met with activists from around the world who agreed to advocate for the tent school project and help raise awareness and funds. There are now more than 3,000 students aged between three and 16 who are being taught in tents by Gaza Great Minds, with 33 teachers covering English, Arabic, maths and science, alongside professional psychiatric support.

“Teaching in a tent is not easy at all. We are talking about high temperatures. It is not a safe place. You could be killed at any moment. We have lost a lot of our students. One of our tents was burned from one of the shrapnels of Israeli rockets while we were teaching,” Abu Riziq says.

“We have students coming to the tents without enough food. They are exhausted. They fall on the ground on some days. They are not focused.

“And the teachers come without enough food. They try to make the students smile while they themselves are crying. It’s not easy. But we need to do this. If we didn’t do this, no one else would, so it’s more than a duty for us.”

Abu Riziq says he feels fear in every class because “there is no safe place in Gaza”. “You hear bombs hovering 24/7. You hear when the rocket launches from the warplane and you wait for two seconds thinking: ‘Is that me? Will we be targeted?’ There’s a moment of silence and then: ‘Boom. It’s not us.’ Sometimes it’s just 100 metres away from us, but there’s nothing we can do. This is life in Gaza.”

He recalls being in a class recently when there was a very close airstrike. All the students lay with their heads down under their chairs and they were terrified. They screamed. But after a few seconds, they realised they had not been hit and they returned to their lesson.

“Imagining this is terrifying. Living it is a catastrophe,” Abu Riziq says. One girl in the ninth grade, Tala, lost 14 members of her family and they are still buried under the rubble now. She has lost her hand, but she still comes to the lessons and hopes to be an English teacher.

“She has a lot of dreams and she loves life. Despite everything that’s happened to her, she still says: ‘I will continue learning and I will continue coming to these tents. Even if it is not a real school, it is the only candle of hope that I found.’”

Another girl, Farah, lost all her family but every time she comes to class, “she is always smiling because her mother told her to smile”. And a boy, Amir, lost his father and his family lost all their money so he decided to set up his own business selling ice cream he made himself with the support of Gaza Great Minds.

Abu Riziq says that it is the children who give him hope. “They are the only thing right now who make me want life, who make me want to stay alive, just to see them grow and see them successful, and see them safe and protected. If there was no Gaza Great Minds, I don’t know what I would be.”

His own children are four, one and nine months and the youngest is seven months old. 

“If this continues, my children will suffer a lot. This is why we are insisting on having psychiatric or social support in the tents. They need hope. They need to play. They need to smile. They need to have fun. We are focusing on these two lines – academic study and fun and joyful moments for them.”

Abu Riziq says he is not ashamed to admit that he is “really, really hungry”. 

“We don’t have enough food. We have just one meal, most of the time, before the sun goes down. We need to make a fire and we need to collect food from the markets, if it’s available. We need to go to dangerous areas to get through from distribution areas. We could be killed in these areas, but there’s nothing we can do. We need to survive.”

They lost their family home and were forced to live in a tent. They have been displaced 11 times in total. Abu Riziq has no money left, but manages to pay the teachers a small salary through the funding raised for Gaza Great Minds. 

“My dream is to have one big school in Gaza, an actual school where I can teach orphans, where I can teach those who lost their limbs, those who lost a lot of their educational lives, and teach them how to be a great generation in the future,” Abu Riziq says.

He hopes that this generation will see a free Palestine – but they need help from the world.

Abu Riziq would like the UK government to end arms sales to Israel, and for world leaders to demand that sanctions against Israel be enforced and for humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza.

“I feel like the whole world has let us down,” he says. “I’m not just talking about Gaza. I’m talking about all Palestinians – what’s going on in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, everywhere in Palestine. The world has decided to stay silent. By this, I mean governments. There are people trying to boycott and go on marches. I appreciate this. I believe people can make a difference. I don’t lose hope in people.”

You can support Gaza Great Minds by donating here, and following them on social media @gazagreatminds.

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