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Empty seats speak of loss as children return to school

Source
Agence France Presse - January 26, 2005

Many seats were left empty in badly damaged schools across Indonesia's Aceh province as children began lessons for the first time since the tsunami struck one month ago, killing thousands of their classmates.

Shortly after dawn, high school girls wearing uniforms and backpacks covered their noses as they rode mopeds past a patch of disturbed earth, the site of one of many mass graves containing thousands of unidentified tsunami victims.

At Junior Provincial High School Number 17 in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital of Aceh where most of Indonesia's 228,000 dead and missing lived, teachers struggled with roll calls over the noise of excavators scooping mud and garbage from the schoolyard.

"They are sad, all of them are sad," said headmistress Kasumi Sulaiman, who lost seven of her 58 teachers on December 26. "We will try to make them happy again." Sulaiman told AFP she thought most of her 980 students had survived one of the worst natural disasters in the modern era.

Elsewhere in the province, roll calls showed a potentially horrific toll on the school population.

Mohammad Hatta, an education ministry official sent to Aceh by the national government, said only about a third of the first-year students had turned up.

He said there were 83,000 primary and secondary school students in Aceh before the tsunami, which struck during the school holidays in Indonesia.

At high school 17, children were ordered to carry their own chairs into the classrooms from a muddied pile of school furniture in the yard.

The walls bore water stains at the six-foot mark (1.8 metres), and somebody had scrawled graffiti of a human skull and the words "tsunami 26-12-04", the date of the disaster.

"Keep coming to school and do not cry because you do not have any uniform to wear," Hatta told the first-graders, many of whom now live in tent camps for tsunami survivors and have lost their navy blue and white uniforms.

"This sad experience is not unique to you. It also happened to other students across the province." Sulaiman, the school principal, said she hoped "playing, child stories, and singing" would hasten the children's recovery from trauma.

Amidst the sadness, there was some laughter as children were reunited with friends.

"I am happy but I don't see all my old classmates," said 13-year-old Renggalita Faddlun, who lost her younger sister in the tsunami.

Although some began lessons earlier this month, at least 130 schools of the 500 that existed before the tsunami were due to reopen on Wednesday, according to education officials, while another 140 schools would also reopen in tents.

But many classes were dismissed soon after the head counts because of inadequate teaching material and furniture.

Hatta said only four of the 15 state junior high school and secondary schools in Aceh reopened because "some classrooms are not ready yet and they have to be prepared and cleaned first." Some local universities plan to open next week, but only partially because some students are involved in clearing corpses. More than a thousand bodies are still being found daily in and around Banda Aceh, officials say.

At Blang Bintang Elementary, close to the city's airport, there was perfect attendance but the children had to share the schoolyard with families displaced by the tsunami who now live in six tents pitched outside.

Sulaiman said at her school, 100 tsunami surviors living in tents at the schoolyard had been asked to move out the previous day so classes could start.

Despite the poor conditions, education experts say the return to school is a priority for helping children overcome the trauma.

"It is about reestablishing the routine, it is about reestablishing their life," said Gianfranco Rotigliano of the United Nations Children's Fund.

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