By Matthew Pearson, The Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday, August 09, 2011

The Ottawa teachers focused their efforts on training people to set up and run schools in their homeland, so others returning to the war-torn East African nation would eventually have a place to enrol their children.

It never happened and the people trained to run those hypothetical schools remain stuck in Dadaab.

“Nobody’s going back to Somalia,” Thibault says with a heavy sigh. “And now the reverse is the case. It’s simply emptying.”

Humanitarian groups say more than 3.7 million Somali people — more than half of the country’s population — desperately need help to escape the current famine. Some areas in the south, bordering Kenya, have the highest malnutrition rates in the world, while across the three worst-affected countries — Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya — more than 11 million people need immediate food assistance.

The Dadaab refugee camps, run by the humanitarian aid organization CARE, house more than 400,000 people, mostly Somalis who have fled the violence that’s gripped their country for years.

Hundreds more are arriving daily as the massive humanitarian crisis spreads across the Horn of Africa, while tens of thousands of others are converging on the Somali capital Mogadishu, where the United Nations Wednesday airlifted food to help the starving masses.

Monnin, a retired geography teacher, travelled to the region in June, and recalls seeing so many dead animal carcasses by the roadside that he stopped counting.

He also visited the dusty fringes of the sprawling Dadaab camps, where refugees were arriving daily after perilous journeys on foot.

“A mother with three kids would have to go through hell to get to Dadaab,” he said, adding they still faced processing delays before being officially recognized as refugees.

Thibault said it breaks her heart to see children and babies, in particular, suffering.

“That we allow that, as rich, rich nations, to go on is inexcusable,” she said.

Since 2004, the couple have run School For All, an aid group that provides teacher training in refugee camps and other places where displaced persons live.

About 65 people, both working and retired teachers, have gone to Kenya, Mali, Tanzania and Haiti to teach the teachers. (A new project may soon launch in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum.)

They began by giving teachers workshops on classroom management, gender issues and conflict resolution, but that’s now morphed into partnering Canadian teachers with a small group of African teachers, encouraging them to try new techniques in the classroom, demonstrating methods through team teaching and then debriefing afterward.

The teachers in Dadaab aren’t necessarily trained as such; most were high-achieving high school students who were plucked right after graduation and placed at the front of the room.

Their classrooms are overcrowded, especially at the elementary level, prompting some Somalis to open additional schools because education is so highly valued.

“There people were taking their future, and their children’s future, in hand,” Thibault said.

Now that the couple have returned to Ottawa — Thibault just wrapped up a four-year stint as principal of a NATO school in the Netherlands and will be taking up the reins at Glebe Collegiate in September — Monnin said he’s hoping School For All can spread its wings.

The organization, which has charitable status, holds one fundraiser every year and usually draws volunteers through word of mouth.

The couple’s dream would be to increase the number of Canadian teachers travelling overseas and to have some working in camps year-round to continue providing teachers with intensive professional development and support.

“We see a huge openness and willingness to change on the part of the teachers we work with, but to maintain that requires return visits, return support,” Thibault said.

But that would require long-term, permanent funding.

In the meantime, Thibault said providing refugees with an education could have a ripple effect: When that person eventually enters a third country, he or she may integrate better, have a head start in the classroom and an easier time becoming a contributing member of the community.

“We have so much, we have so many privileges, that you have to spend your life sharing it, being responsible for making a difference,” she said. “We feel extremely lucky every single year when we are given this opportunity to go and make a little bit of difference in the lives of those kids and their community.”

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