I recently returned from a short trip to the Middle East. Amongst the many issues to see and hear about, I had wanted to see some of the education work going on. This is because the Liberal Democrats are putting education in conflict zones at the forefront of their international development campaigning – as are Save the Children. So Save the Children arranged for me to visit the Kalandia School on the West Bank of Palestine to see how girls from the Kalandia Refugee camp are educated.

Save the Children work with local partners – and in this case Pyalara (Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activism) were carrying out a workshop with about thirty girls, aged around fifteen years.

At the moment the kids have to go in two shifts as the space is inadequate, though a second block was in the last stages of construction opposite the existing school. About three quarters of the girls wore the hijab – the rest were bareheaded.I asked about that – and the answer I got was that it was less to do with religion and far more to do with the views of your family. I was told that despite living in the camp, almost all the families had television (hence their understanding of media I suppose) but that there were only about four computers in the Kalandia camp.

In this school itself they have been using workshops to enable pupils to identify for themselves the barriers that they encounter to leading fulfilling lives. I guess I was somehow expecting them to blame Israel, the US, us for their poverty and their struggle. But what the girls in Kalandia had identified as their biggest problem was actually cultural – early marriage. Three of the girls from this class were already married (one had already dropped out already) – and the expectation was that the rest soon would be. And marriage generally meant an end to their education, expectation and hopes for the future.

So the workshop became about how to raise this issue and how to begin to change things – all based on what they themselves could do.One route they identified was about getting the message out through the media. After a warm up exercise the girls were asked to define their view of the media. They all said it was a way of getting the truth out there – but they also thought the media could be used to tell lies. They wanted to use newspapers to fight against early marriage. Many of them said that education was more important than marriage – and that there was a health dimension with effects ranging from mental to physical to social issues.

The workshop went through demonstrating what was the key to a good news item, what makes a story and how to get the media interested. They decided that in order to make the issue of early marriage newsworthy they would have to select the most important aspect and try and get a real life story to illustrate it.

They were pretty savvy and very enchanting girls. And reassuringly, as girls are clearly girls wherever they come from, they had a uniform which each girl wore in a different way (mostly under their other clothes) so just the tails peaked fashionably out – just like I used to do at school myself!

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2007