Every day, 49-year-old Samih Mesad travels the Palestinian village Jalama, north of Jenin, to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school and back, desperately trying to think of to his pupils’ questions, which usually revolve why they are living in a refugee camp and what life was in their towns and villages before 1948. Mesad has working in UNRWA schools twenty-four years.
In 1995, the Palestinian Authority over an education sector in ruins: “Some buildings actually collapsed and others threaten to do ,” comments Mesad. “Going to school, particularly in villages, is hazardous.”
Eleven hundred pupils the three UNRWA primary schools in the camp. They twenty drinking-water taps and toilets. According to Mesad, overcrowding - “the number of pupils per class is 45 and 50” - antiquated equipment, a lack of open play and recreational are the norm.
In the Jenin camp in the West Bank, 12,000 Palestinian refugees live, frustration reigns to the lack of progress in the peace and the hope the refugees had pinned it to improve their economic situation. Housing in the camp has the appearance of a shanty-. Recently, the inhabitants gripped by a thirty-day epidemic after water from the sanitation works into the antiquated drinking-water system.