You’re sitting in a rather small room with no enthusiasm either toward the day’s lesson on the workings of the human body’s immune system or the teacher’s account of how graduates in the field of medicine have made great strides in the treatment of immune disorders. You shake your head and gaze outside, where it’s already getting dark. After all, you’re among the portion of students who has to attend the afternoon school because there aren’t enough school buildings to go around for all 35,000 thousand Palestinian students in Lebanon. Your biology teacher notices your inattention and admonishes you. You look around at your 50 or so fellow “class” mates, who all look equally jaded and apathetic, huddled in a small classroom that in fact is merely a room in a rented apartment, has no playground and, if you’re lucky, a semblance of a library.

Education is a fundamental right of every child and forms one of, if not the most important cornerstone of our modern age. The primary purpose of education is geared toward equipping students with skills so they can move forward in life, make a living and contribute to their societies, possibly contributing to mankind as whole, yet this is the reality of a Palestinian student in Lebanon: overcrowded classrooms, double school shifts, insufficient premises and minimal funding. For over 60 years The United Nations Relief and Works Agency has almost singlehandedly taken on the task of providing Palestinian refugees with places to live, clinics in which to receive health care, schools in which to learn, and a myriad of essential social services, and all the while relying upon a source of funding that is entirely voluntary, completely arbitrary, and totally unreliable. At the beginning of 2009, the agency’s conservatively estimated budget for the year – for UNRWA’s entire area of operations and all its services – stood at just over $541 million, with a projected income of $416.3 million, meaning that the agency, at the onset of 2009, faced a deficit of over $125 million in the principal budget line, which covers salaries for its staff who form the backbone of UNRWA’s humanitarian and human development work. These include the doctors and other professionals who make certain that basic health-care requirements are met, the teachers and staff who run UNRWA schools, the social workers who deal with refugees made vulnerable by poverty, and the experts who ensure that refugee homes and infrastructure are constructed and maintained according to international standards. If that shortfall wasn’t enough, receiving pledges isn’t the same as receiving funding. Not all pledges are honored, forcing the UNRWA to abandon planned projects and essential repairs, or diverting available funds to more essential needs. 

Furthermore, with the global economic meltdown which began late in 2007, there was a sharp increase in the cost of living across the areas in which UNRWA operates, and in accordance with local wage policies, the agency was forced to raise staff salaries, which make up over 76 percent of UNRWA’s expenditures. In simpler terms, there’s less money to go around, and education is among the deficit’s many victims. However, being at the mercy of donors is just the beginning. The agency is also vulnerable to other financial developments. For example, the recovery of the US dollar, which for many marks a positive development, was a disaster for the UNRWA. While the agency tends to pay in dollars in the areas it operates, and prepares its budget accordingly, most of its funding comes in euros, and the appreciating dollar translates into hefty losses in the exchange rate. According to Roger Davies, Lebanon’s Deputy Director for the UNRWA, the agency, due to the shifting euro-dollar exchange rate, has already recorded losses of up to $52 million, over 10 percent of the year’s projected income. It is also unfortunately the case, explains Afaf Younis, head of UNRWA’s Field Education

Program, that like any other UN body, the agency has to compete for its funding. It’s not a very pleasant thought to think that as a new crisis appears, attention toward an already longstanding problem can wane and the recipients of these essential services will inevitably suffer as a consequence. Speaking about the recent Gaza donor’s conference, Davies leaves an ominous question hanging in the air: “Does that mean there will be less money available for other things?” What all this means is that Palestinian students continue to find themselves squeezed in confined classes with teacher-pupil ratios as high as 50. The schools, Younis admits are not always fit for their intended purpose; some of the schools are lacking in facilities like playgrounds, libraries, computer facilities, labs and the like. The other “devil” as she described it is that UNRWA has to run a relatively high proportion of double-shift schools where a single building is shared throughout the day for the purposes of teaching two student bodies or two “schools.” When UNRWA cites 82 as the number of schools it operates, it actually means 59 facilities, of which 23 are used in double, albeit shorter-than-normal shifts throughout the day. The implication of this last feature is that the students are deprived of 25 percent of the time needed in order to be educated in the Lebanese curriculum.

Once a Palestinian has graduated his or her options for further education are also rather limited in Lebanon. High tuition fees means that a great many Palestinians can only dream about getting into a private university, and so a large proportion will turn to the government-funded Lebanese University, which is already overcrowded and where competition in the hard sciences is particularly fierce. The Palestinians end up taking on courses in the Arts and Humanities partly because the tuition fees for these degrees are more affordable and partly due to the language of instruction. But overcrowded and often-inadequate facilities, harried classes, and narrow university options are not the only factors discouraging Palestinian students in Lebanon from taking education seriously. Who can blame them when they show no interest and their eyes glaze over in classes such as the lesson in biology mentioned earlier when they are barred from applying what they learned professionally in as many as 72 different fields, including medicine, engineering and law – in fact anything that requires membership in a syndicate in Lebanon. It’s like expecting enthusiasm from a desert dweller about learning to fish. Although the Lebanese government has opened up since 2005 and is willing to work in a more positive spirit with the UNRWA, Younis still highlights some of the pending problems. To date the Lebanese government has yet to formally issue any kind of signal to local schools to accept Palestinian students, which provides some confusion – even this writer was led to believe that government schools operated at a 10-percent quota system for foreign students. A related issue is that despite the lack of a ban on Palestinian students attending local government schools, the uptake by these schools tends to be very low, a situation that is hard to ascertain due very poor dissemination of statistics of those who are in the schools. Despite these various challenges, however, the agency has responded time and again to the needs of the Palestinian refugees, sometimes even going beyond its mandate of providing basic education. When Lebanon was failing to provide places for students in secondary schools, UNRWA stepped forward and since 1993 the agency has provided seven secondary schools with a minimum of one secondary school in each of the five geographical areas in which the agency operates. The latest, Al-Jarmaq Secondary School in Taalabaya in the Bekaa Valley, which was funded by the European Union in the context of a 15 million euro educational project aimed at improving the quality of the agency’s education system, was inaugurated on February 12, 2009, and marks the first of six facilities expected to be completed by year end. Its construction helps UNRWA provide single-shift education to Palestinian students in the Bekaa, at the same time affording the students three additional hours to more conform to the norm. UNRWA is also working to substantially reduce the number of double-shift schools it runs by the next scholastic year as well as seeking new and more suitable premises in order to revert to single-shift schools. The agency does adapt itself and responds wherever it can. But there is a limit to its capabilities and many Palestinian students are still not getting the opportunities they deserve. The issue of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is sometimes a thorny one and people would rather not venture too far into the problems. Yousef Ahmad, a member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine who is involved in student affairs, put it this way: There are always some members in the Lebanese community who fear that if Palestinians were given the right to join syndicates there would either be competition in the labor market and/or this would be interpreted as a form of naturalization.

But, added Ahmad, all that Palestinians are requesting is for their basic rights, and the stalemate on the issue of employment does impact a student’s decision to pursue higher education. Money has always been and always will be the number one problem for UNRWA, explained Davies. With the world going through an economic recession, and focus on donations shifting to the devastation in Gaza, and before that to Nahr al-Bared (five UNRWA schools were rendered useless during the conflict in Northern Lebanon), it would be easy to chalk off the shortcomings of education for Palestinians on the global economic meltdown and reconstruction needs. But double shift schools were in play and Palestinian kids were sitting in overcrowded classrooms even when oil was selling at $147 a barrel, General Motors was still purring smoothly, Europe’s top banks were solvent, Nahr al-Bared was bustling with commercial activity and Gaza was, well, not in the state that it’s in currently, and not much was being done by the international community to address these shortcomings in the quality of education afforded to the Palestinian students. The easiest avenue to follow is to assign fault to one or a combination of the parties mentioned, whether it’s the Lebanese government, the UNRWA, the donors, or the fates that be. But while we won’t subscribe to the blame game, neither will we stomach the excuses of the day. There are serious issues that need to be addressed, and the key is money and collaboration. 

A pledge is a promise, and its time to step up to the plate. More than once, and we won’t mention names, donors have claimed pledges made on separate instances were in fact one and the same. If donors are looking for photo-opportunities, there are a number of publications we’d be happy to suggest which can accommodate them. But we’re talking about the welfare and future of children, youngsters who could one day become members of the next Palestinian leadership, and a generation that can produce the next Mahmoud Darwiche, so its time this smoke and-mirrors business ceased and donors began to treat this matter with serious compassion. And money isn’t the only way to make a difference. UNRWA is always open to partnerships, twinning or linking-up schemes which allow the exchange of information, skills, expertise and experiences. The agency has some 60 years of experience in the delivery of a multitude of services and often in the hardest and most challenging circumstances. UNRWA schools have developed and put into practice a number of programs in addition to their regular curriculum including meticulous auditing, teacher training, research/statistics, quality assurance reviews, career guidance for their vocational department, a human rights program and many other services that are conducive and that go hand in hand in the provision of education, and the agency is open to sharing its expertise and benefiting from others.

After all this is the UN; it belongs to all of us, and the more we engage with it the more we can help the agency, our neighbors and ourselves. The UNRWA has been working tirelessly for the past 60 years, trying to make ends meet with the horribly inadequate funding it receives. So the question that must be asked, the one no one wants to think about, is what if it had been our children being deprived of an essential right like education? Would we only then feel the twinge of remorse for turning a blind eye while countless youngsters were subjected to such conditions? UNRWA has been doing its part, isn’t it time for everyone else to step up?