Scared kids shun school reopening in Aceh province
ACEH BESAR, Indonesia (AP) - Schools began reopening across Indonesia's tsunami-devastated region on Monday, but many students, still traumatized by the disaster, stayed away from schoolyards crammed with refugees.
Children who did show up skipped regular lessons for group prayers.
U.N. officials estimate up to half of the 104,000 dead on Sumatra island are children, and aftershocks Monday from the Dec. 26 earthquake-triggered tsunami stoked many survivors' fears, undermining government efforts to bring back some sense of normalcy, especially for the region's youngsters.
"By opening the schools, we're just trying to make the kids happy. They're so depressed,'' said Sutrisni, the 40-year old principal of Guegajah Elementary School, where only half of the 130 regular students gathered in the two classrooms not occupied by homeless families.
The uniformed students - joined by about 60 bedraggled refugee kids with bare, muddied feet - chanted verses from the Quran, with headscarf-wearing girls joining boys in ties on wooden benches.
Teachers would return to the regular government curriculum in the coming weeks, said Sutrisini, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.
"Today we're just teaching them how to pray in these difficult times,'' she said.
The government said Monday that 420 schools had been destroyed and 1,000 teachers killed in Aceh province, which was near the epicenter of the huge undersea quake that sparked the tsunami.
"The government will try to provide new teachers to Aceh and immediately to construct schools,'' Welfare Minister Alwi Shihab told reporters.
"Meanwhile, tents can be used as school buildings as well as other public sites, like mosques.''
UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency helping in the back-to-school effort, is sending mobile schools to Sumatra, where they're expected to arrive in the coming days.
But since many people in makeshift shelters are still waiting to move to more permanent relief camps, it may be some time before there are population centers where UNICEF can pitch its tented classrooms, said Gordon Weiss, a spokesman for the agency.
"It's a brave gesture to set the mark out there by opening the schools,'' Weiss said. "It's symbolic for the people.''
Weiss said there would likely be empty seats in classrooms across Aceh, since students are either dead, staying in relief camps far from their communities or petrified by the kinds of fixed-wall buildings that collapsed in the earthquake.
Many schools would stayed closed.
"There are great reasons not to go to school,'' said Weiss. "It's well-founded terror. The kids are in deep shock.''
Some 150,000 people died across southern Asia and as far away as east Africa from the huge waves, and between 3 and 5 million were made homeless.
Aceh was the scene of some of the worst destruction, and rescue workers were still pulling bodies from the rubble on Monday, more than two weeks after the disaster.
At the school in Aceh Besar - 3 kilometers (2 miles) west of the regional capital Banda Aceh - displaced people crowded four classrooms, and another 3,000 were living in a field up the road.
The quake and waves left some 500,000 Sumatrans homeless.
A 6.2-magnitude aftershock early Monday sent homes swaying across the region, contributing to children staying away from school, said Sutrisni, Guegajah's principal.
"The parents are worried about the earthquakes,'' she said.
"If there hadn't been shocks this morning, maybe all the kids would be here.''
Syarita, a 15-year old waiting to register for classes, lost five members of her extended family when the tsunami swamped her island just off Aceh's coast.
Now sheltering in the school compound, she said she hoped returning to classes and pursuing her ambition of becoming a doctor would help her forget her terrifying flight to safety at the top of a hill as waters rose behind her.
"I'm a kid and I need to go to school,'' she said. "I have nothing now. I'm working for the future.'' - AP
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