October 6, 2013 by RANA F. SWEIS

AMMAN, Jordan — Yusra Shinwan, 44, and her four school-age children arrived in Jordan in June, refugees from the Syrian civil war. Her husband, a school librarian, chose to stay behind after being told he would lose his job if he left.

More than half a million Syrians were registered with the U.N. refugee agency in Jordan at the end of last month, most of them women and children. School–age children from 5 to 17 years old make up 35 percent of the Syrian refugee population in Jordan.

The country’s public school system, already overstretched and overcrowded, is struggling to cope. Aid agencies and officials are warning of a “lost generation.”

After one night in the Zaatari refugee camp, Mrs. Shinwan and her children moved to a small apartment in the industrial city of Zarqa, northeast of Amman.

At the start of the school year on Aug. 28, she tried to register the children in two public schools near her new home. At both, she said, the principles told her to wait until a double shift system could be put in place, with one set of students attending in the morning and another, mostly Syrian, in the afternoon. She is still waiting.

“My 13-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter look around and see people their age going to school and they feel left behind,” Mrs. Shinwan said.

“I fled for their safety, but now they are restless and angry,” she said. “They are telling me they are wasting their education and their future. They want to go back to school in Syria.”

In practice, that is not an option for many. The international aid organization Save the Children said this summer it estimated that more than a fifth of schools inside Syria had been destroyed or made unusable since the conflict started, affecting the education of 2.5 million youths.

In Jordan and Lebanon, aid agencies are warning that Syrian children who do not attend school are at increased risk of abuses including child labor and early marriage.

Jordan’s Ministry of Education announced earlier this year that it was trying to eliminate double shifts at schools to improve the quality of education.

Now, it has been forced to backtrack, to try to accommodate both the influx of Syrian refugees and nearly 35,000 Jordanian and expatriate children who have transferred, mostly for financial reasons, from private to public schools this year.

Double-shift teaching not only puts an added strain on teachers, it also wears out school infrastructure, whether furniture, bathrooms or computers.

“Jordanian parents come to me and complain about the drop in the quality of education for their children,” said Abdullah Al Khattab, governor of Mafraq, a district near the border with the largest concentration of Syrian refugees.

The influx has brought a boom for some Mafraq businesses, like real estate, restaurants, or market stalls. But the pressure it has put on services and utilities like education and water supply have stretched the district’s resources to their limits.

“My town is struggling to keep up with the numbers of Syrians because of the pressure on natural resources but also the lack of funding when it comes to education,” Mr. Khattab said.

More than 81,000 Syrian refugee children are enrolled in learning programs in Jordan, according to Unicef. The big number poses a challenge, but so does low attendance, especially at the Zaatari camp, which is home to nearly 23 percent of the Syrian refugee population.

“The focus has been on registering children,” said Curt Rhodes, international director of Questscope, an organization aiding social development in the Middle East. “It has not been on how to help them stay in school.”

There are almost 30,000 school-age children in Zaatari, of whom about 15,000 have been enrolled in the camp’s three schools, according to Unicef. But actual attendance at the end of September was barely 2,000, Mr. Rhodes said.

Low attendance rates reflect multiple problems: a lack of security for children — especially girls — walking to school; the disruption of normal routines in families leading transient lives; and the development of a vast unregulated economy that attracts some children to work instead of attending school.

Jordan’s minimum age for working is 16 but in Amman and in rural areas it has become increasingly common to see Syrian children illegally working on construction sites, in the fields, or as day laborers to support their families. The government estimates their number at 30,000 and the International Labor Organization says the number is rising.

Given the enrollment difficulties faced by people like Mrs. Shinwan, “education outside of the school needs to be focused on as well,” said Mr. Rhodes, whose organization offers informal education and mentoring programs for refugee children. “Without education, children will so quickly lose everything and a sense of who they are. They’ll just have the war.”

“When you grow up without an education it reduces the ability to form civil trust and that means they are heading for conflict,” he said.

Michele Servadei, Unicef’s deputy representative in Jordan, sounded a similar warning.“You can look at it through a security perspective,” Mr. Servadei said. Children out of school are at risk of being abused, exploited and “can end up being recruited by armed forces or groups inside and outside Syria,” he said.

Mr. Servadei said Unicef is trying to combat that risk by offering Syrian and Jordanian families small cash grants of about $45 a month on the condition that they enroll working children in school. “We monitor their attendance and if they drop out, we stop the cash assistance,” he said. “For now we have a target of 2,000 children in urban areas.”

For people like Mrs. Shinwan, such programs may not be enough. Living outside the refugee camp — as does more than 70 percent of the Syrian refugee population — she is paying $300 a month in rent. Now, after four months, she said, she can no longer afford it.

“I can’t go to the camp,” she said. “It’s not a place I want to raise my children.”

“If they can’t go to school here and I can’t pay the rent, I might end up going back to the war in Syria.”

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June 6, 2013
By RANA F. SWEIS
AMMAN — Two months ago, the most famous ice cream parlor in Damascus set up a new outlet amid the fast-food joints, stalls selling plastic household goods and offices lining Al Madina Al Munawara Street, a traffic-snarled road in Amman.

The original location for the ice cream shop, Bakdash, which is more than 100 years old, is in the Al Hamidiyah Souk, one of the oldest and largest markets in Syria.

As violence rages across the country, it is not only helpless refugees who are leaving for Jordan, but also skilled laborers, proficient builders and prominent chefs. “Business is dead in Damascus, and it’s going from bad to worse,” said Muhammad Abed, who worked at Bakdash in Damascus before he settled in Amman about a month ago.

“I was sent by Bakdash to come and work here, and it’s nice to see our product being sold in Jordan, because it always reminds me of home,” he said, as he rolled ice cream on a bed of crushed pistachio nuts.

Khaldoun Abbabneh, who manages the Amman shop, said it employs some Jordanians but the majority of the workers are Syrians. That includes Mr. Abed, the main ice cream beater: Using a large wooden paddle Mr. Abed vigorously churns the ice cream, made from boiled milk, sugar, vanilla flour, salt and choice pistachios, to soften and mix it before putting it in a large open freezer and serving it to customers.

Before the uprising began, more than two years ago, Jordanians were regular visitors to Damascus and other cities. They were lured by fine restaurants and eating places, along with affordable, high-quality fabric design stores and a shared social culture. The distance from Amman to Damascus is barely 175 kilometers, or 110 miles, by road.

Now, “Jordanians are no longer going to Syria because of the violence there, but we are offering the same atmosphere when it comes to the taste and the simple wooden chairs we bought from Damascus,” Mr. Abbabneh said.

“I used to visit Syria many times a year and always admired the theme and ambiance of their restaurants,” said Ibraheem Shokerat, owner of Areej Al Sham, one of several Syrian restaurants that have sprung up in Amman.

Areej Al Sham, meaning fragrance or sweet smell of Syria, has been designed — by a Syrian architect — to resemble an old Damascene home, with a small fountain in the middle, high ceilings that can open to the sky in summer and black and white wall tiles.

“I have the same kitchen staff I would have if I opened an excellent restaurant in Syria,” Mr. Shokerat said, “and that was important to me.”

“Before the uprising in Syria, it would have been impossible for these skilled Syrians to agree to come here and to accept the salaries we are offering them,” he added: “But the war changed everything.”

The United Nations has registered nearly 400,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan as of June 3, with another 83,000 awaiting registration. The government puts the number of refugees at 513,000.

After a sharp drop last week, the inflow picked up again this week, and is now running at 1,000 to 2,000 daily, according to U.N. officials.

In a country that was already short of natural resources and facing economic challenges, the refugee flow has created resentments, especially among Jordanians living in the north of the country, where most of the refugees are living, and trade with Syria has been hit hard.

Many refugees live in grim, overcrowded apartments, where their presence, intermingled with the Jordanian population, has strained school classrooms, infrastructure and health services. Local residents, once welcoming, accuse the refugees of taking their jobs and blame them for rising rents.

Still, whatever the economic benefits, the war presents daily business challenges. For Bakdash, which continues to make its ice cream in Damascus before transporting it in refrigerated trucks across the border, a worsening of the violence could force the closing of the Amman parlor. “We are not removed from the conflict,” Mr. Abbabneh said. “The trucks are already being delayed in delivering the ice cream from Syria and, so, we are forced to buy larger quantities for fear we will run out.

“In the future, the war will basically determine whether we have ice cream or not.”

For Mr. Shokerat, the owner of Areej Al Sham, there are other reminders of the conflict.

“What happens in Syria affects my employees who have families back home,” he said. “At one point at least four of them couldn’t communicate with their relatives because of the violence in their cities, so last month they decided to take a risk and return home.”

“You lose some really great employees but at the same time you understand the struggle,” he added. “Some of the ingredients also come straight from Syria, so, of course you can bring some aspects of Syria to Jordan. But at the end, you can’t separate yourself or your business from what is happening in that country.”

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