Education helps hope bloom again

It is school holidays for Pavithran, 7, but the boy cannot be separated from his books. Every morning he spends time studying and learning with a teacher – a university student – who helps him revise lessons and prepare for the new school year.

“My favourite subject is math,” Pavithran smiles shyly as he turns page after page covered with sums he has completed.

Watching him study is a dream come true for Subhashini, 25, his mother. Nothing makes her happier than to see him with his books. 

Growing up in the heart of war, education was not a choice for children in Kilinochchi; survival was. As the war became intense education slipped further away from them into a blurry dream. 

“Schooling was interrupted all the time,” says Subhashini, who was a student at that time, “Every class had a bunker to hide in and three or four times a day we would vacate the classes to go in to the bunker. But still we wanted to come to school every day.”

“When we heard too many aircrafts in the sky, we wouldn’t go to school, knowing the bombs would be dropped somewhere. But we all had a thirst to study and, just like other children, we had dreams. I wanted to become a math teacher,” she says.

Even with shell-holes in the roof and bullet-holes on the walls, children went to school whenever possible until the schools were too damaged to function or had to house displaced families.

But there was also another reason why children in Kilinochchi stopped schooling. They had to get married to avoid recruitment into the armed group. Subhashini ,then 16, made the same choice.

“That was the only solution for boys and girls at that time,” she recalls, “so all the students began to drop out of school and get married to avoid recruitment. But those under aged like me couldn’t register their marriage, so the next option was to have a child to prove you are a new family.”

“I did the same. But I looked too small to become a mother and the armed group didn’t believe Pavithran was our baby. So they still forcibly recruited my husband. It was only after I got Pavithran’s birth certificate did they release him. My husband’s sister (16 at that time) was forcibly recruited before she could get married and was killed in battle the following year.”

Subhashini could never imagine Pavithran or any child in her village would ever know education, for she didn’t know if anyone would survive the brutal war. But her family survived and many others did too. And though they were broken and traumatized, they returned ‘home’ to rebuild their lives right from the beginning.

World Vision, along with the government and other organizations, supported their return and assisted them through the resettlement and rehabilitation, catering to their immediate needs.  

“World Vision provided us with goats to support livelihood recovery, and I trust I will be able to get a stable income from it,” she said.

Today, the young mother of two is hopeful once again. “My only dream is to see my children have a good education and be able to achieve their dreams,” she beams.

“I feel very proud and happy when I go through my son’s school books,” smiles Subhashini, “I can see that he excels in math. That was my favourite subject too.”

Helping children return to school was a priority for World Vision and immediate action was taken to renovate and rebuild their damaged school buildings providing them a safe place to study once again. 

While World Vision’s work in Kilinochchi is moving from relief mode to an Area Rehabilitation Programme, with the support of World Vision Australia, there will be a lot more work to help children continue schooling and catch up on the studies they missed.

World Vision provided continuous relief support in the humanitarian crisis during the war and through their displacement. With the 26-year-long war finally over, Sri Lanka now faces the enormous challenge of healing fractured communities and helping them to rebuild their lives once again.

World Vision was among the first NGOs that was allowed access to the northern districts of resettlement after the war and soon began the resettlement and rehabilitation work to help returning communities and children return to normalcy.