{"id":263,"date":"2021-03-11T15:09:37","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T14:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/?p=263"},"modified":"2021-03-11T15:10:30","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T14:10:30","slug":"263","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/english\/263\/","title":{"rendered":"Migrant teens’ tragic challenges to getting an education"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“I WANT to be somebody<\/strong>,” says Gulab Rahimi, who left Afghanistan when he was 12. “I don’t want to be just anybody.” This spring, he graduated from high school, a difficult goal for a young refugee to achieve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rahimi left his parents and seven older siblings to reach Iran on his own and eventually settle in Greece, to get an education and live in what he calls a “true democracy.” Now 21, he lives in Thessaloniki, his apartment littered with Farsi and Greek textbooks; an inspirational quote in English about the power of one’s dreams peeks out from a bright red poster hanging on the wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For years, Rahimi devoted 19 hours a day to working in restaurant kitchens, school and study. It was a marathon, and the graduation goal was achieved online and in the midst of a global pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Most of the time I’m alone in class,” he says. Other students don’t show up for online classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are more than seven million school-age migrants who have been recognized as refugees under the mandate of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and there are hundreds of thousands more whose asylum claims are still pending or who are undocumented. For all of these migrants, as for Rahimi, the best prerequisite for a chance at life in their new country often lies in the institution that their more fortunate peers often hate: school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, however, most of these teenagers do not attend secondary school, let alone graduate. The forces keeping them out of school – poverty, organized crime, family – are too powerful. And now, because of the pandemic, children who had managed to enroll are seeing that lifeline dragged away, with schools closed for months at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You’re Greek to me.”
<\/strong>During their travels, migrant teens often miss years of school. Many are illiterate: they have never held a pen and cannot read their native language, let alone the language of their new country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They need a basic education to find a job and avoid the criminal organizations that lure the most vulnerable children. “If they don’t learn Greek in school,” explains Olga Kalomenidou, a teacher who volunteers at refugee shelters near Thessaloniki, “they will learn it in prison.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

School also introduces them to their new world. “School is the place to become part of the new culture, and it is a prerequisite for integration,” says Frosso Motti-Stefanidi, an expert on education for migrant children at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many of them, it’s the first time they’ve been side by side with peers of different nationalities, races, genders and sexual orientations. This means they must learn to define their own identity, which often becomes a mixture of old and new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a school for recently arrived migrants in the country, in Berlin’s multicultural Kreuzberg district, classmates bullied Alia Basal, a 16-year-old Syrian refugee, for not wearing the hijab (headscarf). “In the end everyone chooses their own way,” she says, “you have to fight to get what you want.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mohamad Marof, an 18-year-old Syrian boy, found his way in the small mountain village of Platanakia, Greece, where a teacher at the vocational school he attends took him in. He proudly remembers what an elderly villager told him, “You speak Greek, you go to school\u2026to me you are Greek.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The only adults they can rely on.”
Passionate teachers like Mohamad’s are crucial for migrant teens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the middle school where Sandra Aparicio teaches – in Phoenix, Arizona – switched to distance learning, only five of its 85 students in the intensive English course showed up for online classes. Distance learning classes can be a big challenge for those who are learning a new language or have limited access to technology. It took the teacher a long time to track down the kids’ parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I felt like I was a call center,” she says, recounting when she helped parents with online passwords or urged them to borrow a charger if they lost the one provided with the tablet given by the school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If I call them, they take action,” he says, “and I don’t let up.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After about a month, her perseverance began to pay off: more than half of her students were participating in online classes, and more than a dozen of them were attending weekly virtual meetings, whereas at first there were only two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aparicio was also a young girl when she joined her mother in the United States from Mexico, where they came from. When she noticed that one of her students was using an electrical outlet in the classroom to charge her electronic bracelet for immigration services, she didn’t mention that she had worn one in the past, too. She didn’t want the kids to fear that she, too, might be taken away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We’re the only adults they can rely on,” she says, “the teachers are the only adults who listen to them.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“In an instant your potential disappears.”
Even before the pandemic, the pressures on migrant teens who were driven to drop out of school and get money were enormous: to pay debts to traffickers, send money to families, help younger siblings, to survive. The loss of a large number of jobs due to the closures brought about by the coronavirus has only further exacerbated the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Central America, families are mortgaging homes and land at usury fees to pay traffickers, who demand sums so high that only a U.S. wage allows them to cope, according to Richard Lee Johnson, a researcher at the University of Arizona. In the northern highlands of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, which are an epicenter of migration, traffickers demand the equivalent of $12,000, the boys say. That, for those who make it to the United States, means they have no choice: having to drop out of school and immediately look for work in the black market of agriculture or construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olman, a 19-year-old boy from Honduras with a high school diploma, knew that when he finally made it to the U.S., he would not be attending school, but looking for a job (the boy asked that his last name not be published); he had his mother and three children to support. Yet, when he stayed for a few days at the Casa del Migrante refugee camp in Saltillo, Mexico, he participated in the English classes that were offered in the cafeteria. With effort she learned to say “I’m hungry” and “chicken, turkey, pork” and also “I’m looking for a job” and “gardener.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Middle East, refugee girls do not leave their homes looking for work. Sometimes they are forced into early marriages (which bring dowries) to ease the family’s economic burden. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that in Jordan, where refugees make up 20% of the country’s population, the rate of Syrian refugee girls marrying underage has seen a dramatic increase as the Syrian civil war continues and conditions for refugees become increasingly desperate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I WANT to be somebody,” says Gulab Rahimi, who left Afghanistan when he was 12. “I don’t want to be just anybody.” This spring, he graduated from high school, a difficult goal for a young refugee to achieve. Rahimi left his parents and seven older siblings to reach Iran on his own and eventually settle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":264,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}