Country Director of Humanity First Jordan, Rafq A. Tschannen, and Operations Director, Hussain Al Masri, with 12th grade students in Humanity First’s Amman School

Ahmed Jabra wakes at seven each morning, eats his breakfast and then decides what to do with his day. If things aren’t unusually desperate – if there’s enough money to buy food for the family and milk and nappies for his two-year-old sister – he goes off to school. If they are, he grabs a big bag and heads out in search of rubbish.

On a very good day, six hours spent rummaging through bins and rubbish heaps for tins, cans and bits of plastic will make him seven Jordanian dinars (£6.71). On a very bad day, the local kids will relieve him of every piastre he has been paid by the local scrap merchants.

The Jabras fled their home on the outskirts of Aleppo three years ago when the shelling became unendurable. Today, the family of 10 lives in a two-bedroom rented house in the Jordanian town of Mafraq, eight miles from the Syrian border.

Ahmed, who is 15, doesn’t mind missing school to support his family, but he can’t understand why the Jordanian children who rob him have to take the money he uses to buy bread for the family.

“Syrians wouldn’t do that,” he says. “I can’t say anything to the kids who take my money; I don’t know what to say, except may God forgive you.”

His father, Hmoud, could not feed his wife and children, even if he didn’t have a bad back, as Syrian refugees are not allowed to work in Jordan. “No father wants to see his son collect scrap, but what else can we do?” he asks.

Syrian refugee Ahmed Jabra, 15, who collects used cans and plastics to sell for recycling to help support his family. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Syrian refugee Ahmed Jabra, 15, who collects used cans and plastics to sell for recycling to help support his family. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
Like many of the estimated 620,000 Syrians in Jordan, the Jabras are dependent on their children, who can work and earn under the radar. The support comes at a cost: parents often have to choose between feeding their children and educating them.

According to Unicef, almost half of the 2 million children living as refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq are not receiving any form of education, while only about 340,000 are enrolled in formal schooling.

Most refugees live outside the camps and in host communities, where the strain they place on the public education system and other basic services makes them deeply unpopular. And Mafraq, which means crossroads in Arabic, was not a prosperous place before the the war forced hundreds of thousands of Syrians over the border.
The wealth evident in the capital, Amman, trickles away the further north you head towards the Syrian border. By the time you reach Mafraq, an hour’s drive away, the 4x4s have given way to battered saloons and the upmarket restaurants have yielded to filthy sheep who graze on the rubbish that can’t be collected and sold.

Ahmed is aware that he may be sacrificing his future, but feels he has little choice. “When I was a kid in Syria, I wanted to be a judge,” he says. “But now I have to work. What can I do?”

His cousin Mohamed, who came to Mafraq with his family in November 2013, often works 13-hour days lugging gas cylinders off a delivery lorry and up and down several flights of stairs. Although his big brother is three years older, 14-year-old Mohamed supports the family as their parents fear the police might mistake their eldest son for an adult if they caught him working and send him back to Syria.
Like his cousin, the teenager knows that each day’s work pushes his dreams a little further away. “I’d like to be a teacher or a doctor, but there’s no way I can do that because I don’t go to school here,” Mohamed says. “I’d rather be at school, but I have a responsibility to my family and I feel I’m contributing what I can.”

Saba Mobaslat, Save the Children’s Jordan director, says the charity is doing what it can to ensure that the present circumstances of young refugees do not entirely determine their future prospects. “That’s a tough thing because they are accepting their new reality and they are accepting that they’re not fortunate enough to go ahead with their lives as they should be,” she says. “When you don’t challenge your new reality, you end up accepting whatever life dumps on you.”

On a very good day, six hours spent rummaging through bins and rubbish heaps for tins, cans and bits of plastic will make Ahmed seven Jordanian dinars ($10). Facebook Twitter Pinterest
On a very good day, six hours spent rummaging through bins and rubbish heaps for tins, cans and bits of plastic will make Ahmed seven Jordanian dinars ($10). Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
As well as working in the Zaatari and Azraq refugee camps, the NGO helps get children to school, laying on buses, offering drop-in centres for working children, and providing cash assistance so that families can afford to send their kids to class.

“Every single mother and father understands the value of education, but they can’t afford it,” says Mobaslat. “And it’s much simpler for a child to work than for an adult.”

She has also been urging the Jordanian government to do more to bring refugees into the social and educational mainstream, warning that the consequences of ignoring a generation of marginalised Syrian children could be disastrous.

“In my last meeting with the ministry of the interior, I said: ‘You either make sure those children go to school, or you’ll end up with a large number of children who are frustrated, angry, and uneducated – and they will be easily recruited by the wrong groups. In that case, the cost of your national security will triple – so you have to make a decision now.’”

Mobaslat concedes that radicalisation is an attractive option. Not only does it foster a sense of belonging, it also offers job opportunities and a kind of welfare state.

Seven or eight years ago, she talked to an Iraqi refugee in Syria about his options. “He said: ‘I cannot see a future; I cannot see a life. But someone promised me heaven after that. I cannot challenge that; it might be true. Why would I risk losing that opportunity? I’m ready to die for that.’ This is how desperate you become and this is exactly where we don’t want to be.”

Syrian refugee Mohamed Husain Jabra, 14, delivers and collects gas canisters to support his family. His father is not allowed to work in Jordan, but Mohamed can earn under the radar.
Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

When Mohamed thinks about Syria, he thinks of the family home, his friends, and the sheep he used to take to graze after school each day. Sometimes, he even allows himself a moment of optimism: “I hope that eventually things there will get better, but God only knows when.”

Ahmed, who is only a few months older than his cousin, doesn’t dare entertain that possibility. “We won’t be going back,” he says. “Syria is in ruins. Even if we did go back, there’s nothing there.”

SOURCE:    http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/mar/12/young-syrian-refugees-give-up-education-jordan-work