Staring into a smartphone camera in an empty classroom in rebel-held northwest Syria, geography teacher Danielle Dbeis addresses students confined at home away from the 2019 novel coronavirus.
“Even if we are now doing distance learning ... you can still talk to me online,” says the 42-year-old, standing in front of a white board.
Like in much of the world, educators in Syria are taking classes online after the country’s various regions sent pupils home hoping to stem the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo: AFP
But distance learning is no small feat in a country battered by nine years of war, where fighting has displaced millions and the electricity supply is sporadic at best.
Syria’s last major rebel bastion of Idlib has not yet recorded any case of the virus. But aid workers fear any outbreak would be catastrophic in the region, which is under a jihadist-dominated authority and home to at least 3 million people.
In the main city of Idlib, Dbeis points to a map of Syria she has drawn on the white board, her voice bouncing off the walls of the empty classroom.
Photo: AFP
Her school used to teach 1,000 girls before it closed last month, she says, but now only 650 have continued learning online as the others have no access to a smartphone or laptop.
Even those with the right equipment face difficulties, says the teacher, who uses WhatsApp to send her students videos. “Most students don’t have constant access to the internet,” she says.
And during long power cuts, she adds, they “are not able to charge their phones.”
Photo: AFP
LATEST OF MANY OBSTACLES
At home elsewhere in Idlib city, Nour Sermini spends her days with her eyes riveted on her mobile phone screen, books and notes scattered around her on her bed.
Switching from one WhatsApp group to another, the 17-year-old checks in with her various teachers.
“We’ll do anything not to miss out on our education,” she says.
The deadly virus is just the latest of many obstacles to learning in Idlib, she says, after years of air strikes on the surrounding region by Damascus and its ally Russia.
“The bombs didn’t manage to stop us from learning,” and neither will the virus, she says.
Since March, a fragile truce has held in northwest Syria. But months of bombardment before that disrupted the education of some 280,000 children, the UN Children’s Fund says.
Across the Idlib region, more than half of the 1,062 schools are now damaged, destroyed or in areas too dangerous for children to reach, according to Save the Children.
Displaced from their homes in the rounds of violence, hundreds of thousands of children live in overcrowded camps or temporary shelters, with little to no water or electricity.
In one of these camps, in the village of Kafr Yahmoul, Ahmed Rateb has just finished recording a math class in a tent.
“We’re trying as much as possible not to deprive the kids of an education,” says the 29-year-old teacher, who sends along his tutorials on Telegram and WhatsApp.
But some are now unable to follow for lack of a smart screen as well as long blackouts inside the camp, he admits.
INTERNET AND POWER ISSUES
As the civil war enters its tenth year, the Damascus regime controls around 70 percent of Syrian territory after successive victories against jihadists and rebels.
In these territories too, where Damascus has announced 19 cases of COVID-19 including two deaths, schools have closed their gates.
To make up for lost time, the education ministry has started beaming Arabic, English and science classes into homes via a special television channel.
But there too, power cuts can last up to 14 hours a day, and the government caps the size of Internet bundles allowed for each family.
In the northeast of the country, the semi-autonomous Kurdish authorities are looking to launch distance learning within days, education official Nureddin Mohammad says.
No case of the novel coronavirus has yet been announced in the region, where medical supplies are limited and there are no tests.
Teachers are filming classes to be broadcast on local television channels and on Youtube, and teachers will keep in touch with pupils via WhatsApp, he says.
Bandar Ismail, a 35-year-old father of three, says he cannot wait for the first episodes.
But he wonders whether the authorities will be “able to ensure sufficient power and Internet for the project to succeed.” Kurdish language teacher Hayat Abbas, meanwhile, says she already misses teaching students in person.
In distance learning, “it’s just a half-an-hour lecture or less, and we try to explain as much as possible,” the 43-year-old says.
“But you can’t answer pupils’ questions.”
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS