For Whom Ring the Bells?

“I hope Yemeni women get their rights fairly.” Fatima Fakhir

Fatima the school principal listened quietly to the teacher who spoke to her with sadness and emotion as she held back her tears. She was the ninth teacher to leave teaching due to the suspension of salaries because of the war in Yemen.

“Forgive me, but I cannot continue without pay,” the teacher said shyly. “You know the cost of transportation, and the difficult financial situation after our salaries were cut off. The grocer refused to lend me the bus fare today.”

“It’s ok,” said Fatima, “I appreciate your position well. If only I could do something, but this is war.”

“I know that well,” replied the teacher. “You’re always with us, but I can’t continue.”

At the beginning of the war Fatima’s school was transformed into a camp for displaced people. As a result, teaching stopped for months. She made an effort and pursued the responsible authorities to bring her students back to their classrooms and transfer the displaced to their camps.

Fatima runs a school in Bani al-Harith, far from the centre of the capital Sana’a, where 2000 girl students study, including least 400 displaced and orphaned girls whose interruption of their education will add new suffering to their lives in this seemingly endless crisis.

Fatima ran her first school in the mid-1980s and resisted discrimination against Yemeni female teachers in favour of Arab female teachers from neighbouring countries. She remembers when a parent paid a taxi fare for an Egyptian female teacher and ignored her Yemeni counterpart sitting next to her. “You are from the country,” he explained. From that day Fatima decided to support the daughters of her country to gain confidence and appreciation, and to give them the opportunity to prove their competence.

Today, she sees their dreams fall down like the leaves of trees being cut off. Fatima decided to find a solution to the teachers’ salary crisis. She contacted some traders and businessmen to request whatever they can offer to help teachers to continue working. She began looking for resources to bring teachers back to school. One merchant donated some food baskets to teachers each month; another businessman offered a monthly amount of money to cover the cost of transport; another offered a monthly amount to cover basic salaries of some teachers; a pharmacist offered to provide them with medicine.

Fatima looked happily out of the window of her office, at the students who were playing in the school yard after school had resumed. But she noticed some poor girl students sitting on the edge of the yard, looking sadly at others. She approached one of them and asked her why she wasn’t playing with the others. “I’m hungry,” the girl said. This shocked Fatima, and she went about looking for some food to feed these hungry students. With her extensive relationships, distinctive style and determination to achieve her goal, Fatima convinced other donors to serve breakfast free of charge for school students, teachers and janitors.

Some weeks later, one morning with a happy smile Fatima watched the students as they performed the morning greeting and continued with their education.