Every day at nine in the morning, Ilona Taimela meets with her students and explains the tasks that she is going to assign them during class.
Since March 2020, her routine has been like that of many teachers around the world due to the pandemic: teach their classes remotely.
But with one exception: her pupils are in a displaced persons camp in Syria, quite far from Ilona’s house in Finland.
With messages sent through Whastapp, he manages to teach classes ranging from mathematics to geography. All in English and Finnish.
His students are 23 children who live in the Al Hol camp, a city made of tents where they are held people who have been linked to the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) group.
Close to 35.000 people live there and they are mostly women and children who originate from various countries, including some Europeans.
Some of these children are their students.
“No matter where they are, every child has the right to education,” Taimela told the BBC.
Arriving at a camp
Before classes began with Taimela, students in the refugee camp could only access informal education that was offered by charities.
After the territorial defeat of IS at principles of 2019, the camp became their prison and the forces led by the Kurdish army became their ‘jailers’.
During these years, children of different nationalities have been held there while their countries of origin assess the risks of security that would imply the repatriation of their mothers, who it is feared could continue to support the extreme ideology that led them to support IS.
Meanwhile, the children have grown up in critical conditions, described as inhumane by various NGOs around the world.
TO finals of 2019, the centre-left coalition ruling Finland said that would bring to the country the 30 children from their country who were in the camp.
However, the announcement caused a national stir, but above all it exposed the legal problem of separating children from their mothers. To solve this problem, the government sent a representative, Jussi Tanner, to negotiate with the Kurdish authorities who run the camp.
It was a difficult process. What was thought to be weeks turned into months, so Tanner began thinking about interim measures to safeguard children’s rights under Finnish law.
Then the pandemic arrived and Tanner thought that if the young people in Finland could be taught remotely, the same could be done with the children who were in Al Hol.
The government of Finland supported the idea and commissioned the Lifelong Foundation Learning the development of a distance education program.
That was when they contacted Taimela, who had experience in multicultural teaching.
In a few weeks, she and another teacher managed to design a special program. It was about sending them daily lessons to help them improve their skills in fundamental subjects and also prepare them for life in Finland once they manage to return.
But they all had to do it through WhatsApp, which was the only way to communicate with the students.
“We’ve never done anything like this,” said Tammelander, noting that this show could be the first of its kind. and serve as a model for the development of broader learning proposals.
Students can only participate with the permission of their mothers, who were contacted directly by Tanner.
With 23 enrolled students, in May of last year they began to send the first lessons.
“Good morning, today is Thursday, May 7, 2020. First day of school”, reads the first message sent by Taimela.
She introduced herself as Saara, to protect her identity. And his avatar picture was a picture where he had dark glasses and a scarf covering his head.
Most of the messages were written in Finnish and for some homework emojis were used instead of high-quality photos.
The program was based on language and math lessons and tasks were designed according to the age and abilities of each child .
Taimela points out that she began to see results. Like a 6-year-old boy who could already read complete stories in Finnish, while others were learning more complex structures of this language.
The children’s progress was largely due to the material that was sent through text and voice messages. The problem was that cell phones were prohibited in the camp, so this whole process had to be kept secret, not only from the Kurdish authorities, but also from public opinion in Finland.
Anyway, Taimela always believed that the messages were read by the Kurdish soldiers. Sometimes mothers did not respond for weeks, raising concerns for their safety.
Towards the beginning of this year, Taimela lost contact with most families. As many of them were repatriated or moved to al Roj camp, where surveillance was tighter, classes were cut.
Tanner explains that 23 children and seven adults had been repatriated, while others 15 remain in Syria.
From return to Finland, the repatriations ended in controversy. The Finnish Nationalist Party has criticized the return of these families who, according to them, could represent a threat to national security.
When asked about the teaching program led by Taimela, the leader of the opposition party, Riikka Purra, said she wished the government “would be as interested in safeguarding the safety of Finns ” as in teach hims to these children.
Although Purra clarified that the children of IS fighters “are, of course, innocent.”
But added that she was perplexed by “how much the Finnish state has done to accommodate the needs” of the families of IS militants.
For his part, Tanner notes that the opposition to the repatriations had “become much quieter” and the reaction to the teaching program had been overwhelmingly positive
For now, the Taimela school is in recess. Even if they are all repatriated and end up living in the same country, her students will mostly still be strangers to their secret teacher.
So far, she has only been in contact with one of the mothers, whom she met in a reception center in Finland, along with some of her students.
This time, the use of WhatsApp was not necessary.
“They knew me by my voice”, he said. “At first they were very shy, but eventually they started coming to me. We read and looked at the phone together.”
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