Musa Haji puts on his blue school uniform, which lost its color after his five successful years in school, like many other classmates who can’t afford to buy a new schoolbag or new clothes.
Musa’s daily snack consists of a dry piece of bread, wrapped in a piece of cloth. He keeps it in a bag made by his mother from burlap bags used for transporting grain and fodder.
Special “buses”
Musa Haji puts on his blue school uniform, which lost its color after his five successful years in school, like many other classmates who can’t afford to buy a new schoolbag or new clothes.
Musa’s daily snack consists of a dry piece of bread, wrapped in a piece of cloth. He keeps it in a bag made by his mother from burlap bags used for transporting grain and fodder.
Special “buses”
Musa’s long and arduous journey ends at ‘Maqsam El-Turab’ School, founded on April 11, 1963. It is considered one of the oldest schools at Hassi el-Frid, at Kasserine Province, about 350 km from the capital, Tunis.
‘Maqsam El-Turab’ school, dubbed the ‘donkey’ school, lies between El-Fakah and Sudan schools. It received its name because of the donkeys pupils use as the major means of transport to school.
There, deep inside the countryside, surrounded by towering mountain peaks from every direction, students show respect to one another by inviting each other to share the ride on the back of their beloved ‘buses’. In an atmosphere of cheerfulness and childish fun, they laugh loudly whenever they meet an abrupt accident, which makes them forget the hardships of a long and difficult road that takes hours to and back from their school.
“I wake up at about five in the morning to get to my school, located at about five miles from here,” Musa Haji says. “I travel the same road every day, and hope to become an architect one day.”
Jawaher Haji, a fourth grade student says she travels eight kilometers a day, using her beloved ‘bus’ to get to school. Her big dream is to become a doctor in the village hospital, to help and treat the patients, and alleviate years of poor living suffered by her mother who, she says, works in one of the neighboring villages.
Jawaher adds, “I can’t hold the pen in the cold winter days, which causes me and my classmates to be punished by our teacher. Sometimes I am forced to skip some lessons, because of floods and snowfall,” she adds.
Her teacher, Shaima El-Zeitouni, says she is highly impressed by her students’ defiance of all the odds for the sake of knowledge. El-Zeitouni also says that her students often put their lives at risk because of the harsh weather conditions, and the danger of snakes and wild animals on their way to school. The teacher stresses, however, that using donkeys for transport to and from school helps them avoid many such dangers.
Brilliant pupils on donkeys’ backs
Paradoxically, the ‘donkey school,’ which may suggest stupidity and dullness of mind, has produced many officials and professionals who assumed senior positions in various fields.
Khalil Haji, a 25-year-old journalist says he still remembers his private ‘ bus’ throughout his school years, stressing that tough conditions that have become a tradition, passed from one generation to another, have not hampered the young pupils from learning.
Khalil like many students of his age, he says, suffer kidney problems because of the solution added to drinking water. He adds that despite these difficulties, he could break all barriers and achieve success.
On the other hand, Sweileh Haji, an assistant nurse, over thirty years of age, says, recalling his school years, ” Our clothes and books would get wet when it rained during our trip on the donkeys’ backs.”
The quest for more donkey schools
Today, after the revolution, Maqsam El-Turab’ residents dream of getting a real bus to ferry their children and the educators to and from school. They demand a junior high school in their village, and improvement of the medical services. The number of registered students in high schools and junior high schools from that region has reached 700.
Parents have launched a 15-day strike, demanding a secondary school in their region. Participating in that strike were El-Dakhla and Sudan schools, and, of course, their beloved ‘donkeys’.
Mr. Khalil Soalhyieh, ‘Donkeys’ School’s Principal, says the strike has come against the backdrop of the “systematic marginalization and exclusion suffered by those areas, which are still suffering extreme poverty”.
Soalhyieh adds that these remote village schools, “which graduated many senior state officials, despite their lack of the least elements and circumstances for success, are worth more than gestures and words.”
On the other hand, Bouali Hanceri, a teacher, stresses the need to create favorable conditions for teachers, noting that he travels nearly 14 kilometers a day on his motorbike due to the lack of means of transport.
Muncef El-Qasimi, Elementary Stage Assistant Director at the Education Department in Kasserine Province believes the situation in the rural areas, especially in areas with scattered population is too difficult to allow for a viable solution to transportation problem. “We can’t arrange transport for each student,” he explains, “because of the influx of students from multiple areas and due to dispersed population.
Donkey school is lucky!
El-Qasimi assures that this school is one of the luckiest, because it has full-fledged educational facilities, and does not experience staff shortage, like other schools in Kasserine.
For his part, Mohammed Saleh Khalfawy, head of primary and high schools equipment supply authority, says programmed implementation of a plan to maintain the school building and provide it with new computers, as well as find solutions to the problems of staff housing, will be carried out in the near future.
Maqsam El-Turab’s dreams, and their children’s daily trip on donkeys’ backs, are destined to continue until these dreams come true. Until then, residents of Maqsam El-Turab, including the children, have no plans to change the name of their school.
