It has been 37 years since al-Zubairi School was built in the city of Amran. Since then, the school deteriorated into a deplorable state, waiting for someone to save it from the ruins and to lift it from its miserable state. The school caters to 1350 students in two shifts - morning and evening - with 400 students from displaced families.
A School for the Poor
Most people living around the school are poor families and IDPs and the school has be-come their only available option. However, the condition of the school mirrors the situation in the neighborhood where poverty and destitution has taken a toll.
Mohamed al-Marhabi, 12, and a student in the school said: “the school year this year was different from previous years. The school and classrooms are in a new state of repair and have created an attractive environment for education - following its rehabilitation by the PWP.”
Salah al-Jabery agrees with his classmate Mohamed al-Marhabi and adds:” Since I enrolled in the school, I never felt that I was in a place that different from the streets. Classrooms were dilapidated. We would sit in the floor because there were no desks, windows are shat-tered, and there were no mentionable teaching aids. The school yard was open to everyone in the street, with the fence wall breached all over, and most parts of the school were dilapi-dated. Today, the situation has improved for the better.”
Recognition
The principal of the school, Sadiq al-Ulmani, thinks that the school, before the PWP inter-vention, had lost all qualifications to be called a school, and was so only a school in name.
He asserts that the intervention by the PWP to rehabilitate the school is like restoring digni-ty to al-Zubairi school. It has improved the educational environment and bolstered morals among the 30 teachers and faculty members of the school. Efforts by the PWP also includ-ed development of the school and modernization of the educational process. The PWP built a laboratory for the school, which was well received by the students who now have an op-portunity for practical studies.
Work opportunities
From an economic perspective, the school rehabilitation sub-project created a number of work opportunities for skilled and unskilled labor in the area surrounding the school, espe-cially for IDPs. 1466 temporary work opportunities were created, 993 for workers from the IDPs community living around the sub-project’s area. This accounts for 47% of the total number of work days created, 67% of the total labor and 473 work opportunities for resi-dent worker – representing about 32.26%. This is considered a positive economic impact for workers from the IDPs community and the residents.