Children returned to school in timbuktu in northern Mali on February 1, a week after Islamist groups retreated following a coordinated ground and air offensive by French and Mali government troops through January. Teachers say about half of all school children fled northern Mali in 2012 when Islamist groups took over much of the north and shut down many public schools, dismantled the curricula in others, and sent some children to Koranic schools.

“You cannot imagine the joy I felt in returning to this classroom,” says the director of Timbuktu’s main primary school, Coulibaly Ami Doucaré. She abandoned the school last April when Timbuktu was taken over by Islamist group Ansar Dine. “It’s important we save this school year. We’ll do everything we can to catch up, even if we have to study on Sundays,” she says, appealing to all teachers who fled, to return.

Exults Aminata Touré, a class IX student: “I feel like I’ve been let out of prison. I can walk around town, I can dress as I like — look, I’m wearing jeans. My second joy is that I have been reunited with my class, my friends, my teachers and my school books. I thought the school year was ruined, but now I will be able to pass my diploma and go to the lycée next year.” Most Timbuktu schoolchildren lost at least four months of their academic year.

Many schools were destroyed in Timbuktu and Gao, with tables and benches looted or damaged. Education network Education For All and local NGO Cri de Coeur have ordered 100 school desks and benches, as well as notebooks and pens to be sent to schools in the north, says Cri de Coeur president Almahady Cissé.

Half of the 5,000 students at the Teaching Academy of Timbuktu fled to central and southern Mali or to neighbouring countries, according to Mamadou Camara, a teacher there. The ministry of education estimated at the end of 2012 that 10,000 displaced children from the north had no access to education.

(Excerpted and adapted from www.irinnews.org)