The Children Are Studying on the Floor. They Reopened the School Anyway.

Perhaps hope is not always believing tomorrow will be better. Sometimes it is deciding what is worth doing today.

Sometimes hope looks less like confidence about tomorrow and more like putting a pencil into a child’s hand today. Image: Canva Pro.

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There is something about a news story this week that I have not been able to shake.

This week, Holy Family School in Gaza reopened after almost three years of war. Around 1,000 children have returned, most of them Muslim and around 130 Christian. The school is attached to Gaza’s only Roman Catholic church, and before the war, there were five Christian schools operating in Gaza. Now the Christian pupils who remain are being brought together in this one place.

Calling it a return to normal would be stretching the word almost beyond recognition.

They still do not have proper desks, there are not enough pencils, and some of the children are studying on the floor. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, described the reopening as a small sign of life amid the rubble, while the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, put it even more starkly. The school may offer some sense of normality, he said, while acknowledging that “nothing is normal in Gaza.”

And that is what I keep coming back to. Why reopen a school when you do not even have the furniture?