Fakhoora Masters student Rania Khalil speaks at the National Union of Students Annual Conference in the UK
Last week Fakhoora Masters’ student Rania Khalil, gave a talk on education during occupation, the UK’s National Union of Students held their 90th annual conference in Sheffield, North England.
Rania is currently living in London and studying at City University for a Masters Degree, after being awarded one of ten funded places to study abroad.
The event was attended by over 1,500 students from across the whole of the UK, and is an opportunity to elect new representatives, develop and approve policy and raise awareness of issues in the world of further education.
The British students were fascinated by Rania’s speech, which described the difficulties of study in the region, but also the love she has for her country and her hope for a better future.
Rania described the difficulty of travelling in Gaza, and the simple act of travelling to classes being a daily struggle of negotiation and luck; will fuel be available? Will the bus arrive? Will this be a day when I have to turn back and give up on my class? The ease that Rania is now able to travel around London gives her a feeling of ‘breathing freedom’.
Resources are also readily available, and Rania loves the endless choices that the bookshops in London provide and there’s no time restriction; she can borrow them for as long as she needs to and there’s no need to share them with her classmates. She talked about the wonderful feeling it gives her to not have to base her whole life around the availability of electricity, and the great feeling she had when she arrived in her apartment in London and realized she wouldn’t have to worry about power and water for a whole year!
The UK students could really empathize with Rania, when she asked them to imagine the feeling of their own universities being bombed, and then the complete absence of repair or reconstruction.
The fear of attack is constant and hangs over the already exhausting struggle to try and study despite all the adversity and restrictions.
It felt that the students were really engaging in Rania’s descriptions of Gaza, because the subject was an area of life that they were able to relate to. Her determination to pursue her education despite all the odds, was clear to the students, as she described how her feelings had not been diminished and she is empowered by the knowledge that it is a human right to have access to education.
Rania spoke about her pride in being selected by Fakhoora for their scholarship as the central focus of the right to education really resonates with her, and it seemed that the same is true for the UK students.
This year’s conference had a strong focus on the restrictions to education across the world that many students are enduring at the moment in Palestine, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria, which gave her talk special and well-timed meaning for her audience.
Amena Saleem, from the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, attended Rania’s talk; “What Rania has said is like hearing something that happened 600 years ago…but it’s actually happening now! We must make people realize that the situation in Palestine is only going to get worse if the world continues to look away”.
As Rania finished her talk, she reflected:
“The experience of talking to so many students today has given me hope. I am comforted that we are not being forgotten. Our international friends share our suffering and support our fight for our human rights. I thank Al Fakhoora for the chance to share my experiences today; it’s the opportunity that they have given me which has brought me here today”.
