In war-torn Sudan, a key to peace may be in a child’s fingertips.
After nearly two years of civil war, an estimated 25 million people in the predominantly Arab country in northeast Africa face acute hunger and 15 million have been forced from their homes. Roughly 90% of schools have closed, leaving 19 million children without a classroom.
Yet along Sudan’s relatively calm Red Sea coast, thousands of displaced children have space in more than 600 schools that remain open. One, a third grader who fled fighting in the south with her family, sat sketching in a notebook with colored pencils. “The war is very bad,” she told the United Nations last week from a classroom in Port Sudan. “I will share the colours with my siblings.”
“In times of crisis,” UN News reported, “education is critical, not just for academic learning, but also for providing a sense of normalcy, stability and safety.”
In war zones around the world, a yearning for normalcy – expressed in a child’s innocent love of learning or a farmer’s spring planting – is as common as it is persistent. The determination to live uninterrupted by the disruption of conflict reflects what the late Czech dissident and president Václav Havel called “living within the truth … humanity’s revolt against an enforced position … an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.”
In the conflict in Gaza, that sense of agency has endured on both sides.
“The truth is we just want to live,” said Donniel Hartman, a modern Orthodox rabbi and president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, in a recent podcast.
“Gaza, a neglected place, visible or concealed,” wrote Tala Shurrab, a Palestinian mental health professional, on the news site Mondoweiss last year, “surprises people with its normalcy – the life it manages to sustain amidst death.”
In Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, neighborhood “resistance committees” that once formed the foundation of a vibrant pro-democracy movement, now provide food and health services to sustain communities shattered by the war. In Port Sudan, at least one school works to help adults resume schooling that was interrupted by poverty or conflict.
The school attracted Maria Adam, a displaced Sudanese woman. “I want to finish my education so I can help my children,” she told Agence France-Presse on Sunday.
Sitting in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reminded his host that “We have very good cities” even three years after Russia’s military invasion. “People work and children go to school. Sometimes it’s very difficult. … We live. Ukraine is fighting and Ukraine lives. This is very important.”
For societies caught in conflict, simple acts of normalcy – as simple as a schoolchild’s drawings in colored pencils – amount to what Mr. Havel called “the power of the powerless.” They set future peace on foundations of dignity.
