When violence forced more than 1,200 families from their homes in early 2022, the informal learning spaces that had existed in the camp vanished within weeks. Parents had fled alongside their children. The makeshift structures themselves remained standing — their tarps still stretched, their chalkboards still marked with the last letters anyone had traced — but they stood silent, spaces without purpose. For the children who lived there, this meant more than missed lessons. It meant the loss of the one place where they could imagine a future beyond the camp. Many had already lost siblings, parents, or friends. Learning had been the one place where they could still dream.
"I remember walking through the camp every day and seeing them sit in silence," said one community elder, whose six grandchildren had attended the learning spaces before they closed. "The children just stared at the ground. Nobody talked about school anymore. It felt like we had forgotten who we were."
When Kitshed's field team arrived in the region in early 2023, the priority was not immediately the learning materials themselves. It was trust. Families who had been displaced, disappointed, and forgotten by short-lived aid efforts in the past were understandably skeptical. The first weeks were spent simply sitting with families — understanding what they believed their children needed, rather than arriving with predetermined answers.
That listening shaped everything that followed. Rather than building a new learning center from scratch, the community proposed something simpler and faster: a series of learning circles that could meet under existing shade structures already used for gatherings. It would not look like a school in the traditional sense. But it would function as one, immediately.
Karuna provided basic learning supplies, a small stipend to support three local facilitators, and — critically — more than 400 storybooks in both Arabic and French, alongside simple math and literacy workbooks. For a community that had been without any learning materials for almost three years, this was not a minor addition. It was, for many children, the first time they had held a book that was theirs to keep. The first learning circle, only nine children showed up. Word had not yet spread, and trust takes time to rebuild. By the end of the second week, that number had grown to over seventy. Some had not held a pencil in years. A few did not remember how to hold one at all.
One of the returning facilitators, Amira, had run a small learning space in the camp for five years before the violence escalated. She described the first weeks back as "relearning how to teach letters and laughter in the same hour." Several children needed time before they could focus. Others arrived early every day, unwilling to risk being late to something they had waited so long to have back.
By the fourth month, attendance had stabilized at just under 110 children — more than half of the camp's school-age population. The community, with Kitshed's continued support, began discussing how to expand the learning circles to reach even more children.
I used to walk through the camp and see children staring at the ground. Now they run to their learning circles every morning, and I don't have to wonder.
