At home in the Finnish capital, Ilona Taimela scrolls through hundreds of WhatsApp chats with her former pupils — pictures of animals, math sums and simple sentences in English and Finnish.
The teacher last year gave lessons to Finnish children imprisoned about 3,000km away in Syria’s Al-Hol displacement camp — using only the messaging app.
Al-Hol is a sprawling tent city housing about 60,000 people, mainly women and children displaced by the US-backed battle to expel the Islamic State (IS) group from war-torn Syria.
Photo: AFP
Among them are thousands of children of foreign mothers who traveled to Syria to be the wives of IS militants.
“Some of the children didn’t know what a building is, what a house is, because they’ve always been in a tent,” Taimela said. “There was so much that they needed to learn.”
Rights observers warn that the children are under constant threat from violence, poor sanitation and fires.
“It’s a miserable place, it’s out of control,” said Jussi Tanner, Finland’s special envoy charged with ensuring the fundamental rights of the Finnish children in Al-Hol, including access to healthcare and schooling, and eventual repatriation.
Extremist propaganda “is free to roam with no counter-messaging,” he said.
Tanner had the idea of offering lessons by telephone to Al-Hol’s Finnish children when students everywhere moved to distance learning at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the help of Finland’s Lifelong Learning Foundation, officials engaged Taimela, a specialist in teaching kids abroad, and another teacher, to design and teach a curriculum.
With phones banned in the camp, the lessons would have to be in secret, and the politically sensitive project was also to be kept hidden from the Finnish public.
Tanner forwarded details about the voluntary classes to the mothers.
“That same day... we got maybe eight children,” Taimela said.
Soon 23 of about 35 Finnish children in the camp signed up.
Accompanied with a smiling selfie, Taimela’s first message to the children read: “Good morning! Today is Thursday May 7, 2020. The first day of distance school!”
“The sun is shining here in Finland. What kind of weather is it there?” it said.
Soon Taimela and her colleague were exchanging hundreds of text and voice messages per day with the children, who were taught one or two subjects each day.
“The little ones would always get Finnish, and the older ones would get geography or history, and some of them also wanted to learn English,” she said.
Sending photos used too much data, so the teachers relied on emojis, but soon realized there were no symbols for mathematical fractions or the ubiquitous Finnish blueberry.
“During the year the blueberry [emoji] arrived, so we were happy,” Taimela said, laughing.
Despite only knowing scant details about the children, Taimela said she and her colleague were “worried all the time about their welfare.”
“Especially when we heard that they were sick, or there was a storm and the tent had collapsed,” she said.
Communication with some families would periodically stop.
“Some of them escaped the camp,” Tanner said. “So they were actually taking part in the school while on the run in northwestern Syria in an active conflict zone.”
Others were repatriated and left the group for good.
After months of lessons, the mother of one six-year-old said her daughter could read.
“Not all six-year-olds in Finland can do that,” Taimela said, smiling. “It was a eureka moment.”
IS fighters declared a “caliphate” in large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, three years into Syria’s civil war.
Taimela said she feels “sadness rather than anger” toward the mothers who led their children into the conflict.
Many were vulnerable and believed the promises of militants that they would live in some “kind of paradise,” she said.
Several military offensives whittled away at the brutal IS proto-state, until in 2019 Syrian Kurdish forces declared it defeated. Reluctant Western nations have since brought home handfuls of their IS-linked nationals, mostly children.
Taimela had accepted that she would never know what happened to the repatriated children she had taught, but one day she was called to a reception center in Finland.
“It was an emotional few hours” meeting some of her pupils face to face for the first time, she said.
They “came very close” and Taimela read to them.
“I just wanted to know, ‘How is everything, what can I help with?’” she said.
Finland’s foreign ministry has repatriated 23 children and seven adults.
Tanner said that only about 15 “harder-to-reach” individuals, of whom 10 are children, remain in camps in Syria.
Taimela’s teaching drew to a close in the middle of this year and the ministry later made the project public. She is looking at how to use the innovative teaching model in other crisis zones or camps, and has received requests regarding Greece, Myanmar and Colombia.
“The Al-Hol teacher, that’s my label now,” Taimela said. “But I’m proud of what we did.”
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