In war-torn Yemen, children find solace in music

TAEZ, Yemen - The sound of music fills the halls at a school in Yemen's Taez, where little Nazira al-Jaafari sits at a keyboard as a teacher takes her through the notes.

"I love music," said Jaafari, a pupil at the Al-Nawras school where tutors are trying to help students temporarily forget the ongoing war. "Whenever I feel sad or uncomfortable, I play music."

She has built up an eclectic repertoire, including happy birthday and songs by Arab icons Fairuz and Umm Kalthoum.

Taez, a city in the southwestern Yemeni highlands, was once known for its coffee beans, grown at high elevation and exported through the famed port of Mokha.

Today, the city is home to some of the most intense fighting in a war between Yemen's Houthi rebels and rival government forces allied with a regional military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

The United Nations has urged both parties to open humanitarian corridors to besieged Taez, where state troops are embedded inside city limits - surrounded by rebel forces.

The three-story Al-Nawras school was hit in 2015-16, right after Saudi Arabia and its allies joined the government's fight against the Houthis.

When it reopened its doors, walls still pockmarked with bullet holes, educators decided to expand the music program, making it part of the core curriculum alongside math and Arabic, with the hope that it would restore joy to their students' days.

"The psychological state of the students was very bad when we reopened here, after all the shelling and bombing and fighting," said principal Shehabeddine al-Sharabi.

The head of a university in neighboring Mokha recommended music, loaning instruments to Al-Nawras free of charge. "Music is not an extracurricular activity here. We can see how it impacts our students, how they are more responsive through music. It yields purely positive revenue," he said.

While the lessons are not part of a formal mental health program, music therapy has been used around the world to support those who have experienced trauma.

And in the humble classrooms of Al-Nawras, dozens of boys and girls find daily, albeit temporary, reprieve from atrocities in a country the UN says is home to the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Smiling and tapping on their desks, a class of bright-eyed students sing, in English: "My face, my face, this is my nose".

In a class later in the day, slightly older children sing: "Education is a weapon".

Agence France-presse

(China Daily 01/29/2019 page11)