Description

Guardian 12 June -- Each morning, they scrabble through a drainage pipe under a busy main road slicing through the unforgiving landscape between Jerusalem and Jericho, where hard-baked stony hills roll down to the Dead Sea.

At the end of the school day, they clamber back down to the drainage pipe to pass beneath the thundering traffic on their way home. But, after today, the last school day in the academic year, the pupils of Khan al-Ahmar primary in the West Bank cannot be certain their school will still be standing come September. Head teacher Hanan Awad fears that if the building is left empty, bulldozers will rumble up the hill from the main road to tear down the illegal two-year-old structure built out of old car tyres and mud. So she and her team of nine women teachers are planning a programme of children's summer activities to keep the building occupied.