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Gaza's child laborers find their way back to school

The Future Hope Center in Gaza helps children return to school and graduate.
Mohammed Zurob marks an exercise for his first grade students during an English lesson inside a classroom at Taha Huseen elementary school in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip September 28, 2015. Nearly three years after Taliban gunmen shot Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, the teenage activist last week urged world leaders gathered in New York to help millions more children go to school. World Teachers' Day falls on 5 October, a Unesco initiative highlighting the work of educators struggling to teach c
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BEIT LAHIA, Gaza Strip — At the age of six, Soha Harez would don her green school uniform, pull her brown hair back in a white hairband and join her classmates every morning in class. Sadly, this routine only lasted a month, because she had to quit school and become a housemaid.

Soha’s father worked sporadically at a cookie factory, earning in the best of times the equivalent of $10 a month. Soha's mother worked as a maid to cover the basic needs of her six children. When her mother was diagnosed with a serious illness, Soha quit school to take over her job. Two years later, a team from the Future Hope Center, a child protection initiative in northern Gaza, knocked on her door and talked her parents into letting Soha take advantage of the center's programs with the hope that she would then continue her education.

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