African refugees cheer each other on while starting lives in Tel Aviv

Just around the corner from Tel Aviv's central bus station, on a street filled with garages and a car wash, stands an unremarkable building in which some remarkable things are beginning to happen.

Here, doctors, professors and engineers sit shoulder to shoulder with the illiterate and ill educated, with two things in common - they fled Africa as refugees and are desperate for basic education in English and Hebrew.

This is the new education center opened early this year by the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC), for the first time in a building owned by the organization itself, in the hope that it can offer a better standard of teaching to the refugee community of Tel Aviv.

The move is community-led, and backed donations of time, money and furniture, explains Joanna Packer, the team coordinator for the ARDC education department. "To as large an extent as possible, the center is run by the community, for the community. While there are volunteers from abroad offering classes the aim is for more and more to be provided by the refugees themselves."

"We had a woman come in to register for a Hebrew class and she saw, a couple of people above her on the list, a woman who was registered to take French literacy," recalls Packer, "and she said 'I'm from Cameroon, and have a degree in English and French language and I would love to teach'."

Cases which reflect this feeling are becoming increasingly common, as the community begins to take ownership of the project, and for Packer, the move to the new building fits this ideal: "To have ownership of the place is important, these are our desks and our chairs which we worked hard to get donated to build with our own hands.

"[In the old building] they weren't our classes; we'd rented the space so it never really felt like ours. I want a place where people can come and hang out so they feel like a part of the community.

"In the other building, they were very, very small classrooms so we couldn?t fit more students into each class, they weren't language classrooms and there was a piano in each room taking up a lot of room which in my mind could have been another table for five more students."

There are currently over 18,000 African refugees and asylum seekers living in Israel, from countries including Eritrea, Sudan, Cameroon and the Ivory Coast. The refugees enter Israel via Egypt, risking arrest and even death to reach the safety in a country which, albeit without enthusiasm, will give them a short-term home.

The center is largely for adult refugees, with varying levels of educational backgrounds and language skills. Packer explains that, "in an English class we have a couple of students from Congo, who are very highly educated, one of them has a PhD and they might be sitting next to someone in their class who has huge gaps in their education, who has no real experience of being in a classroom before."

The classes range from pre-beginner, for basic literacy, to advanced, which aims at full communication, in English and Hebrew, as well as offering French literacy classes (largely for members of the illiterate native French speakers from the Ivory Coast), and are taught largely by American, British and Israeli volunteers.

It is clear that education is vitally important to the African refugee community here in Israel. Joanna Mantello, the volunteer coordinator at the center, explains that the initiative behind opening the center, both this week and back in 2009 at the beginning of the scheme, was all community led.

"It started in January 2009 because of the demand. The communities came to us and said, ?we?re wasting away, we haven?t used our minds in months, or years, we need a school and we also need to get skills, skills which are relevant now'."

It is this kind of self-empowerment which is the real goal of the ARDC as it moves forward, and it's a far cry from the situation just a few short years ago.

Established in 2004, the ARDC was at first primarily an humanitarian aid provider, dealing with the crisis of many African refugees without shelter or clothing. The situation was exacerbated by an influx of thousands of refugees in 2007-8, and at this stage the ARDC was reliant hugely on foreign volunteers.

But, as the situation on the ground began to develop, the need became less for just food and a roof over heads, and more for rights, at which stage the asylum and advocacy projects came to the fore.

Now, at the start of 2010, advocacy and aid are still the largest parts of the ARDC budget, but the focus is beginning to turn to the future, and the new education center, as well as a pilot counseling and psychotherapy scheme, is indicative of this.

However, the center's biggest problem remains a gross lack of resources. They rely on donations from the local community and philanthropists, which are understandably unreliable. The entrance is furnished with semi-functioning sofas acquired at the good-will of nearby shops, with all available chairs placed in classrooms to accommodate extra students.

Asked what the future holds for the center, there seems to be complete agreement among the community and staff as to what should come next. "Students are always coming, asking for computer literacy classes and we just don?t have the resources right now," says Packer.

"I began planning and in no time I found experienced teachers, who've taught computer literacy classes who are willing to donate their time to teach these classes, we expanded her at the education centre so we have the space, we just need the computers, and we have no shortage of students who want to study."

There may not be adequate resources for this ambitious step just yet, but in the meantime, the new center should at least help to maximize what little there is available, and hopefully help to equip some of the least fortunate of Tel Aviv society with the basic language skills which would

mean so much to them, while at the same time building a community. Says one of the teachers: "one of the most beautiful things is that on the last day of class everyone's getting the little diploma that we give and it's all big hugs for each other; they?re all cheering for each other."