Eleven-year-old Sokna and her sister have stopped attending school after their family was forced to flee to a displacement camp in the grounds of a Buddhist pagoda in northwestern Cambodia. Their mother, Puth Reen, told Al Jazeera that they fled due to recent fighting between Thailand and Cambodia.

According to Cambodia's Ministry of Interior, more than 34,440 people, including 11,355 children, remain in displacement camps as of this month. Puth Reen, who worked in Thailand for many years, returned to Cambodia when fighting began, but life has become precarious.

While most children in the camps continue their education, parents say schooling is fragmented due to unsettled lives. Mothers at the Wat Bak Kam camp in Preah Vihear province told Al Jazeera that primary students can attend local schools, but high school students must travel 15 km daily to the provincial capital.

Rising petrol prices due to the US-Israel war on Iran have made it even harder for teenagers with access to motorcycles to reach school. Kinmai Phum, technical lead for WorldVision's education program, said dropout rates and truancy have increased significantly among students from border regions.

Yuon Phally, a mother of two, said her children's focus on studies has suffered due to the war. Her husband is a soldier stationed at the border. During the fighting in December, her children refused to go to school, waiting for their father to call from the front line.

Farmer Sun Reth, 67, is not allowed to return to her home in the front-line area, which remains a militarized zone. She cannot sleep in her house or harvest cashew nuts from her farm for income.

The long-standing border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia erupted into two rounds of conflict last year: five days in July and nearly three weeks in December. Dozens were killed on both sides, and hundreds of thousands fled. A ceasefire was reached on December 27, but tension remains five months on.

Deputy village chief Soeum Sokhem, 67, returns to his home in the danger zone every few days to check on it and tend crops. Recounting the many wars he has lived through in Cambodia since the 1960s, he asked, "Who doesn't want peace?" He now admits he walks with fear when going back to the front line.

Source: www.aljazeera.com