Marhaba! We are the second cohort
of UK and Palestinian volunteers who will be working together on the Right to
Education campaign at Birzeit University. We are very grateful to the previous
group for all of their hard work, as it has given us excellent foundations to
build upon for the next two months.
We have spent our first official
working week brainstorming ideas and meeting with members of the campaign to
give us a clear idea of what is realistic and achievable in eight weeks of
work. The head of the campaign, Nadia, has been very accommodating to our new
ideas and is happy for us to continue the work of the last cohort, as well as
helpfully informing us of what the campaign wants to achieve in the long-term.
To do our job effectively it is very important for us to try and understand the
nature of education under occupation. We have done this by speaking to many
students, but by also visiting the prisoners’ rights organisation Addameer.
They provide free legal aid to Palestinian prisoners and raise national and
international awareness about the profiles of those who have been unfairly
incarcerated, including many students and children. This helped us further
understand the political and social implications arrests have on young
Palestinians.
We have decided to continue the
#didyouknow campaign and we will be releasing a post every Monday afternoon via
Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, as a way of raising awareness through social
media. We have begun collecting facts and pictures to create a database of
#didyouknow statistics, to make the whole process very easy and straightforward.
We have also started coordinating with Omar (the campaign’s school visits
organiser) to arrange visits to schools in Hebron and Nablus. We are planning
on visiting one-two schools a week, and writing up articles and profiles on the
schools to raise awareness about the conditions children have to learn under.
Also following on from the previous cohort, we will continue to establish
connections with UK universities, and are aiming to have a minimum of ten universities
partake in the Right to Education week in November 2015.
After initial discussions we
decided that it is important to all of us to focus on quality rather than
quantity, and so we want to focus on projects that can be easily sustained by
the Right to Education campaign in the long-term. We thought that conducting a
student poll would be effective to get a clear understanding of awareness and
opinion from students on their right to education. However, we realised that
unless we did this thoroughly it would lack any credibility and so any articles
or reports we did based on it would have very little weight. We therefore
decided that we would put our energies into producing an academically valid and
statistically significant survey and report on students’ perception and understanding
of their right to education. If done well, it could potentially help shape
future projects, make them more efficient and improve the direction of the
overall campaign.
We are trying to set up links
between Birzeit University Right to Education campaign and other universities
in the West Bank, and so have already started researching whether this is
doable. We have made some contact with Al Quds University, where other ICS
volunteers are based, and so we hope that we can use this connection to
re-establish relationships between Birzeit and Al Quds in order to expand the
Right to Education campaign across the West Bank.
We are all really excited to get
the ball rolling, and have a really busy and productive time here. We will
update this blog regularly to let people know how we are getting on.
Ma’a Salama.
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