Dance routines and Dimbleby - Right to Education

We've now been working on the Right to Education campaign here in the West Bank for one month. It feels like a ridiculously short time, and yet we've seen more new things than we could have imagined possible - and all in between updating our newsletter, creating databases of our contacts, and running a student survey.

Palestine has so many beautiful and varied landscapes. The places we've been, from the plains of the Jordan Valley to the hills of Nablus, are all the more memorable because of the people we've met there.

Recently we made a trip to the town of Nablus. As well as sampling some local knafeh (syrupy pastry dessert filled with a stringy cheese), we went to ask locals one important question: "what does education mean to you?" The answers we received were 100% positive and passionate - a real inspiration. Our gallery of responses will be a great update for Facebook and Instagram. Look out for our Humans of Nablus!

“[Education] gives me confidence. It allows me to deal with people from all around the world.”

Our Nablus trip also led us to experience the famous Palestinian hospitality. One of the women who chatted to us in the market was keen to know more about our project. When she heard we were documenting ways the occupation affects education she invited us to her village, and three days later we were being made to feel right at home in her living room in Burin, eating her amazing home cooked dolmas (rice wrapped in vine leaves) with yoghurt. She explained that she invites internationals to her home whenever she can so that they can see the realities of life here, both good and bad.

Her warmth made it even harder to hear about what she had to say about life in the village. Settlements just over the hill and IDF incursions onto village land have brought a great deal of suffering to the villagers. From her roof she could point out houses on the edge of the village that had been targeted by violent settlers and now stand empty. She said a baby and a pregnancy had been lost in the violence, which was too much for the families to bear. We were also introduced to a woman whose son had been killed after throwing a Molotov cocktail, just two months earlier. 

Pre-school children dancing in Burin.

In such an environment, of course, schools are affected. Our host was a force of nature and led us briskly around Burin's four village schools. In a boys' primary school we spoke to the headteacher about the psychological impact of settlements on the children. We were shown the boys' secondary school, which has an IDF watchtower built on its grounds. In the girls' school, we could stand in the playground and see the spot where the teenager was shot; girls shout at the soldiers when they see them, we're told. The kindergarten provided us with some light relief, where we had tea and watched the children perform a dance routine for us, smiling massively as they tried to wow us. 

Saying goodbye to the children was tough, saying goodbye to our host was even harder. I felt like I was leaving a family member.

After that day of ups and downs we had one night to rest before it was off to one of the most infamously tough places in the West Bank: the ancient town of Al-Khalil, or Hebron. This unusual site is famous for its settlements, which, due to the town's torrid past and religious significance, encroach upon the town centre itself. We explored the old town, a Palestinian area that feels like a ghost town. Shops were boarded up and streets deserted. As we made our way to H2 - the area of Hebron designated as under Israeli control - we saw children travelling home from school, watched over by international volunteers who told us that they face abuse and stones.

For the second time in two days we found ourselves ushered into a Palestinian home and facing more food than we could ever possibly eat. The Azzeh family, who live within the H2 settlement, a literal stone's throw from settlers' houses, fed us traditional maqlouba (rice and chicken cooked "upside down") and told us some of the problems they had faced living where they do. Not least of these was the physical assaults they had suffered. It was hard to learn that the woman who had invited us into her home and cooked for us had lost two pregnancies due to being beaten by settlers. Her daughter had also been attacked on her way to school many times, at one point leaving her with a broken arm. The defacement of the local school and intimidation of its pupils is an ongoing attack on Palestinians' right to education by settlers.

Graffiti sprayed on the side of Qurtuba Girls' School in Hebron.

It's hard for me to understand how anyone could have the resolve to live with such hardship, and to see their family suffer as a result. Hearing stories like this, I had to ask why the family remained in H2. "I trust my eyes - this is my home," the father responded. "I struggle, and I teach my children to struggle." The people we've met who live by the Palestinian ideology of sumud, staying on land despite the challenges of the occupation, continue to awe me.

The Right to Education team have taken these experiences back to our work, such as our #didyouknow facts on social media. As we noticed that many social mediaites use #didyouknow, we've started using the hashtag #bt3rf (pronounced b-tagh-raf), which means "do you know?" in Arabic. As well as being shorter, this gives us a more unique hashtag, which you can now follow for pure Right to Education info!  You can find our factoids on Instagram and Twitter.

To cap it off, this Sunday just gone we hosted a discussion on education in Palestine. We brought together two of the areas we had looked into: prisoner education (represented by Emsat Mansour, a former prisoner turned campaigner) and international law (represented by Wael Abunemeh of Al Haq). Thanks a million to our speakers for sharing their expertise, and to our audience for being equally as impassioned.

Wael Abunemeh and Emsat Mansour

No wonder we were too worn out to stay up and watch the UK election! We'll instead pin our hopes on the Eurovision Song Contest next week.

Salaam

Birzeit Advancement Project - One month in

After a hectic first two weeks, the Birzeit Advancement team has begun to settle down and feel comfortable in its surroundings. The group has been keen to get running with the project and it has been great to have In-Country Volunteers that are equally enthusiastic and willing to commit so much time and effort to get us up and running.

The university was closed due to Easter on what was scheduled to be our first day of workshops, so the group instead prepared for the two days of workshops we would have that week. Through the use of the widely-followed 'Birzeit Advancement Project' facebook page (established by the previous cohort of volunteers), we drummed up interest for our Social Media and Culture workshops.

Each session was led by two volunteers (one UKV and one ICV), with other volunteers facilitating the group activities as required. Social Media was a great place to start as it is something that almost everyone in Palestine (and, indeed, in the UK) is involved in somehow. Culture was another great icebreaker as it gave us a chance to laugh about the stereotypes the UKVs and ICVs might have had about each other. Once we determined that smaller group discussions feeding back to the group as a whole was the best method of gaining the participation of all the students, we had some great, flowing discussions and interesting ideas. The turnout was just over 70 students over the two days with the workshop structure incorporating powerpoint/video and printed/written question cards, but with verbal discussion clearly being the main theme throughout. A highlight of these sessions was an activity asking the Palestinian students to try to workout the meanings of some English idioms - which led to some inevitably inventive answers!

Our second scheduled week of workshops had to give way to the student elections, which seemed to have taken hold of all of Ramallah, let alone the university. Although the efficacy of the elections seems to divide opinion among the students, the turnout and spectacle at the election debates were evidence of the increased importance of the student elections in the absence of actual state elections. Despite worries that the timing of the elections may affect the momentum we had been building for the Advancement project, it has made the team even more eager for the next batch of workshops.

The Birzeit Advancement also had their first Guided Learning trip at the end of our first month in action. A packed schedule for the day began with a trip to a new city under development - Rawabi, a short drive out of Ramallah. An official from the showroom team in the Rawabi project was kind enough to show us around the new town, with it's impressive 15,000 accommodating amphitheatre and all-Palestinian sourced materials and labourers. This was followed by a trip to Bil'in. Here we met Iyad at the Friends of Freedom and Justice Centre, who took us through the ongoing daily struggle faced by the villagers. He took us through the ordeals of the villagers during their non-violent demonstration against the seizure of their land and also how the movement has grown and spread to other villages, especially following the making of the film '5 Broken Cameras' - directed by his brother. A tour of the village and the annexation wall ended at his house, where we were greeted with the delicious Palestinian rice meal of mujaddara and a brief yet touching history of Bil'in.

We said our goodbyes to Iyad and his wonderful family and set off to our next stop in Mas'hah. Here we met a man and his wife whose house had been completely annexed and isolated by the wall, fence and settlements. He told us of his inspirational and continual battle with the occupying and Palestinian officials alike, its impact on his livelihood and employment and his eventual (semi) victory.

I started this post by saying that a hectic first two weeks were followed by the team settling into its surroundings - but upon reflection I can see that this has hardly been the case! May the weeks ahead bring just as many challenges and adventures, insha'Allah.

Ma'Salaama.

Right to Education – One Month in Palestine

This weekend marked a month of the UK volunteers being in Palestine, time has really flown. Every day is always an adventure and we are all really in our element. This country and the people still continue to amaze and educate us in more ways than we could ever have imagined and our friendships continue to grow.

All this, however, is still kept in perspective as in the last two weeks we have learnt and witnessed the hidden challenges this nation and its people face. On occasions we have been deeply shocked and moved.

Our first school visit was to a school in a village near Nablus in the West Bank. At present there are only six families left living there. Being in Area C, any building or development is restricted by the Israeli government. Over the years more and more settlements have developed on the hills surrounding this village, almost entrapping Palestinians within their land. These settlements and the actions caused by their inhabitants have driven out many of the families.

On our arrival in the village we were told that only eight children were enrolled in the school. I questioned at first how a school of so few children could have any sort of character or ethos to promote development of the children. How wrong I was! Here I was privileged to meet some of the most inspirational teachers I have ever come across. Yes, there may be seven teachers and eight children in the school, but every day these teachers showed the children that they were equal to other children and had the right to a safe and complete education. Seven teachers were needed to make sure that a full curriculum was open to the children, giving them the opportunity to achieve anything they wanted to with all the future possibilities available to them.

The head teacher told us how being there and keeping the school running was a strong form of resistance by giving the children a protected place where they could study, with less fear. This school showed me that it is not the size of the buildings or the number of pupils, but truly the people, that create the character and ethos that guide both teachers and students.

Monday the 20^th of April was International Volunteer Recognition Day. All of the UK and Palestinian volunteers joined together at Al Quds University in Abu Dis, along with volunteers from other organisations, for a day of presentations on the importance of volunteering. It was great to hear about other projects that volunteers from around the country and abroad were participating in, and the motivations that made them want to participate. I was a little surprised to find out that all the university students here in Palestine have to complete a certain number of voluntary hours to be awarded their degrees. This means that all our Palestinian co-volunteers are participating in ICS on top of any hours they had to do at university. To me this seemed a little strange, as for us volunteering is something that helps define our interests and passions, and some what gives us another strand of our CV. Everyone volunteers in Palestine, which makes it hard to stand out against the crowd, especially when the job market currently has limited options for graduates. All the Palestinians I spoke to also seemed shocked to find out that volunteering was not a compulsory part of UK degrees.

Elections for the new student body took place this week and on Tuesday we went to observe the debate. Comparing the elections here to any student university elections in the UK is near impossible as the differences are so great. Firstly, students are representing the same parties that stand for government. The biggest three parties standing were Fatah, Hamas, and Jubha. The debate was really intense, with many students piling into the square to hear the representatives speak, along with watching from the windows of surrounding buildings. Although it was all in Arabic, being part of the group you could feel that it meant a great deal to the students. With a lack of general elections, this vote can be seen as one of the biggest representations of public political opinion, in the country. The square was filled with banners and flags for each of the parties, and they paraded through campus with drums and chanting at the beginning and end of the debate. Although the experience was rather intimidating at times, being so different to all student elections I’ve been part of in the UK, it was really a privilege to have seen it.

The past week we have also had a meeting with Al Haq, who are one of the leading human rights NGOs in Palestine. Learning about the work they do and the documentation they collect was really interesting. Although the focus was on educational violations, the meeting also gave us a further insight into some of business and human rights issues they work on. Holding a discussion with them led us to develop some new ideas that we want to integrate into our own projects. For example, we want to research Al Haq's past recorded violations, then go back out into the field ourselves and write a follow-up report of the current situation. We also plan to create a documentary, trailing children’s journeys to school from all over the country, and asking their views on education. With this we hope to be able to compare it to children’s journeys to school and thoughts on education from around the world.

We look forward to bringing you further news of how the project continues in coming weeks, so watch this space!

Ma’a Salama.

Birzeit Advancement Project - our first two weeks

Marhaba and hello from the new Birzeit Advancement Project volunteers! 

The UK volunteers have been in Palestine for just over two weeks now and are settling in well after a great welcome from our Palestinian colleagues.  We spent our first week getting to know each other, eating falafel, attempting some Arabic and learning more about the situation here before getting down to work.

Working in conjunction with Wojdan and Bahor at the Alumni and Career Services Office, we kicked things off last Wednesday with a “we’re back!” event which we organised to introduce ourselves to the BZU students.  Around 75 people turned up over the two events and we were overwhelmed by the support and excitement we were greeted with.  We conducted a survey of our attendees and were surprised that over 70% had never been to a workshop before; we hope we can encourage even more new students to join the project over the next couple of months!  Meeting the students and hearing their reasons for coming has made us all really keen to get going with the workshops this week. 

After the huge successes achieved by the last cohort of volunteers, we have decided to carry on with the same model of English conversation workshops provided three times a day from Monday to Wednesday.  The aim is to provide a space in which students can practice their English, improve their fluency and develop communication skills whilst hopefully having fun and engaging in interesting conversations along the way. After a group brainstorming session, and taking into account the results of the survey, we have come up with lots of ideas to discuss and can’t wait to get started with the first workshop on Tuesday! 

As well as the English conversation classes, we’ll be providing skills and employability workshops on Saturdays, covering general topics such as interview techniques and CV writing.  This will be followed by a drop-in service where students can come to get more specific help with CVs, motivation letters or careers issues.  We’re also hoping to provide a proofreading service and help with scholarship applications as well having some guest speakers come to share their careers experience and offer advice.  With our first guest speaker lined up for Saturday, we’re expecting to make the careers workshops a really useful service for BZU students. 

Aside from work, the UK volunteers have spent some time travelling, with people heading to Jerusalem and Bethlehem and others taking part in the Wadi Qelt Bike Ride in Jericho.  Some of us attended a performance of The Siege by The Freedom Theatre in Jenin and others have hiked in the hills around Ramallah and were even lucky enough to bump into local author Raja Shehadeh! We’ve also been treated to the delicious traditional dish Maklouba and sweet Kanafeh by our Palestinian counterparts. 

With lots of ideas and exciting plans to come, we’re looking forward to continuing the success of the project and making our time here as productive and useful as possible. 

Ma’a Salama for now!

The Right to Education- our first two weeks

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.  

 

It’s hard to believe our time working at Birzeit has come to an end. I think I can speak for everyone on our projects in saying that we don’t want to leave yet! The students have been fantastic and I feel like we’ve made a lot of progress getting something valuable off the ground, despite a long hiatus and with little continuity from the previous Advancement placement.

We’ve established a regular programme for our language workshops and have been delighted to see a consistent group of keen attendees. We now have a short gap before the next volunteers arrive, but we’re hoping that by providing our successors with details of how we’ve run things we can make it reasonably easy for them to pick up where we left off, and keep many of the same students involved.

Some of our last sessions focused on Women’s Rights, Interview Skills and Politics.The Women’s Rights discussion was led by other ICS volunteers here, who are partnered with WCLAC (Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling). It was great to have the variety of volunteers from another project running a session, and informative to hear a bit about what the organisation does. They also led a session which got students really involved in actively expressing their views about gender roles in Palestinian society, allowing scope for them to use advanced vocabulary while keeping discussions inclusive. I thought it was a great session and enabled students to discuss the issues intelligently, and clearly express a wide range of views.

 

The Interviews workshop was a good way to do something further on careers, which we hopefully made a bit more fun and interactive than one can easily make CV writing! We’ve been really lucky throughout our project to have great support from the lovely people in the university’s Alumni & Careers Services office, and their help in structuring these careers-focused sessions was no exception.

Our final sessions on Politics were perhaps a little more controversial, but were I think an important inclusion and one requested by quite a number of students. Adopting a structure where we assigned everyone a particular side in a debate, we found that students were impressively calm and took the time to carefully and accurately express their positions with really good English.

We concluded our last full week at Birzeit by bringing some food and having a farewell gathering in our usual classroom. Our students suggested an amazingly wide range of music for us and got most of us attempting to dance dabka at one point, with varying levels of success. We’re really going to miss them all!

I hope that during our time here we’ve given students some support with their language skills and careers knowledge, and we’ve had fun learning about each other and our respective cultures. I’d like to think that as the first placement for a while, we have also laid foundations that will enable subsequent groups to continue with a bit more momentum and do more for Birzeit students in the future.

I think we have also gained a lot from the project. I’ve learned a huge amount about Palestine and the amazing people here, as well as improving my skills in teaching and communicating, sometimes in spite of the language barriers that we have been trying to reduce.

 I think that some of these skills will transfer to our lives in the UK generally, but the experience has also piqued my interest in charitable work and international development. I’m grateful to have learnt more about the situation in Palestine and the root causes making life here so difficult for many people. I believe all our projects with ICS have done some good during the placements, but living here it is also hard to ignore the impact of outside governments’ decisions upon Palestinians’ daily lives. I hope to persuade at least a few people at home to consider their positions more carefully, and encourage their political representatives to do the same.

As a charity International Service do not take a political stance, but I think we should remember that the humanitarian struggles of Palestinians do not exist in a vacuum. The root causes of many difficulties here are inherently political, and external political pressure is a crucial element in affecting change.

The moment we’ve all been dreading has arrived and it is with great sadness we say goodbye to Palestine. It has been a while since Right to Education’s last entry, this post will include a summary of our recent activities before giving concluding thoughts on the placement and being in Palestine.

Campaign members have been involved in various activities during these past several weeks. Students and volunteers have visited universities, schools and youth organisations across the West Bank to research and document the ongoing violations to educational rights. R2E has also been in regular correspondence with Addameer Prisoners’ Support Association. Their extensive knowledge and tireless work in the service of prisoner’s rights has been invaluable to Right to Education’s efforts to educate ourselves on the plight of student prisoners. One of the in country volunteers attended Lina Khattab’s last court hearing on February 16, detailing this experience through a heartfelt letter to Lina, published on the campaign’s website http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/a-letter-to-lina/. Another volunteer has also written a comprehensive account of the various violations to the right to education faced by young detainees, from those in primary education to university students,  http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/the-dismal-lives-of-students-locked-in-israeli-prison/ which we are proud to annouce was also published by Mondoweiss.

Some of us also coordinated work shops (on the theme of education of course!) with the Advancement group at Birzeit. We discussed case studies from around the world, which detailed various violations to the right to education and we held debates where we divided the class into two to argue as to whether education is a right or privilege. Whilst we took care not to force a discussion on Palestine, some students began drawing the connections between some of the issues that were raised in other countries to their own situation. The students initiated some very thought provoking discussions and we came away a little jealous of the Advancement placement for being able to work daily with such an engaged group of people.

On 9^th March, the Right to Education Campaign (R2E) at Birzeit University hosted a ‘Right to Education Week’, an annual event designed to highlight and oppose the harsh realities of education in occupied Palestine. This event usually occurs in the third week of November, the decision to put on another Right to Education week just four months later was made to keep the momentum of the campaign going.

We began Right to Education week with ‘grab a coffee’, where we set up a stall for students to help themselves to coffee and encouraged them to ask us questions about the campaign itself. On the same day, we also built a four-metre long wall out of recycled wood resembling the ‘separation barrier’. The construction of this illegal wall began in October 2003 and has since exacerbated the many problems relating to movement for Palestinians, adversely affecting the quality of and access to education. We wanted to find a way to highlight the various violations that stem from the wall, but rather than going through the ­­­­­­usual channels such as distributing pamphlets, we decided that building an actual wall would be a more effective way to grab students’ attention.

 

The wall was positioned relatively near the entrance of Birzeit University so that students could not miss it as they arrived into campus. We also left marker pens so that people could write their own messages, making this form of visual protest an open and multi-way engagement. Statements such as ‘the wall must fall’ and ‘I want to go to Jerusalem’ were interspersed with tributes and messages of solidarity from international students. The wall remained on campus for the rest of the week, accumulating more and more writing as the days went on.

Students and faculty members who are members of political parties are susceptible to arrest, even those responsible for the provision of welfare and academic support. As mentioned above, many detainees’ right to an education suffers enormously once imprisoned; therefore, given the centrality of student prisoners to the campaign, this week would have been incomplete without doing something in their honour. On the last day, we arranged for a flash mob where students held up signs reading ‘what have you done for...’ in both Arabic and English, next to rotating pictures of different student prisoners. Some of the participants were blindfolded, alluding to blindfolding of those upon arrest, as well as sending a message about the dangers of closing one’s eyes to injustice.
 

And finally, we produced this short video for our presentation to the Department for International Development (DFID). With the footage almost entirely shot on our phones, this video perhaps most aptly captures our experiences working on the campaign:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHTvPWz4sso

Overall, we are incredibly proud of what has come out of these intense few months. We would be lying if we said things hadn’t been trying at times; however, this made our successes seem all the more remarkable. This requires a blog post in itself, but what we will say is that our experiences here in Palestine are those that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. We have made lasting connections with lots of people and through our projects and time here, we have learnt more about Palestine than we ever imagined we could.

We wish the next cohort the best of luck; you will have an excellent time! We would definitely give anything to have this experience all over again.

 Salamat!