Edinburgh Summer School - July 2008
We have great pleasure in attaching a report on the Windows for Peace Summer School held in Edinburgh last July. From every account, the School was a resounding success – only made possible by your generosity and support.
The Summer School is part of an on-going process. The young people who came to Edinburgh are continuing to work together and next summer will pilot an exciting new video project being run by the London-based Point Blank organization which is donating their time and expertise. This will take place in Israel and is being funded by The Raynes Foundation and many individual donations. At the same time, new, younger journalism groups are starting the process of working together. The plan is for the first of these groups to come to Edinburgh for a summer school in 2010.
Needless to say, with all the terrible events unfolding in Gaza and Israel, the work of maintaining close contact between the young people becomes harder. But it also becomes more vital to continue the dialogue. It is at times like this that it is even more important for us to support people in the region who are dedicated to a peaceful solution. They need both material support and our moral support.
Over the next two years, we need to raise £150,000 to fund the young journalists programme. We have started 2009 with the wonderful news of a single donation of $72,000 (£48,000) from which £22,500 is being assigned to the young journalism project. With a carry-over from the 2008 Summer School, we start the year with approximately £26,000 towards our target.
Thank you again for your wonderful support,
Yours,
Judith Sischy, Brenda Beecham, Ken Singer and the Windows UK team
Windows for Peace (UK)
Edinburgh Summer School July 2008
Summary
Windows for Peace (UK)
Edinburgh Summer School July 2008
Two weeks of energy, excitement and emotion
The Beginnings
The first seed of hosting a Windows summer school in Edinburgh was planted during a visit to the Windows offices in Tel Aviv in December 2006 by two friends, Judith Sischy and Brenda Beecham. Brenda had been introduced to Windows through her sister, Ros Raizada, who lives in Manchester and is a Trustee of Windows for Peace UK.
They were inspired by the Middle East Windows youth journalism programme because of its connections with young people, with education, with vulnerable situations, with resolving conflict, with peace and above all with hope. The magazines put together by young people exchanged stories about the difficulties, physical and emotional, that they experienced as Jews living in Israel, and as Palestinians living in Israel or in the Occupied Territories. Their letters to each other were open, honest, unembellished and heart rending.
Rutie Atsmon, the founder of Windows, explained the difficulties of bringing together a group of young people for more than 24 or 48 hours in their own environment. There had been summer schools in the recent past, in Italy, in Spain and in France, so why not Scotland? Returning to the UK, Judith and Brenda resolved to make a summer school in the UK a reality and with Judith’s contacts in Edinburgh, this was the obvious choice of venue. City councilors, officials and other education organisations in Edinburgh were unreservedly supportive.
The biggest hurdle was to raise the required funds – around £35,000. Windows for Peace had been operating as a UK charity supporting Windows in the Middle East for four years, but this venture would be bigger than anything undertaken so far. Financial support was sought from selected trusts, donors, individuals and existing Windows UK supporters. We had to be sensitive in our approach, as we realised that bringing together Israelis and Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Muslims, required a gentle, diplomatic approach focused on the aims of Windows and the educational and spiritual values of the project. To our delight, we raised a total of £38,945 in a relatively short period of time, thanks to the support and generosity of over 120 donors. The makeup of the donations was:
Charitable Trusts: £22,400
Individual donors: £15,026 (including £2,200 recovered via Gift Aid)
Corporate and other donations £1,519
The Reality
Accommodation was offered at Merchiston Castle School, one of Edinburgh’s fine boarding schools, the funds were secure, the programme drawn up, permissions obtained from young people and their families in the Middle East, visas secured and flights booked. The event was now a reality and would take place from 14 to 28 July 2008.
The Windows team selected 15 young people who had been working in the programme for around two years, putting together articles for the Windows magazine. The six Jewish Israelis were from the Tel Aviv area, the five Palestinian Israelis were from Jaffa and the surrounding area and the remaining four were Palestinians from the Bethlehem area. There were 13 girls and 2 boys, although the gender imbalance was not typical of other Windows groups.
The Summer School
During the two weeks of the summer school, the group was not on holiday – the young people were here to work, with three facilitators, a translator and Rutie Atsmon the group leader. They had an intensive pre-arranged programme to follow, dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the realities of life in the Middle East, issues involving conflict, pain, fear, terrorism, discrimination and human rights. The facilitators encouraged communication through art, through writing, through music, through role-play and through dialogue so that the young people could reach a better and deeper understanding of the issues behind the conflict.
Judith had the opportunity to meet some but not all of the young people and the facilitators in Israel in April 2008. Meeting them in the Tel Aviv offices reminded her that this was a group of 14 – 16 year olds who could be teenagers anywhere in the world. What would they like to do during their free time in Edinburgh? Harry Potter came the unified reply. Sadly, JK Rowling was unable to join the group in Edinburgh so the next best idea was to take the group on an outing to Alnwick Castle to see the location of some of the Harry Potter filming. Like any other teenagers they were keen to visit trendy shops in Edinburgh (a maximum of three outings was allowed) and to buy gifts for their families and friends.
They much appreciated the grounds of the boarding school, the surrounding beauty of Colinton Village and Colinton Dell in Edinburgh and the greenery – everywhere. They coped well with the change of climate, with the change of diet, with being away from home – in some cases for the first time – with the language and the Scottish dialect, with sharing dormitories and living together on a daily basis. They were wonderful young people. Rutie and the facilitators - Avda from Tel Aviv, Maisalon from a village near Nazareth, and Hwaida from Bethlehem - were equally wonderful, together with the amazing Tony from Jaffa, who translated continuously into Hebrew, Arabic and English. Occasionally stumped by the Scottish dialogue, he managed to make sense of the guides at Real St Mary’s Close in Edinburgh, the City Chambers, the Scottish Parliament, Alnwick Castle and other tourist spots.
The group was joined one afternoon by a group of young people from Edinburgh and Selkirk and by a group from Rochdale near Manchester on another occasion. As these sessions were conducted largely in English, translated by Tony into Hebrew and Arabic, it was possible to listen in on the exchanges between the young people about the conflict, about how they managed painful discussions about the future, their fears and hopes. In these sessions the tension was sometimes palpable, handled sensitively and caringly by the facilitators yet never impairing the bond that was growing daily amongst the group.
Open Day
Towards the end of the two weeks, the group invited around 60 donors, friends and supporters to an open-day at the school. The guests included a Rabbi from Edinburgh, members of the Orthodox and Liberal Jewish communities, leaders and members of the Church of Scotland and of other faiths, Quakers, Middle East Pilgrims, Muslims and others. The atmosphere was friendly, welcoming, informal and electric.
The young people divided into their three groups and each briefly told their story. There were moving presentations from the Israeli Jews, from the Palestinians living in Jaffa and from the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. They eloquently described what they had learned and gained from being together for two weeks. No one could fail to be moved by the experiences of the young people, by their honesty and openness, by their maturity, their deep desire to improve life for their own communities and to see peace in the Middle East. They were immensely grateful to all who had helped to arrange this trip.
Farewells
The group departed tired, exhausted, eager to go home, tearful, emotional, happy yet sad. Judith and Brenda were told that they had made a difference to the 15 young lives and that if peace were to come one day to the Middle East, the young people would all feel that the summer school had contributed some small part to the process. Judith says, “They taught us lessons that we wish we could share worldwide. It was a huge privilege to be part of the summer school”.
How was the money spent?
The total cost of the programme was £35,500 made up as follows:
Travel £9,916
Living costs (Merchiston Castle School) £11,600
Pre- and post-meetings £4,119
Overheads (Windows in the ME) £2,867
Salaries (Windows ME facilitators) £3,930
Trips in the UK £815
Purchases in the UK £1,523
Windows ME expenses in the UK £650
Windows UK admin. costs £80
The Future
Just as the Summer School was not the beginning of a process for these young people (they had been working towards it for well over a year with letters, emails, and short contact meetings), nor is it the end. The funds raised in the UK paid for the summer school itself and also for the preparatory sessions in the Middle East and for post School meetings back in the Middle East. One wonderful example of the success of the Summer School in building trust is that after returning home, a short joint meeting of the group was held in Bet Jala in the Occupied Territories – the first time the group of young Israelis had the confidence to cross over the border for a meeting. And there is more: the group will stay working together for another year or so – moving onto a Video Journalism project with a training summer school being held in the Middle East next summer (2009). Windows for Peace (UK) has secured a major grant towards this (£15,000) with additional funding coming from individual donors and general Windows income. The Summer School will be tutored by the London-based Point Blank video workshop (who will be donating their time and expertise to the project).
And what about future groups? Well, we can’t forget that there are new cohorts of young Israelis and Palestinians joining the Windows project. So of course we want to repeat the process and are starting to plan for the next Edinburgh Summer School in 2010. You will perhaps have noticed that there was an excess of income over expenditure of about £3,500. Well that money is in a ring-fenced account to start the process of fund-raising for 2010. As they say, “watch this space”.
Everyone involved with Windows, both in the Middle East and in the UK is immensely grateful for your financial support for this project and for the enormous goodwill and encouragement you have given it. Windows will not by itself stop the conflict, but the programmes of contact between the youth of the different communities shows what can be done. Windows in the Middle East is pushing to get their dialogue-based programmes into the schools and the communities, and in every possible way spread the message that “you can find people to talk to on the other side”.
Judith Sischy,
Brenda Beecham,
and the Windows for Peace (UK) team.
November 2008
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