Finish Advent Calendar

hi to eveyone!

We have had good time making the advent caldendar and we finished it today.  We wrote some of the  Human Rights inside the calendar windows. This was great because it meant we talked about human rights with the girls. We also talked about the Separation Wall and what kind of human rights they are destroying in Palestine, with checkpoints, the wall, etc. and we also talked about the different IDs. 

Now, you can see a pic about our lunch club and about the Human Rights Advent Calendar. We hope that you like it.

Human Rights Advent Calendar II

Today we continue working on our 'Human Rights Advent Calendar' We decided to paint the cover with blue sky, a grey wall, a big christmas tree in green and a Palestinian flag in the centre. It looks really beatiful and colourful now!

At  the same time we were talking about the wall and what kind of human rights the wall destroys. For example we talked about the rights to movement, freedom and the family. The students were really surprised about the size of the wall because it is enormous and it is really difficult to imagine.

Can you imagine your family in the other part of a big wall? Can you imagine spending a lot of time trying to cross a big wall every day? It is really crazy for us just to imagine! Hundreds of Palestinians live with this every day, and the international justice court said that it is illegal. We hope that the wall will be destroyed soon.

Human Rights Advent Calendar

Christmas is close and we decided to make a creative activity with Maria Fidelis between Human Rights and this festive time. Claudia had the idea to create a Human Rights Advent Calendar. So we planned to design the cover of the Advent Calender and put a Human Right in every single box.

When we arrived, three girls and the art teacher were waiting for us in the class. First, we talked about the International Human  Rights Celebration at the 10th December. The girls started to think about Human Rights and got some inspiration for the cover of the Advent Calender. So Today they just finished planning and started to make some pencil drawings. If we finish this artwork, we want to put this in a nice and popular place of the school, because we want to share it with the other students and teachers.

Dunja & Emilio

UN Children's Day Exhibition

 
Today, we had a really good time in our Lunch Club in Maria Fidelis School.
There were new students in the group so we started talking about CADFA, the blogs, the links in Abu Dis and about the situation in Palestine.
There were also some students who had been involved in the same Lunch Club last year so they could talk about their experiences. They showed the new girls the blog and the posts they had written last year.

Tomorrow we have  the UN Childrens Day Celebration, so we prepared  a little exhibition about the last kids visit in October with the students. One of the girls had been to Bethlehem and she was really surprised about the Israeli soldiers there.

We really hope that we see the girls next week for a second time, so we can build up a bigger project.

Dunja & Emilio

School's Closed

The events of the last few days has brought normal life in Abu Dis to a stand still. Today the girls of the UNRWA school is empty.

A man from this town was attacked and killed in West Jerusalem on Sunday night and yesterday the whole town was out on the streets mourning him. Arabic echoed through a megaphone, gun shots were fired into the air and fireworks flew high in an angered response to the incident. Crowds gathered, chanting and waving flags and boys threw stones until finally all action was smothered by tear gas from the Israeli army.

The family of the man killed is well known in Abu Dis and everyone feels the loss. Today the students are at home with their families as they watch the events unfold and violent demonstrations are expected. This is all too normal for students in Abu Dis where interruptions to school life happen often. 

Unfortunately, we will probably not see the UNRWA students before the UN Children's day on Thursday, but we hope it goes well and we will talk to them about it next week.

We have seen your blog post from Maria Fidelis school and look forward to showing it to the girls when things are back to normal.

Here are some pictures of Grade 9 at the UNRWA.

 

Grade 7 love One Direction and gave us this drawing

First lunch club

Today we had our first lunch club at Maria Fidelis School. We met Fiona the art teacher, who hosts the club. We were in the art room where we looked at the amazing screen printing. The girls had been doing and chatted to some of them while the girls who were coming to the club grabbed lunch from the canteen. 

When the girls arrived we introduced ourselves and talked about CADFA’s work. Dunja asked what they knew about Human Rights and Palestine and they talked about hearing about the war in Gaza.

We had a look at some photos from Claudia’s time as an EVS volunteer in Abu Dis. We showed them pictures of the Wall, checkpoints, children in their twinned school UNRWA and in the Community Centre in Abu Dis to give them a rounded view of life, especially school life in Abu Dis. Then we had a look at the school blogs and showed them how to find them online.

At the end we talked about CADFA’s UN Children’s Day celebration*, because we want to prepare something next Wednesday to share in the celebration in Kentish Town Community Centre.  We are really looking forward to next week!

*20^th November, 7:30, Kentish Town Community Centre

Dunja & Emilio

Hi, we're (Mya and Jessica) having our last club for the year, and we wanted to write to you before we left school about what we've been up to.
Last Friday, we finished our exams :D We had a full week of exams, and the only results we've gotten back so far is French (oui oui) and science. Have you guys done your exams yet? After exams, we have a week of normal school for no reason (D:) and then we have something called Enrichment Week. It's where we go on extra curricular activities (non-school activities). We only know one of the trips we're going on, which is a trip to France in Boulogne. We don't know what we're going to do there though. We do know that Boulogne is by the sea in northern France.
Mya is going to France again in our summer holidays. We get six weeks off. I (Jessica) don't have any plans for the summer holidays yet. In our free time, we like do draw digitally (on the computer with paint programs). Mya records how she draws and posts the videos on YouTube. You can watch it by clicking the cat's face above.
http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2014/185/6/f/forest_kitty_by_superrandomstuff-d7p6ro3.png (finished image)

And the fish pony is something I drew :3

Okay, bye until next year! :D




 

Hi, it's Mya, Jessica and Holly (not Saffron) writing to you to tell you about a game we played today.

In the game we played, we all had to go to our imaginary sister's wedding in Nablus at 2:30 pm (actually, Holly and Mya have sisters. I don't, so my one was imaginary.) We started our journey in Hebron, and we had to make a pit-stop at Ramallah to pick up our sister's wedding cake. On the way, there were several checkpoints, so we had to change our leaving time to account for that. I left the earliest, at 6:00 am, Mya left at 8:00 am and Holly left the latest, at noon. During the game, Mya got sent home twice, I got stopped at a checkpoint for two hours, and Holly got stopped for three hours. Because of this, and lots of other stops, Holly was three hours late to the wedding. Mya and I were early to the wedding, but we forgot to calculate the actual time to takes to travel, so in the end Mya was about an hour late, and I was an hour early (YAY). Unfortunately, this meant that Holly was six hours late and her cake melted into a puddle of something.

We were shocked to find out that when you wanted to travel in Palestine, you had to plan far ahead, and leave very early to ensure you arrived on time. Here in the UK, we can go wherever we want whenever we want, and the only thing that really slows us down is traffic.

When I (Mya) was in France I had to wait to get into the country but only for a few minutes. The longest time I had to wait was when I was going back into the UK and there was problems with the trains and checking our passports this took around three hours and I got home late but this only happened once and was because of delays with the trains.

We have a few questions for you now :3
How long does it take more on average with the checkpoints to go to places?
Do you get sent home often on the checkpoints?
What do you do while you wait at the checkpoints?
Do you get sick of waiting at the checkpoints?

That's all, thanks, hope to hear from you soon.

Jessica, Mya, Saffron and Holly!

ID GAME

Yesterday, Holly, Jessica, Mya and Saffron change their identities for an hour during a game

Holly was Israeli settler in the West Bank
Jessica a Palestinian living in the West Bank with a green ID
Mya was a foreigner
And Saffron was a Palestinian living in Jerusalem with a blue ID.

We first speak about where could they live on the map of Israël-Palestine according to their identities.
Then they had to pick up cards and I asked them, according to their IDs, if they could do what was written on the card or not.

With her green ID (Palestinian living in the West Bank), Jessica couldn't do almost anything. She had the worst situation and a lot of things were forbidden for her. Not being able to go to Jerusalem was a big issue because she couldn't live with her husband who has a blue ID, couldn't go to take care of her mother who lives in Jerusalem and who is ill, couldn't go to pray at Al Haqsa mosque, couldn't find work in Jerusalem, couldn't travel with her fatally hill husband to the hospital in Jerusalem....
She was also shocked that she has to go throught checkpoints on her way to university (she picked a card saying that she lives in Hebron and go to university in Abu Dis). If I remember well, she said : "I can't do anything even in my own country".

We enjoy holidays!

When I ask the girls if they like holidays, the three of them (Holly, Jessica and Mya) answered : YES !

Fortunately for them, the Easter holidays have just started and will go on for two weeks….14 days of free time (but still some homework to do) without going to school! It’s a lot of time…what are they going to do?

Holly and Jessica will stay in England but Mya will go to France, to a city called “Dijon” because she has some family there. She visits them twice a year and so she knows Dijon well!

Holly will also visit her family in Essex (a region not far from London, at the north-east of the capital) but most of the time she will stay in London. Jessica will spend time with her cousin in London too.

During holidays, they like to chill at home…watching TV, playing card and electronic games and sleeping of course…it’s a good time to relax! They also do some outdoor activities in their own neighbourhood like roller-skating, going to the swimming pool and the park.

Sometimes, they are also a bit bored during holidays because they have a lot of free time and they don’t know what to do or can’t do what they would like to.

We hope they will enjoy their holidays. They will write about it on the blog when they are back in two weeks.

Do you also have spring break in Palestine? What do you do during your holidays? Do you enjoy it as well? We would like to know how your holidays are in Palestine….hope to hear from you soon!

A photo of the UNRWA School

Maria Fidelis girls say "Hi!"

Hi! We're Mya, Jessica and Holly and we're all 12 years old. We've been a part of this club since September 2013, the beginning of Year 8 for us. We listened to the song that you linked us and we really liked it! Mya and Holly said that they would enjoy it even more if they knew the lyrics. Can you translate the lyrics for us? A song that we all like listening to is called 'Let It Go' from the movie 'Frozen' by Disney.

Hope to keep in touch with you again soon! Bye.

We love One Direction too :)

The girls at UNWRA School are really excited to learn about life in London and at Maria Fidelis for girls the same age in England. We spent the first class getting to know each other where we chatted about where we live, our family, our favourite colours, and what music we like. A lot of the girls love One Direction and Little Mix!

 

The girls at UNWRA also love Mohammed Assaf who won the Arabic version of ‘Pop Idol'. Maybe the girls at Maria Fidelis would be able to listen to his winning performance and let us know what you think? And in return tell us one of your favourite songs that girls in Palestine might not have heard so we can listen too!