A visit to Maria Fidelis Regent School

When I visited the school, I met with the teacher called, Fiona Millar who took me for a tour around the primary and the secondary school. The school consists of of two buildings and has about 800 students. The visit was two days long and I had the chance to attend art, techonology, and science classes. Maria Fidelis was already parnters with Abu Dis UNRWA School and this visit gave me the chance to explore our partner school and make a plan. Fiona and I drafted an initial plan to get the two schools communicating, exchange materials, and present our activities to each other.

Art Class

Fiona and I

D&T Class

I am looking forward to going back to Palestine and telling everyone about this great visit and start this great twinning link.

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