A Message From a Palestinian Mother

MY DEAR CHILDREN

IF YOU ALLOW ME TO CALL ALL OF YOU MY CHILDREN KNOWING THAT YOU'R NOT CHILDREN ANYMORE, BUT FOR A PALESTINIAN MOM HER CHILDREN WILL STAY ALWAYS CHILDREN EVEN WHEN GROWN UP AND RESPONSIBLE LIKE ALL OF YOU.
I AM SALWA AMIRA'S PROUD MOM, READING YOUR BLOG WHENEVER ANYTHING NEW APPEARS, IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY AND PROUDER OF AMIRA AND ALL OF YOU. ENRICHING OTHER CULTURES ABOUT OURS AND MAKING IT CLOSER TO REACH A LONG LASTING PEACE BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE AND TWO STATES. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK.
WITH ALL MY LOVE FROM THE LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM WHICH IS GROWING SMALLER BY THE HOUR, WITH WALLS ENCLOSING US AND PEOPLE STEPPING ON EACH OTHER AS WE DON'T HAVE MORE SPACE TO GROW AND OUR LANDS AND MOUNTAIN TOPS ARE BEING CONFISCATED..WE FEEL STRANGLED AND GASPING FOR AIR.
HOMES OVERLOOKING WALLS JUST 3 METERS OF AIR…NO BACKYARDS, NO PLAYGROUNDS, NO SEA, NO LAKES, NO MORE MOUNTAIN HIKES, OR JUST A WALK WITH MY GIRLS IN THE FIELDS OVERLOOKING THE MOUNTAINS OF OLIVE TREES AND PICKING OUR TRADITIONAL FOOD (ZAATAR) FROM THE MOUNTAINS UNLESS WE WANT TO GET SHOT AT.


I DON'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF FUTURE AMIRA AND HER FUTURE CHILDREN WILL HAVE…I ALWAYS THINK OF LEAVING TO ANOTHER COUNTRY, AS I FEEL SORRY FOR HER AND THE REST OF MY GIRLS. I SHOULD BE OPTIMISTIC BUT I CANNOT BE SELFISH TOWARDS MY GIRLS TO PURSUE A BETTER DREAM AWAY FROM IT ALL.
FOR HER BEING IN GERMANY WITH ALL OF YOU IS A STEP TOWARDS THIS DREAM THAT I HAVE FOR MY DAUGHTER, A CHANCE FOR HER TO BE AS WONDERFUL AS SHE IS.
AM PROUD OF HER.
WITH ALL MY LOVE.
AMIRA'S MOM.
PALESTINE.

going back....to a new time...

Hey my friends,
yesterday we left each other....and when i woke up this morning i thought about what i m going to prepare for the breakfast today...and then i realised that i m in my mums house and that i just have to think for myself from now on...
i want to suggest to share pictures on www.eye-to-i.org
if you register you can upload 15 pictures and download whatever you want...

hey my girls...i miss you...hope you enjoy berlin!!!!

Articles for the newsletters

We were asked to write an article about our trip to Germany for some newspapers, so I wrote this one and its going to be published soon in some newpapers, I would like to share it with you:

Hello everybody,
My name is Amira, 19 years old from Bethlehem, Palestine. I don't know from where to start talking about Germany and her people. I have just fallen in love with them. So I will just start from the beginning, I came to germany with Jacob Kraul whom I met earlier in Palestine in a youth conference which is called "walk Your Talk". As Jacob was one of the organizers of thet conference, he came up with the idea to bring people who participated in" walk your talk" to Germany to participate in another conference which is called" connecting bridges" in Schloss Hamborn.
I arrived in Germany on the 15 of July to Berlingen, Lake Constanze. I stayed the first five days in Jacob's house. Thanks to Jacob's family who hosted me, took care of me and made me feel as if I am a member of the family. Then I moved with the group who consisted of one Israeli guy, five Palestinian guys who live in Israel and another group of German youth, to The Waldorf School in Berlingen ; we stayed there for one week having a lot of meetings with students from the school to talk about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and how an Israeli and a Palestinian can be together in one place and living as human beings not as enemies. It is possible if the people of the world would just listen to one another without any borders between them.As a result there won't be anymore war and hatred. We really had a lot of fun in ÜBerlingen; even we had a cultural night in which we invited a lot of people from the area there and we performed some Palestinian folklore dancing, sang songs for peace and unity, shared our personal stories about life in Israel and Palestine and finally cooked some Arabic and Palestinian food. Thanks to all the people

including farmers who donated for us a lot of food and for the families who invited us to their houses to spend the day with them.
Thursday the 26 of July we arrived at Schloss Hamborn at 1 pm after a journey which lasted for almost 9 hours in the car; and there the organizers of the conference were waiting for us. The organizers of this conference are a group of approximately 20 young people from Schloss Hamborn (grades 10 to 13) as well as students from Augsburg and Mannheim. These students organized "The Youth Congress Connection 2007" last January. The most thing that interested me in these young people is that they are clever enough to choose two important and sensitive topics for this conference. That means they didn't choose topics about youth but also they chose topics that concerns almost everything that must be taken care of . The first topic was about the environment. For example: genetic engineering. They talked about

tools and ways we already have to do genetic manipulation. Where would the sciences lead us in the future?, which ethnic doubts we have?, and also which advantages can we get out of genetic engineering?. The second topic was about society. For example: "Eye to eye" in which I participated, we talked about how we can transform any kind of suffering that we face into positive actions. Not only workshops were held in this conference but also there was daily lectures and discussions for the public so that every participant will be able to gain a certain insight into every topic.
I was very happy to participate in such a conference. I learned many useful things from it, specially some words in Germany!!!! Good luck for you my friends and I wish you all the best!!!

Talents Night

This is one of my articles that will be published in the newsletter of Connaction 2007 conference:

Talent show
A big mysterious reward was waiting for the most talented Miss or Mr Connaction 2007. Evereybody from the conference gathered together in the youth club with all their talents and full of hope that they will win this mysterious reward.

“ Tabea dumped me!!! Oh my heart is broken now… But what I don’t understand in all this story is that our relation ship lasted for eight seconds only!!!!! That was the first performance in the show by Dave’s humorous show. Oh my God!!! We didn’t stop laughing, it was a very funny show. Now, all you have to do is to let your tongue reach your nose and touch it. I know that you are trying to do that now and I know also that you didn’t succeed in doing it!! But let me tell you something, Silvia, the tender girl from the conference could do it!!! Bravo!
What about playing the flute? Two talented people, Hannes and Frederike, could play the flute perfectly and could play the song that most of you know from kindergarten “ Hejo, span den wagen an”. Everybody was singing happily the song with them while playing, it was so cool!!! Sababa!!!
Now ladies and gentlemen I would like to

intoduce for you the super star singer “Urs”, who didn’t sing anything at all but he was trying to show of while Nicola played the harmonica.
After that super performance three talented guys (in real life) in playing many different kind of instruments, Martin, Simon and Fabian, but in this show they acted like playing the instruments on Mute mode!! Firas and Motasem chose four people from the audience, Christian, Urs, Sophia and Evi and took them outside to tell them they should act in front of all the audience the role of riding a motorcycle, while the others inside were preparing a trick for them and they had to imagine them sitting on the toilette. After some minutes the four victims came in and they starting acting their role. You have to imagine it, it was really very funny!!
After all the laughing and humorous shows, I went on the stage and sang a very sad song in arabic about being away from home for a long time and how much I miss my hometown. It is a song

called “Nassam alayna il hawa” for a very popular singer called “Fayrooz”, and Ahmad played the Darbokeh. But the problem was that my stomach was hurting me a lot as I ate a lot of food since I cam to Germany, I just can’t stop eating because the German food is very delicious, spaghetti, cheese and vegetables. Yam Yam!!!
However, there was one girl who is very talented in drawing portraits but she was hiding and didn’t want to say anything about her talent, probably she was shy a little bit. I introduced her to the audience and showed them the portrait of my face that she had drawn it earlier that night. Good luck girl!!
Peace…. It’s a big and very important world, we need it in our life because it is like the water, if we don’t have it in our life we wouldn't have survived until now. So Lucia, Moira and Lisa sang a song about peace in two languages, Hebrew and Germany. Thank you!!
The last performance was from Ruth and Martin who sang and played the electro guitar,

they were so good, nice voices and a very perfect performance, I think they should form a band!!
Finally, the time of announcing about the winner came and all the people who performed something went on the stage and each one had to stand in the middle and the audience had to shout and clap as much as they liked his performance, like this the judges would choose the winner. In a result, we had three winners, Dave, Martin and Ruth, they were too perfect to let any one of them lose, Special Mr Connaction “Martin”, Mr Connaction “Dave” and Miss Connaction “ Ruth”. Then it was the time for the mysterious reward to be given for the winners, everybody was waiting for it eagerly. So first of all there was presents for all the participants, but guess what was it?……………………. four packets of tea each!!! Then they opened the big reward, also guess what was it???………… a lot of food, Jam , biscuits and vegetables!! It was so funny because we expected to see something else like maybe electronic reward or at least a book!!!!!!!

Not even borders can prevent us from meeting!!!

Saturday

We had a good night sleep! We slept for as much as we wanted... Hour passed until all awoke. Then we found that it's raining outside. And we had in mind Bob Marly sang by Katerina 'the sun is shining and the weather is fine...'

We thought about adding a small dictionary the will explain in simple language our way of speech.

“You know“:
Is a Fraze that must be added in the beginning of a sentence, or at the end, or just in the middle... You got the idea...

“I'm so sure!“:
I believe it could be... Maybe.... Let's talk about it...

“HABIBI FALAFEL“:
§!“$=(!%;:_*

“Believe me“ follows by an emotional expression like I love him:
I'm just kidding

“It's going to be snowing tomorrow“
German didn't understand a singe thing of the Arabic language that was spoken around

“One Two Seven!“
One Two Three

So!

We also had a meeting in which we had brought some disagreements into a solution. At list for some time. We had talk about the way we present the situation in the middle east to a class, or in the future to other people, while we satisfy each others opinions.

Now...

Afterwords at the after noon we had a guest from Syria!! Amira's friend.
That was an exiting meeting because I couldn't have met him in Israel and neither can Amira, and the same goes for him. So we couldn't have met each other in our own countries.

This was happening while the others where doing some acrobatics. And afterwords in the evening at 6 o'clock the conference began with a dinner. The dinner was followed by a lecture by Mr. Valentin Vollmer from IDEM. He was speaking about the stage where humanity is standing in it's progress, and compared it with the different stages of individual growth (e.x. childhood, youth etc.).

As individuals grow, they at first shaped by outer influences (religion, social status, etc.). One can pomper this state with the state of childhood. At our time those outer influences are shading off, and humanity is at it's youth.

We always meet those outer influences throught other human beings. And they are gone away all that stairs is our own individuality, our own I.

He also spoke about the way we think of ideas. He mentioned how one can think of ideas as thoughts that are coming from the future. For example when the organisers of this conference thought of it for the first time it was two and a half years ago. So from this example we can see that the idea existed already in the future, or wanted be born in reality. He offered us o think of ideas in this way.

As you can see we where very impressed from the lecture and wrote about it in great details!!!

written by Gadi and the help of Charlotte and Amira

friday in Botrop

A friday in Botrop

I never thought that I will ever visit Botrop, but the reason to come to this town was good. Alia and her mother Hannan, her father...and her sisters Farah,...,...,...and her brothers:....and Jamil and Farah´s husband....are living there.
Alia´s parents where born in Lebanon and raised there and immigrated to Gremany 21 years ago. After the family Hamad visited us in my mothers home allready we where now hosted from them like kings. We had a big delicious palestinian meal and our guys where eating a lot as they where so happy to get arabic food like at home again.
We had a lot of conversations under each other and exchanged about, life in Germany Palestine, Israel and Lebanon.
So wonderful to be reseved by you my friends! Thank you so much!

8 hours in the car!!!!!

As it was the last day for us in the school, we cleaned everything and kept the place very tidy and clean. We had closing session where we shared our opinions at what we experienced so far and other many things. Then we danced our last dabka dancing in front of the main gate of the school and said goodbye to Fiona, Claudius and Rachel, as they didn't come with us to the other town, Paderborn. We had three cars; we put in them food, the bags and ourselves. You should see how we looked, FULL cars. We started our journey at 2 and we had 3 stops in the way because it was too much for us to handle, on the high way with hot weather. Finally we arrived at Schloss Hamborn, Paderborn at 10:30 P.M. of corse after this long tiring day we had our Arabic supper, Fried eggs with oil and Zatar, and then we went to sleep.
This picture was taken from the car tha I was in with Katharine and Majd. and these two cars are Jacob's and Annie's having a race on the high ways of Germany.....(Just kidding, it was just annie overtaking jacob)