Supporter: Albana Dwonch

Seventeen-year-old Mado Askri poses with his first-place certificate. On the right is his mother and on the left is Mira Bakry, Mercy Corps' youth program coordinator in Gaza. Photo: Mercy Corps

In my last post, I talked about how we managed to print photos in Jerusalem taken by Gaza youth for a special photo exhibit entitled "Recognizing Our Common Humanity."

We invited 100 students in the Gaza Strip, 15-21 years old, to help others see the world through their eyes through photographs. We posted the photos online and invited people to vote on them. And we also assembled a jury of four professional photographers in the U.S. to decide three winners.

On September 29, at an outdoor seaside restaurant in Gaza City, we held our award ceremony for this exhibition, which so many people were involved in and helped to make it a success.

As we announced the name of the first winner, a woman suddenly jumped from her chair while barely controlling a sort of a scream. We were all confused since the winner was a young boy, Mado Askari, 17 years old. And Mado himself, who could not believe that he had won the first prize, stood frozen at the end of the hall.

The woman ran quickly towards him and ignoring 100 people sitting all around, grabbed his hands and kissed them, then his face, then his hair. It was his mom! Everyone was cheering around, and everyone had teary eyes. There, for a moment, we all experienced live a true human moment. It is a moment that I will never forget.
 
Mado's winning photograph and the second- and third-place photos are below. (Both the professional jury and the online voters chose the same first-place winner.) To see all the photos, click here.

First prize: Mado Askri, "Hope for the future"

Second prize: Ikhlas Abu Roos, "Me and the sea"

Third prize: Nour Al Sosi, "Children teaching each other how to swim"

Read more ▸

For two days now, we've hand-carried photo frames from Israel's border to the Gaza Strip, walking through a long silent tunnel and crossing a high cement wall. We've gotten got ten frames into Gaza for the photo exhibition; 20 more to go.

As you watch these pictures, please try to live the real story of this photo exhibition: 100 students take pictures in Gaza, where quality printing and framing is nearly impossible. Two weeks ago, in a petite flash-disc we "smuggled" the raw pictures from Gaza to Jerusalem. After one week, we finally have beautiful photo prints in elegant thin silver frames. Our next puzzle to solve is how to get them back from Israel in Gaza with no mailing service and no transportation of goods either.

I tremble from the fear that the Israeli soldier who sits at the border will not allow the frames to enter into Gaza with me. As I expect, she (the soldier) is suspicious when she sees me with frames almost as tall as me, hanging on both my arms. I look more like a décor for the frames.

"What do you have in your bags?" asks the soldier.

"Picture frames," I answer.

"What kind of photos?" she says.

"Hmmmm...they attempt to capture those moments that make us all recognize our humanity in each other," I answer.

Pause.

"Open them, please," says the soldier.

I rip the seal off the frames, which are compressed together, and she gets a quick peek.

Pause. Phone call. Hebrew. Then English again.

"You can go," the soldier says.

With a deep breath, I am absolutely happy as I walk through. Ten frames are in Gaza now, with 20 more to go between tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Convinced that the frames will be there, students are assigning a place for each frame on the walls of the hall we rented for the exhibition. It starts on Saturday. I doubt we will get them there on time and express my frustration. One of them tells me quietly, "They will be there on Saturday."

I need to trust her. After all, this photo exhibition has a message: "Recognizing Our Common Humanity."

While we still struggle to get photos into Gaza, one by one, in less then 3 hours Mahmoud uploaded all of them online. Instantly the photos were available for people to see globally. Some, may call this fact ironic, but I call it heroic.

Here are the pictures. For more information on the contest, click here.

Read more ▸

It came to no surprise to those who know him that the evening after he joined a young couple in Holy Matrimony in Seattle, Father Bruno Segatta traded in his priestly vestments with a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, shoved a ticket into a half-empty backpack and set off toward a much different destination: the embattled Gaza Strip.

In between absolving and anointing, baptizing and marrying, this 66-year-old priest is above all committed to celebrating the most important emotion of all: unconditional love for his fellow human beings.

"Padre Bruno" is an Italian native who has practiced painting and art since earning his degree from Northridge University in 1982, mostly at Gonzaga University's campus in Florence. He has traveled the world around with his young students, teaching them not only about art but also about compassion and caring. Revenue from paintings sold on his website, http://www.brunoartforkids.com/, is donated to the Niambani House for Kids orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya.

Even on this trip, the use of art as a therapeutic tool is at the core of his mission: to teach Palestinian youth to use art as a tool for change. "I was offered an opportunity to help other human beings that are in dire need for hope and compassion in their life," explains Bruno. "I said yes to it."

Part of the "inclusivity fresco" painted by Palestinian students in Gaza under the direction of Italian painter and humanitarian Bruno Segatta. Photo: Albana Dwonch/Mercy Corps

Bruno came as a guest of Mercy Corps' Middle East youth exchange program, "Why Not?", or "Laysh la" in Arabic. The project connects 500 Palestinian youth in Gaza and the West Bank with their U.S. peers at high schools in the American Northwest. It's a way to build bridges between two often-misunderstood cultures and to give the Palestinian youth an outlet to creatively express the hardships of living amid daily violence and oppression.

His first stop: Jerusalem, where he bought canvasses, brushes, paints. Second stop: Eretz Terminal, the often-dangerous crossing that connects Gaza with Israel. He walked through the same long, windy, impersonal tunnel that connects the two checkpoints, and emerged on the other side of the tall cement wall. After introducing himself to the taxi driver with a quick "Ciao, I am Bruno," he rode to Mercy Corps' Gaza City office, gazing out at a surreal environment: destroyed buildings, old cars sputtering along on cooking oil and a worn-down look of a place under near-constant siege.

In addition to this athlete, Gaza students drew a fishermen fishing the sun out of the sea, a column of Palestinian houses topped with a beach umbrella, and an olive tree sprouting from ruins. Photo: Albana Dwonch/Mercy Corps

Bruno arrived with two concrete objectives: to give painting lessons to eight groups of Palestinian students (130 in all) and to help 100 students paint a wall 50 meters long and 2.5 meters high at Al Aqsa University on the theme of inclusivity.

He climbed up on a ladder and divided the wall on 100 squares. Than he instructed to his Palestinian students: think, paint and enjoy. There were few rules; one was that no black color be used. Each of the squares, Bruno explained, should be seen as windows that together would show "Gaza in colors."

At first, the scale of the painting seemed impossible. "But Bruno told them, 'We can do it together' — and they did it," said Nour Al Bassy, a project coordinator with Mercy Corps.

"I wanted all of them to be part of something that they themselves would create," he explained later. Slowly, under a sweltering sun, pictures, images and colors started to emerge.

Most of the images, unsurprisingly, were centered on the separation wall. A horse jumping over the wall was the mural's most obvious window. But other drawings included a fishermen fishing the sun out of the sea, a column of Palestinian houses topped with a beach umbrella, and an olive tree sprouting from ruins.

They were simple images, but also "creative, hopeful and original," said Father Bruno.

I've rarely seen teenagers so full of energy and mirth as these were during their 10 days with Father Bruno. Their respect for the man was obvious in their smiles and their words. "'Use your mind. Think before you paint.' I will never forget that from Bruno," said 17-year-old Mohammed.

While students carried away a picture of a hardworking and always-smiling Bruno, all covered in paint, Bruno put his mental picture of the students to paper. He gave each student a copy. At the bottom of each, he wrote: "I will never forget your beautiful faces."

Beautiful to him, of course, because they are all human.

For more information the Why Not? project, visit the GloPAL Lounge on the Global Citizen Corps website.

Read more ▸

Palestinian students from the youth group "Gaza Waves" hold up a banner with the name of Mercy Corps' Internet exchange program, "Why Not?" Photo: Mercy Corps

"What's happening in Gaza feels like a recurring nightmare that I and my friends have to endure again and again, because it never ends. I don't even care that the food at home might soon run out. Those who live in fear, have no appetite. I am depressed, hopeless and angry."

These are the words of Yusra, an 18-year-old girl from Gaza. In the days following Gaza's bloody street battles last week, she did not look out her window; she could not make herself read a book or listen to a CD or even to watch a movie. She just listened to the shootings, watched the news on TV and tried to appear strong and not scared for the sake of her parents.

"No one sleeps at night. No one knows what to do during the day. No one has anywhere to go."

For this teenager and her friends, the world looked a bit more hopeful a week before, when they chatted with American students from Portland as part of Mercy Corps' "Why Not?" youth Internet exchange project. It's designed as a way to build cross-cultural connections that reduce isolation, create more accurate perceptions and deepen each groups' understanding of the other's political and social realities. In the past month, teenagers affiliated with two Palestinian non-governmental organizations, the Sharek Youth Forum and the Save Youth Future Society, connected with three classrooms at two Portland high schools.

Just days before the Hamas takeover of Gaza, about a dozen teenagers in Gaza City chatted with five students from Portland's Trillium Charter High School using Skype's video chat feature. Previously, the students had written poems on the themes "I am from" and "Just because." Jana Potter, who manages Mercy Corps' Why Not? program, says the poems revealed the Palestinian students' commitment to the struggle for independence and the survival of their identity and cultural heritage, and the American students' struggles against racism, religious intolerance, gender inequality, divorce and sexual orientation.

Palestinian teens see their American counterparts on a large screen in a Gaza City youth club. Photo: Mercy Corps

The 90-minute conversation — which took place at 8 a.m. Portland time, 6 p.m. Gaza time — covered a wide range of topics, says Mercy Corps' Amie Wells, who was with the Portland teens in a Mercy Corps conference room. "They discussed gender constructs, race stereotypes, the 'American Dream,' violence in Gaza…. We even had a live sample of Palestinian rap music and laughed about cultural restrictions on long hair."

"It was clearly a transformative experience. The students were engaged, interested, even enthralled with their counterparts," Wells adds. "The best was to hear them laughing; it showed they were connecting at a level that made difference and distance irrelevant."

Yusra says she and her Palestinian peers came away from the conversation feeling like they'd made new friends. "There we were, sitting in front of a group of American teenagers who weren't looking at us as terrorists, who actually didn't think we were bad people, who were enjoying our fun stories and trying to understand our plight for independence. At the end of that videoconference we wanted another one, a longer one. We kept talking about the experience with our friends."

Today, in the wake of Gaza's bloody internecine conflict, they're talking about other things. This week I asked another youth participant, Mahmoud, 19, to describe what's going on in the streets of Gaza, he answered: "Madness." What are you feeling? I asked. "Shame, anger, fear."

"So many people are injured, so many are killed," he went on. "There are not enough ambulances to carry them; there is not enough medicine in the hospitals to treat them. Food is finishing and fuel cannot be found everywhere. We are living in fear."

"We are afraid that the international community will just abandon us for what we are causing to each other," he says. "We need to talk to those Americans who watch Gaza on TV and we need to tell them 'Don't believe in either side of the story. Don't believe in the reality as it's told by the political forces who hold us hostage. Believe in us!'"

Yusra is also worried — about what Hamas rule means for Gaza, and for women; about how the world will now view the Palestinian struggle. She returns to a question she posed to one of the American students, a boy named Chris, last week — "If you don't agree with your government's foreign policy, why don't you protest in the streets?" — and wonders how she'd answer that question herself.

"If we had another chance to talk, I would tell Chris that I now understand that it's also our responsibility as a Palestinian youth to protest against this massacre that our political parties are causing in our streets, at our expense, for their benefit. I would assure him that I am not the only one who thinks that violence is not always the only means to achieve a just peace. I would tell him that our way — talking to each other and educating each other about our lives and struggles — is the best way to fight for justice."

"I would have told him and the other students a lot of other things," she continues, "but what I would have asked most fervently from my American friends is, 'Please don't give up on us. We are not the ones who are killing each other in the streets. We are not the ones who have guns. This is not our battle, not our fight.'"

Read more ▸

It takes Mohammed six hours on muleback to reach the top of Mount Hermon, 9,200 feet above sea level from his Lebanese village in the valley. Accompanied only by his small herd of mules, he passes historic Greek temples, ancient caves rumored to contain gold and unexplained lights and the spot where Jesus was said to have transformed himself into a glowing spirit in front of his disciples.

Reaching the mountain's crest, which looks out over Lebanon, Syria and Israel, Mohammed sometimes gazes at the magnificent sunrise, the sublime sunset, or, on clear nights, the larger-than-life moon. Then he dispatches his mules in a whisper, slips on a snowsuit, goggles and a pair of skis, and slaloms back to his village.

To Mohammed, this is a routine trip that he's completed nearly every day for 15 years. But to a tourist, it's an adventure worth paying good money for.

That is why Mercy Corps is arranging treks up Mount Hermon with Mohammed and other mule-riding guides as escorts, one of several tourist attractions that is helping revive Southern Lebanon's economy. Other nearby sites that Mercy Corps is helping build and promote include a World War II museum housed in an underground British bunker, a restored Roman temple, a rare-bird reserve and a centuries-old ensemble of grain mills.

Each of these job-generating projects provides an economic boost to a region disproportionately hurt by the country's civil war and regional instability. Lebanon's tourism sector, once a dominant industry, is making steady gains overall. Tourist arrivals jumped 13 percent in the past year, according to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Mercy Corps is helping the people of South Lebanon, particularly rural residents, capitalize on the increasing number of visitors to their lands. Since November 2002, the agency has begun work on about a dozen tourist sites, created more than 30,000 person-days of employment and trained more than 2,000 people in basic business-development skills. Some participants already have used what they've learned to open bed-and-breakfasts, launch restaurants and lead cultural tours.

Mohammed, for example, is now one of six mule riders trained as tour guides by Mercy Corps' partner agency, Cyclamen, a private Lebanese eco-tour operator. Mercy Corps provided traditional saddles and other decorative adornments to help the mules fit their new role.

“I never thought my skills climbing the mountain could be used as an income generation possibility," says Mohammed. "I have climbed it for 15 years. I buy different items in the village and sell them to the soldiers that live at the military base on the top. But now, after Mercy Corps gave this opportunity for me to offer mule rides to interested visitors who want to enjoy what I see every day, I feel like I have much more to show and more people to talk to."

Last August, for example, a religious event celebrating the Gospel story of Jesus' transfiguration before the apostles Peter, James and John drew 200 tourists, who were led to the top of Mount Hermon by the mule-riding docents. As the group camped under a moonlit sky, Mohammed stared up at the great white orb as he had done so many times before. But this time, he was not alone.

Read more ▸