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Spenden, damit der Ballen ins Rollen kommt!
Der Spendenaufruf für den Sportplatz als pdf

Yallah … just do it!

It is a cold, wet and stormy day in January, a Saturday, and in Jerusalem – we hardly see anybody on the streets. Together with Deema, a member of PARC and a colleague in the project, I’m on my way to the Jahalin, to the “jabal”, the hill on which the wind blows even stronger and the rain sneaks through your clothes in an instant. We continue visiting the Jahalin-families, what we had already begun in December. Today we want to visit Mussah and his family. We meet his mother outside and she invites us for a cup of tea. Inside where it is warm, around a hot oven, there are already sitting Mussah’s father, Mussah, and two of his adult brothers. Little by little, quietly the room is filling and after a while I count 16 people sitting together, especially young men, who have a lot of questions. Also Youssef, one of Mussah’s cousins has come. He lives in Assariah, the neighboring Palestinian town, where he has opened a private kindergarten in the ground-floor of a house about two years ago. Children of the Jahalin families and children from Assariah go to this kindergarten: at the moment there are 54 little boys and girls. We talk about school and education and then there came up all he various stories and wishes: about unfinished school educations, about insufficient Arabic skills, about their work (if they have one) in Israeli companies, schools, and supermarkets in Maale Adumim, the Israeli settlement right next to the hill. They also want to learn Hebrew, speak, read and write, and English and nearly all of them want to know how to work with a computer. But here on the hill there are not enough rooms and most of all, there is no sufficient power supply. But all this shall not be an obstacle. Yallah, just do it! And then everything is done very easily and quickly:
Youssef offers his rooms in Assariah. There are already three used computers, provided by Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom, which only have to be installed. Khaldoun, a young Palestinian colleague from Jericho, is willing to teach some basic computer knowledge. Deema and Nitza, the Israeli colleague, offer Hebrew lessons.
Just one week later, on a Saturday again, we sit together in Youssef’s kindergarten and start with computer and Hebrew lessons, at the small tables and seats of the children, after kindergarten is over at noon. But also this condition should only be temporary: more or less by coincidence, we hear that there is a large storage room right next to the kindergarten, only in its rough state. So we sit together again and think, what would be necessary in order to set up a small “Study-Center” in this room. With some remaining project-funds and the energetic help of the young Jahalin men, we got down to work immediately and started to put this idea into action. Also there are two new computers (fundraising by the Cologne Women in Black), that actually had been intended for the small women center on the hill, but could not be put to use there yet, due to the lack of electricity. With the consent of the Cologne women, in the meantime the computers can be used in the study center. Besides, the idea is to use the study center for the Jahalin women and girls as well, and of course also for the interested young boys and adults from the hill.
So with no doubt, there is still much to do: we want to find more volunteers and teachers and to create a lively connection between our work on the hill and these new tasks with the Jahalin-Bedouins in Assariah.
Yallah… just do it!