Project Hope brings together Internationals and Palestinians to teach Language classes, produce Drama and Art, and provide other important activities to the local community. Through alternatives to violence we are improving both the physical and mental health of our participants. Many of our programs are geared to the community at large with training courses providing skills to people that will improve their everyday lives.

Project Hope is working to improve the current situation Palestinian Women are facing. They are very active in running our programs, as well as participating in them. We believe Economic Stability is vital to Palestine's future and the everyday lives of its people. For this reason we are working on ways to help financiers of economic development and investment in Palestine. We are also very active in the Medical Field, aiming to improve basic medical knowledge within the community, and helping to acquire any necessary supplies. Project Hope works in the surgical field, for example organizing surgery for Palestinians in need.

Our involvement provides an alternative to a desperate and violent environment. Our focus on children provides Hope for the Future.

Though up and running for just a few months, we have numerous programs in medicine, education and recreation, affecting hundreds of people with dozens of international and Palestinian volunteers. We are made up of normal, everyday people, who are trying to make a difference, without the costs and overhead of large organizations.

Where we work - Nablus, Balata Refugee Camp, Askar Refugee Camp and Jayyous Village.

Artistic Expression in Palestine

The degree to which the Israeli occupation and ongoing military siege have engrained themselves into everyday life in the West Bank and Gaza strip represents a harrowing picture of what violence can do to young children. To children growing up in what can only effectively be described as a war zone, the physical realities of what happens on their doorstep and in the street outside their home clearly mean more than our own explanatory systems of ideological and economic reasoning. As most schools of thought concerning child psychology would agree, textual expression of everyday reality for children mean far less than visually emotive symbolism. The need for Palestinian children to express their fears, insecurities and anger from forces as life-governing as military occupation is evident in their ability to speak about subject matters that for children in the peaceful west would be beyond their grasp.

Working in the village of Jayyous in the West Bank which has had its fair share of violence and systematic destruction from outside of its social fabric and internal cohesion, ‘Project Hope’ volunteers gave children the opportunity to express themselves visually with art materials. The initial impetus was the hope that doing so may serve a number of purposes. Firstly to provide the children with a diversion from their everyday problems, secondly, so the children find ways to express their feelings about the world around them that they are unable to do through speech, and finally, with the idea in mind that we would show the art project internationally. This would educate that viewers and give the children an added incentive to really express themselves and a feeling of self-empowerment in knowing that for once in their lives someone would be listening to them.

The children were encouraged to paint a number of themes ranging from the home to the natural world, but their really triumphal pieces of work and those into which they put the most love and attention were those expressing the reality of occupation. Walls were an important feature of a lot of the children’s paintings as were similar themes of enclosure and imprisonment. A lot of the imagery that they produced was also clearly influenced very heavily by the imagery used by the resistance groups and Palestinian struggle for independence; the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the image of the armed resistance fighter, of sacrificial blood and the symbols of doves and olive branches. For these images to be in the mind of a ten year old child clearly says a lot about the emotive power of imagery in Palestinian society and the ubiquitous nature of such symbols from street graffiti to the Arab channels on television.

Giving the children of Jayyous the opportunity to express themselves has clearly been only a part of the greater motivating force of art in a society under siege and constantly needing to define itself in the face of this siege. Art here can be both unifying and motivating and very much an expressive part of national identity and consciousness. The fact that young children can produce work that all of their fellow schoolmates can relate to and find moving says a lot about the power of imagery over words. The impact of this work on a western audience is of course another subject but one would imagine that the motivating power of this work will reach out far beyond the people of Palestine.

European Volunteer by Areej Mohammed, 15

One of the volunteers was told by the artist that it is important that Palestine’s long-term problems are alleviated. The artist feels that their lives have been planned or ‘designed’ and that they are powerless to change their situation, being unable to travel and tell the world of their plight.