Education Palestine Project #2179

Abir's Garden Playgrounds for a Safe Place to Grow

by Rebuilding Alliance

Project Report | Mar 16, 2016
A safe place to play in village surrounded by danger

By Kamila Kaminska-Palarczyk and Andrea Walker | Data & Web Associates, Social Media Outreach Team

The freedom of the first swingset in Ein Yanoun

Dear Friends;

At the end of February, Combatants for Peace gathered in the tiny West Bank village of Ein Yanun to build Phase One of the Abir's Garden Playground. Located just east of Nablus, this is now the 3rd playground Combatants for Peace and Rebuilding Alliance have brought into reality in memory of Abir Aramin in the West Bank (more on Abir's story below). Fingers crossed for many more Abir's Gardens, many more Safe Places to Grow, in the years to come!

The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. The primary infrastructure for a playground includes a slide, swings, and monkey bars. You have many questions, and we excitedly bring you answers.

After a 2 year pause in the project, things are going forward. This village, in an idyllic valley with olive trees and wheat fields, is surrounded by Israeli settlements on every hill. The settlers are armed and very dangerous — it was with the help of peace groups including Combatants for Peace and the Ecumenical Accompaniment Team that lives as witnesses in the village that the Ein Yanoun villagers were able to return home to live in their homes again.
Our playground is a community effort: children and adults, Palestinians and Israelis, villagers and former fighters now working for peace and justice, all gathered together recently to assemble the playsets in Yanoun.

Abir's parents, Bassam and Salwa, Abir's brother and her little nephew were there for the opening! Bassam wrote, “It was really amazing, very beautiful especially in [this] poor area…a place for kids to be kids…We have a lot to do to complete it.”

Maya, originally one of the project leads for Combatants for Peace, had a similar view, “It was a wonderful day yesterday in Yanun. As you can see in the pics and video, the children really helped painting and we all had a great time. We now try to plan forward the next step that will enable us to develop Abir's Garden playground a bit more. Lets all think together of directions and ideas."

We want to take a moment to describe how and why this whole project began:

Abir was leaving a candy store just next to her school with her sister and two friends in the Jerusalem suburb of Anata on January 16th, 2007. She never made it home to her family. On this day a single shot was fired from the back of an Israeli Border Police jeep that was patrolling outside the gates of the Anata Girls’ School. Abir was hit by a rubber-coated steel bullet and critically wounded. She was taken off life support after 3 days of struggling for her life. She was only 10 years old.

In January 2007, news of Abir’s death created a wellspring of emotion worldwide, in part because Abir’s father, Bassam, is a founding member of Combatants for Peace. Responses to an online condolence letter written by Women of a Certain Age and addressed to her family, came from 58 countries.

“As I was signing it, I knew that we had to do more,” said Donna Baranski-Walker, founder of Rebuilding Alliance. “My board asked me to contact the Aramin family. Her family wanted nothing for themselves — they wanted a way to help Abir’s friends, because her desk would now be empty at school.” Rebuilding Alliance, working with Women of a Certain Age, partnered with Combatants for Peace with the hope that the world would help us build playgrounds to give the children and their families with a safe place to play and grow — and so you have.

We still have work to do at the Ein Yanoun site: Combatants for Peace plans to build some more benches and playing facilities from old tires, and they want to finish painting and planting the flowerbeds. And then there's the community children's theatre ... these are important dreams to nurture, important plans to realize.

Tomorrow, Wednesday March 16th, is the next GlobalGiving Bonus Day. GlobalGiving will match your donation from 9 AM until 11:59 PM Eastern time (3pm Wed - 5:59am Thu Jerusalem time), all day, for donations up to $1000. Global Giving is granting a total of $75,000 and this time, every donation will be matched until the competition closes.

On Wednesday, please help Combatant for Peace finish the Abir's Garden Playground in Ein Yanun and build the next! Please give during this Bonus Day and ask 10 of your friends to give too!

Teamwork - Combatants for Peace install slide

Painting elegance!

C4P group building the playground in Yanoun

Teeter-totter play!

C4P group & Abir's family presenting new sign!

Links:

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Dec 30, 2015
Our biggest Abir's Garden playground ever

By Donna Baranski-Walker | Founder & Executive Director, Rebuilding Alliance

Everyone will come to help with Construction

This is just a short status report to bring you up to date. Mohamad Oweda, Palestinian Coordinator for Combatants for Peace called yesterday to update me on the project status. Combatants for Peace will be meeting this Saturday to set the schedule for the month ahead with completion expected by April, if all goes well.

"This will be the biggest Abir's Garden of all," said Mohamad Oweda. "The mayor gave us a full dunum." A dunum is 1000 sq.meters, a quarter of an acre.

"We will decide together what the day will be for all the Combatants for Peace to be there. We will be purchasing the semi-finished play equipment from a professional, then working with all the village and our CfP members to finish and install."

I am forwarding them a prospectus for a Palestinian landscape architecture group that would be fun to work with - they've done some very creative playgrounds! Also, I'm inviting the Combatants for Peace to join in the Pinwheels for Peace program, with their own families and at their meetings in the villages.

Lastly, of note, the Israel side of Combatants for Peace is one of then non-governmental organizations being targeted in an anti-NGO bill designed by Israel's Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and other leaders of the settler Jewish Home and Likud parties. According to colleagues, "While the pretext for this bill is greater "transparency," what it really does is create a series of new hoops that organizations that criticize Israeli government policy must now jump through or face huge fines."

Thank you again for your support of this project and through it, your support of the important voices of Combatants for Peace and the Villagers in Ein Yanoun.

Sincerely,

Donna

Links:

Here is Combatants for Peace' new website

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Jul 7, 2015
If this were easy we'd be doing something else

By Donna Baranski-Walker | Founder & Executive Director, Rebuilding Alliance

Ein Yanoun, with settlements on hillsides

Dear Friends,

Our Combatants for Peace partners sought to build this third Abir's Garden Playground in a village that is at such high risk of settler violence that internationals from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) moved in to the village to live there so that Palestinian families would be safe. That's why Combatants for Peace are there too. I thought that the Itamar settlement was only on one hilltop but as we drove there in April, Abu Mohammed, a coordinator for Combatants for Peace, pointed out the settlement buildings and outposts on all the hilltops around the village. Afterwards, as we were driving out of the village, the settlement's private security car came down into Ein Yanoun to inspect the playground space we had visited.

I wish I could tell you that this third Abir's Garden project is up and running, with happy children and families enjoying their new playground in all safety. However, this simple playground project is more difficult than the others in part because of the risks that the villagers face and in part because it is relatively challenging for Combatants for Peace volunteers to reach this site — only one road remains, the Israeli Army has closed the others.

Combatants for Peace reports that they continue to hold their commitment to build the playground despite their delays. Yusri, a member of Combatants for Peace, who was the project leader for the Abir’s Garden playground they build in the south, has now joined the team in the north to help move this project forward. They will all be meeting soon after Ramadan to plan next steps and will soon be in touch with the town of Agraba regarding the town's promise to install the new road to the site of the playground.

When my team and I visited in April, we drove along a road through the olive orchards some with red poppies growing in the grass. I was with Ayat, Rebuilding Alliance's Communications and Outreach Officer, and also Sue, a member of my Rotary Club of Woodside Portola Valley who was visiting the Holy Land now that we finished our Rotary Birthing Center project. We picked-up snacks in Ramallah then drove to Nablus to meet Abu Mohammed who was very clear about using his truck instead of rental car to get there.

We drove through the town of Agraba then past the center of the little Ein Yanoun village to the new playground site where we parked and walked through a beautiful waist-deep wheat field, planted beneath the olive trees. Somehow, my camera battery failed in one of the most picturesque vistas in all of Palestine.

Some parts of the park and playground site were surrounded by a cement block wall, while in other parts the wall was made of tires stacked some 4ft high. There were tire walls in other areas of the village too. The playground walls will be painted with colors later as the playground takes shape. Abu Mohammed also decribed their plans to make it a special playground garden and have an opening ceremony when it’s finished.

But why use tires? After all, there is no auto repair underway in the village. Abu Mohammed explained that there are wild pigs that damage crops and can be very dangerous. Rumor has it that they were released by settlers, but it is likely that the native wild boar population just grew as they now have no natural predators. See the article by Nora Lester Murad for more information about this.

Afterward our visit to the playground site, we went back to the center of the village to visit the members of the EAPPI who are staying there to protect the village. Only one volunteer was home. She was really nervous about being outside with us. “I’ve got to put my yellow vest on so the settlers will see it,” she said.

The EAPPI volunteers walk around the village every morning and every evening in a team of two. They know the settlers are watching everything and they hope their walk will reinforce their important protective presence. It was good to connect them with Combatants for Peace (CFP) and our Abir’s Garden project.

Despite the challenges, we are all doing our best to make this Abir’s Garden take shape as truly a safe place to grow. Thank you again for your trust in Combatants for Peace and in Rebuilding Alliance. I’ll post CFP's construction schedule as soon as I receive it.

Sincerely,
Donna

Getting directions to reach the playground site

Abu Mohammed from Combatants for Peace drove us

Getting snacks in Ramallah for the long ride there

The old olive trees with wheat growing beneath

Another view of Ein Yanoun

Links:

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