14 January 2008
Computer Center Builds Skills, Networks for Palestinian Youth
Students use Internet to pursue community service projects
Hebron, West Bank -- Palestinian girls wearing pressed headscarves and jeans stride beneath a grape arbor to enter a computer lab in downtown Hebron, where they sit beside boys at the keyboards. Clearly, this is no ordinary Internet cafe.
Some 60 Palestinian teenagers gather at this clubhouse nearly every day after school. It is one of six West Bank Internet learning centers run by Relief International Schools Online, with a grant from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, to promote Internet exchanges between Palestinian and American youth. There are sister centers in Jenin, Ramallah, Salfeet and Bethlehem, and another opening soon in Nablus. More than 350 teachers and 3,000 students have participated in this innovative program.
Omar Dahman, information technology engineer for the Center of Excellence in Hebron, gives pointers on Web site design, writing code and Photoshop techniques while groups of students surf the Web for information and build networks of online friends with whom they develop community outreach projects.
Students at the center, who range in age from 14 to 22, are keen to connect to other Palestinian students in the West Bank who rarely are allowed to cross security barriers. Many of their online friends also come from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Britain, Egypt, Jordan, Tajikistan and the United States.
Hebron teens catch on quickly to American slang, and one 16-year-old said his new onscreen moniker will be “Ryan Hummer” -- just because it “sounds so awesome.” Chatting with students in Virginia and Maryland has piqued his interest in volunteerism, and he recently joined a local environmental group, Youth for Change.
Local teachers marvel at how quickly teenagers improve their skills through peer-teaching online with American students.
“Sometimes my students are better than me,” laughed Ola Shawer, a female instructor who ensures that girls feel free to participate as equals in a global civic education platform. “Every month, new people arrive, and we all have a chance to share our opinions and our talents.”
This is one of the few places in Hebron that Arab parents feel comfortable sending boys and girls to learn together under staff supervision. “My father accepts that it’s the best way to improve my English and skills on the computer,” said Diana Sharif, a veiled 17-year-old.
Gathering and comparing complex data and arriving at informed opinions are crucial skills that can be honed through information technology. Instructors encourage students to undertake individual projects on complex topics like climate change and the right to food. Lubna Taha, inspired in part by frank discussions with American girls on the cyber-network, devised an online workshop about the perils of early marriage for teenage wives.
“For me, it was the first time I had even considered this as an issue,” admitted Nabeel Kasrawi, 17, a student actor who participated in her project. “I thought it was just the bad luck of some girls. Now, I get how early marriage isolates brides and I am against it.”
With one in four Palestinians currently out of work here, young people are vulnerable to despair about their future, and sometimes fall prey to radical ideologies or violence. Hebron is a particularly volatile city -- part ghost town and part bustling downtown, flanked by jittery no-go zones separating Palestinians from right-wing Jewish settlers.
But frustration can be channeled into positive action, insisted Naser al-Ardah, Relief International's program officer for the Palestinian Territories. His aim is to empower women and youth through computer skills, and to use the Internet for vocational training, nonviolent action and conflict resolution.
“We should accept one another and our differences," commented Sharif, a student who sees computers as a way to sidestep confrontation. "Together we can achieve so much.”
"Pride in results helps overcome a victim mentality," al-Ardah observed, "and real changes can come about through activism."
One group of Hebron students went online to recruit volunteers to refurbish the Qurtuba school for girls after vandals lobbed firebombs into the schoolyard in late November 2007 and hacked at the doors with axes. On the Internet, the teens selected sturdy blooms to replace the trampled flower beds, and planned to remove scorched rubble and boulders blocking the paths to the classrooms.
Abed Almu'ty Yaghmour, a young computer club activist, sent an e-mail with an explanation of these renovation plans to a fellow student in Kabul, Afghanistan, using English, their only common language: “Peace is like a tree. If you take care of it, it will grow, but if you ignore it you will lose it.”
