My name is Sara D'Affifi and I have been working with Ventura Terra for two years and a half now.
I am an engineer, I am working for the municipality of Nassar.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I have been working for Nassar for two years and a half now.
I am Fokma Borussia, a children's land principle since 2011.
I am Radra Zella, I am an architect.
My name is Nad Kajal, I am the manager of the Canaan Institute.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
I am the director of the Canaan Institute of the New England.
We start since 1997 to put the alternative of a new education system and way for people.
To choose the tradition one, the old one, which we grow on and they still going on in the community and in the schools and and and.
Or the new way of free to choose, responsible to choose, active learning and non-violence education.
So we succeed to make this as a stream or as a way of dealing, a way of war with children, with teenagers and with youth in the Gaza Strip.
We already train around 800 kindergarten teachers from all Gaza Strip and they have the diploma of mid-term training course.
Actually education is important for Gaza as you know in general because we don't have farms, we don't have factories, we don't have oil or something like this.
We have only education.
Here in Oman Nasir in the past you don't find many people who can read or write or something like this.
Most of them they didn't.
But you know after 2011 and maybe all the people here noticed that everything changed.
Maybe only two or three girls went to the university, only from this 5000 person here in the village.
But now if you see most of the girls, most of them they go to the university.
So this is important for us because education is important for the person himself to be, you know, to respect himself more, to feel that there is a value.
This is the first thing.
Another thing it's important for the economical situation.
If they want to work they have to be educated people.
So at first it's a psychological thing.
Then the needs for the life to live in this world.
We try to do, you know, as mixing between active learning and industrial approach.
Because we know that the playing is important for the social learning.
The center is a great building.
It's a great place for people to see and inside it has two floors.
The ground floor consists of two laboratories for income generating, one for tailoring and the other one for carpentry.
And also we have a small showroom where we put the products that have been made by the women.
The second floor we have a social service place where we have two social workers working and they work to support the women and the children of the community.
And also we have a multi-purpose room where we do workshops, seminars and we also welcome other organizations that would like to give services for the community we are working in.
So they can come inside and we can collaborate together to give this service.
I was a trainer for this project to give the women the skills to be qualified in producing toys, wooden toys and fabric toys.
The training was about how to design and produce a good quality toys and educational toys for the children under 6 age.
It was a challenge how to promote the carpentry workshop to have women working as a carpenter.
Since many years they left the school and they forget all the mathematics about geometry.
And it was a challenge how they will count and use the measurements to do measures to read the drawings, to design or to implement some designs.
Now they have the ability to do many things to draw geometric shapes, to know about geometric shapes, to know how to design and how to implement the design.
They learn more about tools and techniques and now they can choose.
The 23 women who have been working with us have witnessed a lot of change and we have been lucky enough to actually see that change in our own eyes throughout the process that they have had.
So with our help and the help of the trainers who have been working with us, they managed to become women who are capable of making something.
And this skill that they have acquired have changed them from the inside as well.
So it's not that they only are able to make things but also they have changed as women.
They have become empowered, they have become strong and they are now independent and they are happy and proud of who they are and what they do.
There is a very big demand for our toys that is made of natural materials and no toxic, no paints for the wood for example, good fabrics like cotton and very smooth for babies, children and we are trying to study all the safety about it.
So in this project the women are given the role to make the toys, make the educational materials and put them in the best possible shape and to have them functioning and do everything that is needed from them.
And then it comes to us the role of marketing those products and it has not been an easy process because we needed to raise awareness in the community that they actually need this kind of toys because in the market everything you would find is some cheap materials made in China and made out of plastic wood which is not very safe for children.
Everyone, like upon seeing those products everyone knew that yes those exactly are the things that we were looking for to put in our kindergarten to give to our children and to use in the educational programs that we have.
So it's not an easy process but we keep doing it every day because we know that it's not just us who see the pure value of those products but everyone else will be able to see that because it's not only great educational materials but it has also been made with mothers with love and care because they were always thinking of the children themselves when making those.
So it was not a factory but it was loving hands of moms in that Bedouin community that made those things.
What we wanted from this project is that we wanted to create a center owned by those women who are confident enough that they can be the ones providing for their own and they can be the ones who have an active role in the society, in the community they are working in and in Kazakhstan as well.
They can be the ones making things and generating income and bringing that home and also investing some of that income in the center itself for that center to be self sustained and self sufficient.
What's different in our project is that we do not come with the mentality to distribute salaries or money. We came with the mentality that people have to earn that money.
The center is so important for the human and human asset because it's the only place for the woman and the human asset because the woman likes to come here to feel like a gate of freedom for them.
Here you can see each other and you can speak, you can laugh, you can speak about their problems, something debriefing to their feelings inside the center.
And I consider myself to be really, really lucky to have been with them in this process because to see women who have not been talking before, who have been really shy or scared to speak up their mind to come in the center
and become women who are really confident and happy to say exactly what goes in their mind and are happy to introduce themselves not as the mother of somebody or not as the wife of someone but as themselves.
So you would see them saying, my name is Fida, my name is Ghalia, not I am the mother of Ahmad or whatever.
And that's really important. That's really something that maybe not everyone can know what it means.
It might seem as something that's not that important but for them it's a huge thing and it's a huge change to introduce themselves as themselves, as who they are.
Their response was great because while they were busy opening up the center, they were busy opening up and then slowly let themselves go. Now for them it's a second home and it was what we wanted, we wanted to create a place where the development of community was the fundamental value.
And this place was born with Zaina and now when there will be the land of the children next to Zaina it will be the family core that will allow a development of a more complete community.
The process made us all even stronger and it made us all know exactly what it means to work in a team and what it takes to work in a team and to work in a place in an area like this one.
Working in Gaza is not like working anywhere else in the world because things are really changing fast and sometimes you cannot keep up with all the changes and how fast they are going.
But it was a learning process for all of us and I can speak for everyone I think when I say that we would not have changed this for anything else in the world.
It was one of the experiences that made us who we are now and it helped us become the people we are now, those strong independent individuals who are happy to work together as a team but who can also do well on their own.
Thank you.
