wfn.org | Job training helps build healthy Palestinian society

["NewsDesk" <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

Oct. 15, 2003 News media contact: Tim Tanton7(615)742-54707Nashville, Tenn. 
ALL-RM{492}

NOTE: This story may be used as a sidebar to UMNS story #490. Photos are
available.

By Paul Jeffrey*

JERUSALEM (UMNS)-Ala Kleibo recently upgraded his skills as an auto mechanic,
and his customers claim he's a whiz at keeping their cars in top shape.

Yet Kleibo spends hours sitting in his shop in Bir Nabala drinking
cardamom-laced coffee, his business suffering from the Israeli occupation of
his West Bank town.

"There are checkpoints everywhere, so it takes forever to drive from one
place to another," he explains. "I have lots of customers in Beit Hanina,
which is less than five minutes away. But for the last two years it takes two
hours each way to drive through the checkpoints."

Earlier this year, the 40-year-old Palestinian mechanic participated in a
three-month professional refresher course at the Lutheran World Federation's
Vocational Training Center in Beit Hanina.

Along with several other vocational training and income generation projects
in the occupied Palestinian territories, the VTC is supported by Action by
Churches Together, the worldwide network of churches and church-related
agencies responding to emergencies. The United Methodist Committee on Relief
is an active member of ACT.

Kleibo's plight illustrates the difficulties of working in an economy under
siege, where a third of all workers are unemployed, a figure that more than
doubles in some hard-hit communities.

Just up the street from Kleibo's auto shop, Musallam Herbawi runs a carpentry
shop. Herbawi used to have dozens of Israeli customers who appreciated the
quality cabinets that he and his seven workers produced. Then came the road
closures and curfews, and his business has dropped in half. He has only three
workers now.

One is 19-year-old Abed Al-Wahab Samody, who last year graduated from a
two-year carpentry course at the vocational center. Herbawi is impressed with
the novice worker, and with his training. "He's still young, but he has
learned well. They did a good job teaching him. They gave him the keys to
learn more and become a true professional," Herbawi says.

The Vocational Training Center was founded in 1952 to help Palestinian
farmers who had lost their land to the newly formed state of Israel make the
transition to life as industrial workers. Over the decades, it has trained
thousands of carpenters, metal workers, plumbers and auto mechanics. It has
also continued to evolve, adding electronic telecommunications repair and
maintenance to the curriculum three years ago.

With electronics, the training center added women students for the first
time. Rawa' Rabah is one of them. A 2002 graduate, the 19-year-old works
today in a mobile phone shop in Ramallah. She knows her stuff, and prefers to
sit at a bench in the back room fixing tiny circuit boards but spends most of
her workdays behind the counter in the store, demonstrating phones to
prospective customers.

"Although I'd prefer to be in back fixing things, I can live with marketing,"
Rabah says. "I enjoy working with people, and at least I have a job. That's
more than a lot of people have these days."

Such versatility is necessary in a challenging work environment, according to
Randa Hilal Nassar, the training center's director.

"These students were trained in both the repair and the marketing of
electronic equipment," she explains. "Most businesses in Palestine are small
family businesses with less than five employees, so they look for people who
are versatile, who can handle maintenance, marketing, bookkeeping-the whole
range of skills necessary to make a business run well."

Many of the women students come to the training center from family
environments, where contact with men outside the family was mediated by
fathers or brothers, so for women students like Rabah, additional time is
spent in self-awareness and assertiveness training to help them survive in a
male-dominated business culture.

The Vocational Training Center's curriculum also focuses on helping the
school's 170 students develop attitudes and skills for building a functional
Palestinian civil society. "We've integrated into the curriculum the
experience of democratic relations, not just by talking to the students about
it but in the way we treat them," Nassar says.

Other ACT members working in the Palestinian territories also offer a variety
of vocational training and income generation programs. International Orthodox
Christian Charities, for example, trains women in beekeeping and other
agricultural production, as well as quilting and puppet making, in programs
throughout the West Bank. 

"Even in the worst circumstances, there is work to be done," says Nora Kort,
the country director of International Orthodox Christian Charities/ACT. "So
it's important for people to stand on their own two feet and create an
alternative economy."
# # #
*Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America who traveled to
the Palestinian territories as a field communicator for Action by Churches
Together.

 
 

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United Methodist News Service
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