Dear Friends,
We write to you from Palestine at this very difficult time. We the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees (UPWC) are in desperate need of your help and your kindness. Our lives have been severely limited by the Israeli occupation. It seems that they do everything they can to make life impossible.
Everything is disrupted. Many places of work have been damaged by demolition and people have lost their jobs. The ever growing numbers of closure points make movement to and from work very slow. Food is not reaching our communities in sufficient quantities. Parents are unable to feed their children. Some schools are occupied by the Israeli military.
Our programs serve children and women. Things are always worst of all for the children. They suffer from malnutrition, from nightmares, and in some areas from retardation due to malnutrition of mothers during pregnancy.
The UPWC runs approximately 33 daycare centers and kindergartens serving over 1,500 children. They are now in danger of not being able to remain open because of an unusual emergency situation. Our funds are depleted.
Up till now and for the last 6 years we have been able to cover deficits by donations, but this year and especially these two months the regular donors respond to our requests saying that they are more interested in projects that deal elections process. But, no one is even sure that elections will indeed take place. We all wonder how we can empower a woman to share in elections while we take away her ability to feed her children. We wonder why the policies of the USA to stimulate democratic reform neglect children's basic rights to security and education.
Many families have lost their breadwinners. Some are unemployed, some in jail, some handicapped by the ongoing violence, and some are underemployed. Those who work across the green line in Israel do not earn enough to feed their families. In many cases, the women have had to find work as well. In some cases they are the only bread winners.
We, the Union of Palestinian women's Committees, a volunteer non-profit grass-roots organization, employ 50 women as teachers in our daycare centers and kindergartens. All of them are the only breadwinners in their families and have no other avenue of employment. We are unable to pay them for the coming month. This is devastating for them and for their children. Our women are very poor, but they are very much respected by their communities, and most of them, after teaching the children in the morning, spend the afternoon as volunteers helping to empower women in small, poor and neglected villages and refugee camps.
The stories of the women who work with UPWC are heart breaking. We have three teachers in Beit Foureek (Nablus area) who have 6 relatives including husbands who have been killed during the last year, and what is more disturbing, they have 22 members of their family who have been put in prison by the Israelis on flimsy pretenses.
Our women deal with a lot of pressure and are heroic.
We have a very special program for the children. We teach them some important basics. We try to give them a meal and help them find some safety and comfort. We want kindergartens to be a safe haven and a place of sunshine for them. We are suffering over the thought of having that bit of safety and peace taken away from them. We fight hard to maintain our capacity when we need to double and triple in size to serve the unimaginable needs arising from the violence of occupation.
We have been unable to supply the basic materials for our schools. We have a special curriculum embodied in a program that we created. But right now we are unable to pay for new copies of these books which see heavy use in our schools.
We try to generate funds for some of our expenses by charging fees for our daycare and kindergartens. These are symbolic and equal to 5 to 10 US dollars. But when we ask the parents, we find that on the next day many children do not come back to school. So we send the teacher who is from the same village to bring them back because our Priority is the child not the money. Khiam, for example, is the mother of three of our children. Her husband is a worker who lost his job because of the Apartheid Wall divided him from his job. They cannot afford the school fees. Khiam is too pained to say that she can't pay the fees and thus keeps the children at home until we send someone to fetch them. When we have them back, their smiles at our schools are as bright as sunshine.
These fees, in any case, merely pay for 10% of our book costs which amount to $8,000 annually for all our daycare and kindergartens. We used to take this money from the leftovers of projects held by donors in Palestine like CRS or UNDP. It used to help us to decrease our deficits. But now, even this money has dried up.
An emergency situation exists and the Apartheid wall is strangling us every day a bit more. Mrs. Nadia T. director of our school program is unable to travel properly between towns and villages to examine the schools. Her work has been slowed immensely and made very frustrating, yet she persists.
Please, would your organization consider sending an emergency donation so that we might help the most helpless of society in a situation of war and occupation?
Our bank account is at the The international Bank of Palestine, Albireh branch, under the name of the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees, Account number 114001.
Maha Nassar
Chairperson of Union of Palestinian Women's Committees, UPWC
Al Bireh (Ramallah) Palestine, P.O. Box: 4112
telefax.: 00972-2-2987252
e-mail: mahanassar@yahoo.com / upwc@palnet.com
web-site: www.upwc.org
http://www.newjerseysolidarity.org/
(973)954-2521
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