"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon." - Tom Stoppard

My small moment of pride for the week is that my recent post on TYO's WISE program was republished in both the Christian Science Monitor and Nextbillion.net. Check out my small moment of journalistic success here:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2012/1031/Incubating-women-s-businesses-in-Palestine

http://nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3001

Done bragging now. I'll update about Eid vacation in Israel in the next day or two.

Incubating Women's Businesses in Palestine

The women in TYO's WISE program participate in a wide array of trainings,
 including Business English classes like this one.
Photo: Lila Wakili (Tomorrow's Youth Organization)

This post was written by me and originally published in Global Envision.

In Palestine, entrepreneurs are everywhere, but successful businesses are hard to come by.

The economic situation in Palestine is uniquely difficult, and aid agencies have stepped in to help maintain living wages as much as possible under the blockade imposed by Israel. In recent years, business development and entrepreneurship programs surfaced across the West Bank and Gaza, and suddenly there was an influx of people trying to start their own business to escape the crushing levels of unemployment.

However, many of the programs put in place lacked follow-through. Entrepreneurs were left to sink or swim on their own. “It was like walking them to a cliff,” explains Samin Malik, coordinator of Women’s Empowerment Programs at Tomorrow’s Youth Organization based in Nablus, Palestine. So TYO took a different approach--instead of just helping female entrepreneurs launch businesses, it helped promising new women-run businesses survive.

TYO’s Women’s Incubation Services for Entrepreneurs (WISE) brought back six businesses that had developed a foundation from their initial women’s entrepreneurship program--Fostering Women Entrepreneurs in Nablus, and recruited nine additional female entrepreneurs by running advertisements in local newspapers, radio and on Facebook. The requirements were simple--businesses had to have a foundation or business plan already completed, and had to be based in the northern West Bank.

Candidates who responded to ads underwent two rounds of interviews, designed not only to determine the entrepreneur's eligibility for the program, but also to assess her strengths and needs moving forward. Partnering with the Small Enterprise Center, TYO sent their final 15 candidates to one-on-one coaching early in the process in order to set their women up for targeted support and success. Additionally, the year-long incubation project will provide marketing, access to capital and financial growth trainings, as well as business English and social media trainings facilitated by last year’s Palestinian TechWomen delegation.

When planning for an incubation center, TYO kept in mind that the conservative culture in Palestine often limits businesswomen’s opportunities to participate in meetings, classes, conferences and other development programs. Furthermore, the psychosocial environment at times leaves women discouraged when they do not see immediate growth or results in their efforts to propel their businesses forward. By planning programming in the mornings and weekends, TYO is able to work around many of the restrictions on women’s mobility. Not only that, but establishing the TYO center in Nablus as the base for WISE, they are able to fill a gap by being the only business incubation center in the northern West Bank geared to women, and provide support to women who may not be able to travel all the way to Ramallah, where such programs are more common. By serving as a support system to the businesswomen, Samin and Inas Badawi--a local Palestinian--provide examples of female-to-female support that is uncommon in Palestine, and try to foster the same sense of encouragement between the women they work with.

It is this model of American-Palestinian cooperation that sets TYO’s WISE program apart from other entrepreneurship trainings in Palestine. Their model provides them with contacts and networking within Palestine, but also regionally and internationally because of the center’s connections with the U.S. State Department, the British-based Cherie Blair Foundation and U.S. organizations that support women's empowerment in the Middle East. While TYO is technically an American NGO, it is run largely by local staff like Inas and youth volunteers from An-Najah University. Due to its sustainable and holistic approach, TYO's incubation doesn’t just focus on building better businesses, but building a better community where women are integrated and have full participation in society.

Struggling businesses may currently be the rule in Palestine. But the 15 businesses in TYO’s Women’s Incubation Services for Entrepreneurs program are proving to be the exception.

Want to know more about the kids I'm working with?

Read profiles on a couple of them on TYO's blog: http://www.tomorrowsyouth.org/2012/10/intern-student-profiles-fall-2012/

“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.” - Banksy

One of my favorite Banksy paintings

We went to Jerusalem and Bethlehem last weekend, so we saw all of Banksy's graffiti on and around the West Bank barrier wall. The experience of seeing all of the resistance art was incredibly moving, and has definitely been one of the starkest and yet most inspiring things I've seen since I've been here.

A beautiful mural of an olive tree breaking
down the wall

Jerusalem included a trip to the US consulate to talk about the possibility of foreign service work, a tour of the old city, a view of al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock from a distance (though not from inside because it was Friday so people were praying inside), as well as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which is  the burial site for Jesus and the Wailing Wall. It was so interesting to see a city so incredibly steeped in religious history. One of the biggest things about just entering Jerusalem is that you have to enter through one of two checkpoints. One, Calendia checkpoint, is a walking checkpoint, which is usually a faster way to get through into Jerusalem. Because we went on a Friday though, and so many people wanted to go to al Aqsa to pray, we took a bus to the drive through checkpoint in order to enter the city, an option available to us as non-Palestinians and to Palestinians who have managed to obtain permits to go into Israel proper, but not without IDF soldiers boarding the bus to check permits or passports first.

Another great Banksy painting

After spending the night in a hostel in Jerusalem, we took a bus back to the checkpoint and went through a huge maze of a walking checkpoint into Bethlehem. In fact, we got lost and confused about which way to go to the point that the IDF soldiers manning the checkpoints were laughing at us. The main checkpoint into Bethlehem walks you along the West Bank barrier wall, giving us our first up close experience with it. Once inside the city, we met up with a cab driver who took us around to each of the Banksy paintings, various other very powerful street art pieces, to holy sites such as the birthplace of Jesus (The Church of Nativity) and the shepherd's field, identified since ancient times as where the shepherds saw the star of nativity, to souvenir shops run by his friends where we bartered deals, and even to his home where we met his family and were offered a delicious and hot meal cooked by his wife. Finally, we ended up at a Banksy shop in Bethlehem where we bought a few posters of our favorite pieces of art, and got the opportunity add our two cents and graffiti the wall ourselves. It was quite an experience, to say the least. The religious significance of the place takes a backseat when you see a giant wall erected through a city that should be considered holy. It's hard for anything to seem too holy when it's surrounded by something so wrong.

Seeing so much hope and so many words of love and peace and acceptance and resistance to oppression painted on such a symbol of segregation was incredibly powerful. My favorite was just a simple sentence, written in both Arabic and English-- "You are welcome in Palestine". It highlighted so many of the misconceptions Americans have about Palestinians, and with one sentence, was a very obvious extension of friendship.

Another Banksy painting- protester
throwing flowers

"You are welcome in Palestine"

I was also sick all through last weekend, and by the time we were heading home from Bethlehem, I no longer had a voice at all. We caught a public taxi home, but as the one with the most Arabic in our little group, I was useless to us or our driver as we sought to explain where we were going, where we were from and why we were living in Nablus. I kept trying to squeak out answers, but the cab driver just kept laughing and saying he couldn't understand a word I was saying. We did make it home though, and I was able to help my group through our own version of Arabic telephone, in which I squeaked a sentence to the person next to me, who repeated the sentence to the person sitting in front of her, who repeated it to the cab driver.

The narrow alleyways of Balata

On Sunday, we headed for a long awaited tour of Balata, the biggest refugee camp in Palestine. I think seeing the living conditions where our kids come from, especially when we see them every day in our center, was a really eye opening experience. The camp is one square kilometer, the same size it was when the UN rented the land right after the 1948 war, despite the fact that families have continued to grow and be raised within that space. Because of that, buildings have been erected so close to one another that in some areas it is hard to walk through. Since people can't move out of the one square kilometer allotted to them by the UN,   people continue to build upward rather than outward, meaning that buildings which were never structurally built to handle several floors are now several stories tall, and have been built out to the point that they touch with the buildings next to them. It is so impossible to move furniture through the alleyways of the camp that people are forced to demolish walls and pass their furniture through the walls of their neighbors and then rebuild, adding to the lack of structural support in the buildings in the camps.

Us adding our two cents to the wall-- "No one can
makeyou feel inferior without
your consent" - Eleanor Roosevelt

The thing that has been most sobering and most frustrating to me since arriving here has been the fact that even many Palestinians seem to see themselves as a symbol rather than as individuals, and people are viewed as part of a political strategy or endgame. The lack of action toward solving the refugee issue is based on a desire to not solve Israel's problem for them, which makes sense to me, but in the meantime people are left living in abject poverty and extremely unhealthy conditions.I get that the personal is political, but to me, people should always come first, not policies.

"Now that I have seen, I am responsible"

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it" - Henry David Thoreau

Man, do I ever hope that quote is true, because I sure have been busy the past few weeks. I plan on updating my blog about seeing DAM (a Palestinian hip hop group) play and about the rotation change in classes, inchallah sometime this week, but in the meantime, check out our post on Library Day and the International Day of Play for TYO's website.

And remember, if you haven't liked TYO's page on Facebook, please do so! (I'm trying to get the most likes of our intern group, so if you liked the page but are not friends with me on Facebook, please leave a comment to let me know!-- The intern who gets the most likes wins a prize! And I'm in second place so far!)

10 days left in the TYO "Like" Drive!

Anyone who hasn't liked TYO on Facebook, please do so now as a favor to me. For every "like" we get, $1 gets donated to support our programming. All of the amazing work that I'm getting to do here, I only get to do because this organization has such a strong internship program and such strong programming in general to support the women and children here in Nablus who need it the most.

Please help me return the favor to them by liking TYO on Facebook, and sharing this link with your friends and family: www.facebook.com/tomorrowsyouth

Thanks everyone!

"Well-behaved women rarely make history" - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

We have this stereotype in the West, that Muslim women, veiled women in particular, are voiceless and powerless, and while there is certainly a long way to go on the gender equality front here in Palestine, I just wanted to dedicate a post to the many strong, feminist, amazing, smart, funny women I have met here.

Palestinian women face substantial obstacles in gender equality-- girls are often married at ages we would consider sexual abuse in the US, legally as young as 15. Polygamy is also still legal, though not common practice, in Palestine. It is a written in clause in a marriage contract, which a woman can consent to or refuse to allow. Domestic violence is still incredibly high, and the social pressures on women to behave appropriately, especially in a community as tight-knit as this, is huge. Family sizes also average 8-10 people, unemployment is as high as 38% in some parts of Palestine and 1 in 4 men in Nablus has been arrested by the Israelis at some point in his life.

I don't know about you, but to me, any woman who can raise a family in those conditions is anything but powerless. The amount of strength it must take to get up and go through daily life here-- especially as a woman under those conditions, responsible for 6-8 kids who all need food, clothes and an education, not to mention a place to run and have fun-- is unimaginable.

Societal pressure is extremely high here for women to veil, which I do see as problematic. A girl as young as 10, one with a love of the color pink and all the glitz and glitter and fashion she can find, walked into my classroom on the last day of class last week wearing a (pink and glittery) hijab for the first time, refusing to answer the question of whether she is veiling because she wants to or her parents want her to. Wearing a veil isn't a problem and it definitely doesn't take away your personality or make you voiceless, but being forced to wear one (or disallowed from wearing one in countries like France and Turkey) is a problem.Women here are witty and smart, not voiceless people hidden behind a veil. The fact that Americans view Middle Eastern women that way is, I think, a failure in our own brand of feminism.

Feminism runs so much deeper than choosing to or not to veil. Women at our center are working to improve themselves, through everything from health and fitness to general English to Business English and Entrepreneurship training. Some of these women run businesses and went to college. Others are largely illiterate. But they all show up every day, determined to better opportunities for themselves and their children. And I don't think there's anything much more feminist than that.

But there is not one way to dress like a feminist or talk like a feminist or act like a feminist, and these women prove that to me every day.

***

I'm going to see the Palestinian hip hop group DAM, who raps about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, poverty and women's rights among other social issues, tomorrow. Check out their music here: