[Press Release] Marginalised community defies poverty to build school

from World Vision

The community in the village of Walajeh in the West Bethlehem Area Development Programme (ADP) is determined to build a better school for its children. Incredibly, despite the widespread poverty, a relatively large sum of money was collected to build a modern school for the village's children, and with help from World Vision their dream has just become reality.

About 2,000 people live in the village that lies just southwest of Jerusalem. For decades, the local school was considered one of the best schools in the area and children from other villages came to study in it.

Local Council member Sh'aban Abu-Tim says that the local school was one of the first schools to introduce the teaching of English Language in the early 1940s. Nowadays however, the school building is too old and poses safety hazards to the 312 students studying there.

'The school building is comprised of three separate homes and the classrooms are very crowded. Three children sit at every desk. The classrooms are inadequately lit and badly ventilated. We hear complaints from the children all the time. So we decided to act and build a new school,' he notes.

The new school building contains four classrooms and a room for a computer lab, and efforts are underway to acquire a building permit for a second floor. For now, only 100 students in grades one to four have been transferred to the modern building, while the rest are still studying in the old school building, further uphill.

Nine-year-old Halimah is very happy now in the new school. She says: 'The classrooms are more spacious. I can concentrate better now because there is only one student next to me. In the old school, we used to share each desk with two other students."

The community's efforts started in the 1980s. The first attempt was frustrated by the Israeli army's Civil Administration unwillingness to grant them a building permit.

Nevertheless, the community started a rigorous fundraising campaign that collected over the years about US$ 250,000.

Every family in the village was required to pay more than US$ 350, which is a considerable sum of money for families in need especially these days when poverty in the village stands at more than 50 percent.

Despite these efforts, the community was able to gather 60 percent of the cost for building a new modern school. To the villages benefit, World Vision decided to expand the West Bethlehem ADP, and Walajeh was included in the development programme.

West Bethlehem ADP Programme Officer Lubna Matar says that the ADP was very impressed with the efforts the local community made and decided to commit US$60,000 to help them realize a long-awaited dream.

She adds: 'I have never seen such an active community. Usually, we ask the local communities we work with to cover around 15 percent of the cost of any development project, but the people in Walajeh were able to cover about 60 percent of the cost. That is really incredible and shows how much the community is interested in seeing its children studying in a proper school.'

In addition to World Vision, a local non-governmental organisation has agreed to pay the community about US$ 27,000.

The rest of the money came from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that has agreed to furnish the new school.

The ambitious community is now dreaming to build a playground and enlarge the school into a secondary one so that the villages' older children would not need to travel to the neighbouring town of Beit Jala for schooling.