NSWAS Week-by-Week

August 1 - September 4 1999

In this Issue

NSWAS Week by Week is back after a long summer break. Though summer is a quieter period in the village, quite a lot of information accumulated over this time, so in order not to make this edition too long, we will cover just the a few items this week, and fill in the gaps in next week?s edition.

Primary School: Summer and the Beginning of the School Year
The School for Peace
The Community: Update on the Auditorium, Kolping, a new baby

Children's Educational System

Back to School!

The School Year got off to a bright start with some 250 students enrolled in the kindergarten and Primary School. In the Primary School there are 210 ? a 20% increase over the previous year. These include 48 new students, who had to be selected out of 80 applicants. In order to accommodate the increased enrollment, we had to complete a new classroom. The new bright and airy classroom was constructed in such a way that it blends nicely into a corner of the existing school building. The School also absorbed six new teachers while, in the Kindergarten, Aishe Najjar was replaced during her sabbatical by Berna Salim, a member of the community who happens to be a kindergarten teacher of long standing. As mentioned previously, the School has a new directorship, with Boaz Kitain replacing Anwar Daoud as the administrative director of the school, and Diana Shaloufi ? Rizek replacing Boaz as the educational director.

Summer too was a busy time both for the new directors and the faculty as a whole. Eyas Shbeta taught a weeklong refresher course in Arabic for the Jewish teachers. This was followed by an advanced course for teachers (and School for Peace staff) who already had a better grounding in Arabic. Another summer event was the annual summer camp (mentioned in the last Week by Week).

From August 13-18, Bob Mark represented the School, with his daughter Naomi at a conference sponsored by the German chapter of UNESCO, to Beit Jalla in Palestine. This was the third of three such UNESCO conferences that brought together Palestinian, Jewish and German children and teachers of UNESCO affiliated schools to study various ways of possible cooperation. The NSWAS School is one of about twenty such schools in Israel.

In late August, the School hosted a seminar for teachers of the three currently functioning binational educational experiments in the country. This was a very exciting program, which will no doubt prove to be the first of many. A full report will shortly be posted on the web site. Then, for four days in the end of August, the teachers of the NSWAS School came together for a preparatory workshop of our own. Besides dealing with formalities of dealing with scheduling and classroom content, the teachers also took part in workshops intended to help reinforce the special qualities of our School. One was a half-day workshop on methods of dissipating violence and creating an atmosphere of peace, taught by Alon Shafrir of Tel Aviv. Alon has worked with several schools on non-violence and self-awareness issues. Another workshop, given by staff member (and NSWAS resident) Dafna Karta-Schwartz, used drama techniques to create scenarios that could arise in the classroom, to stimulate discussion by the teachers on how best to respond.

The School for Peace

During the summer, Nava Sonnenschein was installed as the new director of the School for Peace, replacing Rabah Halabi, who goes on to take charge of the nascent research center. The SFP directorship is a two-year term and alternates between a Jewish and a Palestinian member of the staff.

Summer events included three overseas delegations. Ahmad Hijazi accompanied three students from East Jerusalem to the Interface project in Cuenca, Spain, where they met with young people of many countries. Orly Friedman and Ryad Ghannem traveled with a group of seven Arabs and six Jews to the International Kolping Summer Camp in Germany. Anita Brandt and Hatem Daroushe went to the International Eco-Peace village in Cyprus to attend a youth action program for participants from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. Currently, Nava Sonnenschein is in Germany for the annual meeting of the German Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam.

On Friday, September 3, the second semester of the Facilitator Training Course got under way.

The Community

Auditorium

The Auditorium is nearing completion. In fact it already served as the venue for the opening day assembly of the Primary School. Still to be completed is the air-conditioning, and landscaping.

Kolping

As every year, we are happy to receive in the village a group of young volunteers from the Kolping Organization of Germany. The group have been doing a variety of jobs around the village during their stay, which is from August 21 to September 12

A New Baby

Congratulations to Nihaya and Anwar Daoud, on the birth of a new baby boy, Diyar, to join Sama and Said.