 Job training helps build healthy Palestinian society |
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by Paul Jeffrey |
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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.
Date posted: Oct 20, 2003 |
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