Project Hope: Supporting—and Learning From—Community-Based Initiatives
| WRMEA Archives 2006-2010 - 2008 December |
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2008, page 57
Special Report
Project Hope: Supporting—and Learning From—Community-Based Initiatives
By Jane Adas
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ON VACATION from teaching English in Saudi Arabia, Canadian Jeremy Wildeman visited Palestine. While he was there, the second intifada broke out. He witnessed an Israeli tank using fog-producing infantry spray against Palestinian schoolgirls. This, he said, was a powerful motivator, which led to the 2003 founding of Project Hope (<www.projecthope.ps>), whose mission is to provide normal activities for young people living in an abnormal situation.
Wildeman described Project Hope as community-based—led by Palestinians in Palestine—with support from international volunteers. Hakim Sabah, director of the main office in Nablus, and his staff oversee projects in partnership with 21 local organizations, in the Old City and in Balata, Askar and Al-Ain refugee camps. These include English and French classes as well as art and drama therapy.
The role of international volunteers, Wildeman stressed, is to support local initiatives, to teach and assist Palestinians, but also to learn from each other. Recruiting volunteers is the easy part: Project Hope receives more applications via the Internet than it can accept. Jenny Gaiwyn in England is responsible for recruiting and interviewing potential volunteers.
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More difficult is Wildeman’s primary role as executive director: to secure funding from both international institutional grants and an individual donor base. He also networks to develop small, short-term joint projects with other organizations, such as Zaytoun Olive Oil and Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. Wildeman described his method as “open-source software,” meaning if somebody comes with a good idea, Project Hope tries to support it.
Laura Venditti had such an idea. The seed was sown about a decade ago, when she was a student at NYU. When she asked a friend why he was so kind to the crabby student in the wheelchair, her friend explained that the student was Palestinian. It was Venditti’s introduction to the issue. She married and built a career as a nurse in a critical cardiac care center in Long Island, but what she had learned stuck like a burr in her brain. Feeling she had to do something, she wrote to many NGOs offering her skills as a nurse. Only Project Hope responded. So in 2006 Venditti spent her vacation time as a clinical nursing instructor for third-year students at al Najah University in Nablus.
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During that time Venditti saw an urgent need for basic health education. In a medical emergency, people call for an ambulance. But Nablus, the West Bank’s biggest city, has only four ambulances—which can’t always make it through Israeli roadblocks. What, then, does one do when the ambulance does not come right away? What is the best way to carry a gunshot victim to safety? How does one treat traumatic wounds, or recognize the symptoms of heart attack or stroke—and how should one respond? What if a baby is choking? How can the risks of diabetes be lessened?
Venditti designed a comprehensive course to train Palestinians to teach basic first aid and healthy living initiatives. Wildeman recognized a good idea and in 2007 Venditti became coordinator for Project Hope’s medical program. In the first year the program reached 2,000 people and now has a backlog of requests for classes throughout the West Bank.
Venditti is about to make her fourth trip to Nablus, all on her vacation time. Each time she goes, she takes donated supplies including surgical gloves, first-aid manuals—and once an adolescent-sized CPR mannequin, which she packed in a large suitcase. Nervous about what Israeli authorities at the Allenby Bridge would make of a mannequin in a suitcase, Venditti couldn’t stop laughing. This behavior was so suspicious that Israeli soldiers detained her for hours, but did not open the suitcase. Venditti and the mannequin made it through.
Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York City metropolitan area.
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