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100.000 Euro for aid projects in Iraq and Palestine
In the second year of its activity of supporting projects with musical education for children in war and crisis zones, the Stiftung Hoffnung13 based in Marburg will subsidise a total of three projects with a total of 100,000 Euro:
Musical training at the Ibda’a School of the Arts in East Jerusalem.
In September 2017, the Ibda’a School of the Arts opened in a district of East Jerusalem. It is the first school of its kind in Jerusalem and the only one in Israel to focus its programmes specifically on the Arab sector. The basic principle of the school is that through creative self-expression through music, art and film, students find a way to recognize their strengths, deal with possible traumas and create opportunities for positive development for themselves and society.
In this institution 142 students can currently discover and develop their own talents and benefit from the therapeutic effects of music. The Ibda’a School therefore places a special emphasis on musical education. For the coming school year 2019/20 there will be courses in the subjects (classical and modern) music, plastic arts and theatre/film. In cooperation with the Jerusalem Foundation, our foundation is financing costs for musical education in individual lessons and orchestra, workshops and performances inside and outside East Jerusalem.
Training of music therapists in the refugee camp Debaga/Iraq
After a successful pilot project of Terre des Hommes financed by us in 2018, our foundation will once again contribute to offering children and young people the opportunity to learn a musical instrument or to sing and make music in pedagogically guided groups in this huge refugee camp (currently 40,000 people live there in tents). The training of the necessary social workers in the camp will be provided by well-known musicians from Iraq, Syria and Germany in several course sections 2019/20, who will then give a concert together with the social workers and children of the camp as a gift for the many thousands of inhabitants of the camp.
The selected therapists will receive targeted training in psycho-social care (PSS) activities over a period of three years. They are qualified and supervised by trained psychologists and pedagogues.
The basic pedagogical understanding, necessary for specific social activities, is imparted over a longer period of time. The funded project docks on to this work and makes use of synergies. In the preliminary projects it was found that methods of music pedagogy proved to be very effective. This is particularly true with regard to the emotional stabilisation of young people (in some cases also radicalised young people) and their willingness to engage in therapy processes and peace education activities.
Dima Orsho, a Syrian singer living in the USA, Kinan Azmeh, a clarinettist also from Damascus living in the USA and the German accordionist Manfred Leuchter are three already established musicians. There will be a total of four. All three musicians are familiar with both Arab and Western value systems and have established themselves as ambassadors in the connection of both worlds and are recognized (also by Iraqi government authorities). They have many years of experience in conducting music workshops for marginalized children and young people, especially in the Arab world.
Within the framework of the method training, various drums and singing are mainly used in order to have a stronger effect on body awareness and breathing. Children and adolescents who already play guitar, flutes or other instruments are integrated in a supportive way and advised by the musicians.
MAKAN – Children Play Therapy Initiative in Palestine
The MAKAN – Children Play Therapy Initiative project has been on the road in Palestine since spring with music educator Joline Shamieh Khader and, at times, dancer Mohan C. Thomas from Essen. They move from place to place in the West Bank, first Bethlehem, Hebron and Jericho, and spontaneously organise workshops with children and young people in cooperation with schools, summer camps, orphanages and Bedouin communities. They start with a read story and the children can develop their own interpretations of the story and its progress with drawing, forms, music and dance. (see Joline Shamieh Khader’s description in the appendix). Hoffnung13 hopes to be able to finance this successful pilot project again next year.
