Dateline ACT

Palestinian Territories 0303

Job training helps build healthy Palestinian society

Jerusalem, September 17,2003--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. 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. So even if I’m the best mechanic, they’re going to look for someone closer. And many of my customers who live closer don’t have jobs, so they can’t even afford to drive their cars," Kleibo said.

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 (VTC) 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 (ACT) International, the world-wide network of churches and church-related agencies responding to emergencies.

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 of them is 19-year old Abed Al-Wahab Samody, who last year graduated from a two-year carpentry course at the VTC. 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 said.

The VTC 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 VTC 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 the back fixing things, I can live with marketing," Rabah said. "I enjoy working with people, and at least I have a job. That’s more than a lot of people have these days."

According to Randa Hilal Nassar, the VTC’s director, such versatility is necessary in a challenging work environment.

"These students were trained in both the repair and the marketing of electronic equipment. 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," Nassar said.

Many of the women students come to the VTC 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. "We have a social worker who works with the women students to help them stick to their career decision after they graduate, to help them defend their choice to work," Nassar said.

The VTC’s curriculum also focuses on helping the school’s 170 students develop attitudes and skills that will help build 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 said. "They have rights. No one is discriminated against because they are Muslim or Christian, or because they’re from the north or south. Some of them come from backgrounds where they experienced discrimination, but we teach them that everyone is equal here, that the only thing that makes us different is what we can achieve. We try to let them feel and live this experience of democracy."

Citing studies which show VTC graduates are more likely to find employment than other Palestinians, Nassar said part of the difference is the VTC’s focus on entrepreneurial skills. Instead of a final exam, students must craft a business model and present it to a committee as if they were requesting a bank loan. Trainers from Birzeit University helped the VTC develop simulation games that hone the students’ business development skills.

The VTC has also been affected by Israel’s tightening grip on the occupied territories. With assistance from ACT, the school has had to rapidly construct dormitories to house students who could no longer commute because of closed villages and Israeli military checkpoints. Even students who come from Ramallah, just 11 kilometers away, have to live at the school. Nassar said the school had only 23 boarding students before 2000. This year it has 80.

To construct new dormitory space, the school has had to creatively adapt the buildings it already owns, since Israeli authorities refuse to grant permits to construct new buildings.

Nassar said they may also have to soon construct dormitories for some staff, as Israeli authorities have closed many key roads in the area to Palestinians. Several VTC staff were arrested earlier this year for walking along a road newly designated for use only by Israelis.

Nassar is also studying the possibility of developing training centers in regions of the Palestinian territories where repeated closures have left communities isolated. The VTC plans on opening one pilot program near Hebron in early 2004, offering short-term intensive training courses in cooperation with local community groups.

Other ACT members working in the Palestinian territories also offer a variety of vocational training and income generation programs.

International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC), for example, trains women in beekeeping and other agricultural production, as well as quilting and puppet making, in programs throughout the West Bank.

According to Nora Kort, the country director of IOCC/ACT, Palestinians are natural entrepreneurs and often just need help with quality control and marketing. Despite the hardships of the Israeli occupation, Kort argued that Palestinians have to learn to survive economically.

"If they can’t make it economically, they have to depend on charity. Yet it’s hard for Palestinians to continue to depend on donations. Many have been doing it for 55 years. It becomes a disability. Even in the worst circumstances, there is work to be done. So it’s important for people to stand on their own two feet and create an alternative economy," Kort said.

One of the tasks of the Palestinian National Authority is to foment economic development and employment in areas it controls, a task that wouldn’t be easy even without the Israeli occupation. Yet what economic development it has sponsored tends to be macro projects, created from the top down, where the most vulnerable, according to Kort, "end up doing the slave labor." What IOCC and other ACT members are developing are projects from the bottom up, where the natural talents of ordinary Palestinians can contribute to creating a functioning, sound economy that will be ready to expand rapidly if the occupation ever ends.

Empowering those at the bottom of social hierarchies will also help build genuine democracy in the long run. IOCC/ACT has worked in the West Bank town of Beita for several years, helping women start income generation projects. The organizing was contagious, and when the town’s mayor refused to construct a road that many people in the area wanted, the women gathered signatures to push the project ahead. When they were rebuffed, they went on strike, denying sexual relations to their husbands until the men forced the mayor to go on "vacation" for two months while the town built the road.