Cultural tours organized by Organization “Palestinian Vision” and “Al Ta’won” NGO’s

These two local organizations have to revive the abandoned and marginalized Palestinian villages in order to promote the Palestinian national identity and to raise awareness for the emerging generations of its cultural and historical heritage. These cultural tours focus on 300 Palestinian youth, from Jerusalem and west bank cities, who participate in “Bridge Palestine project”, which is implemented to provide an educational opportunities for tenth grade students in the Palestinian community and to confer them a training program course for a period of 3 years.

This training program includes a series of intensive courses that prepares the students to enter their highest education in different universities around the world. Among the workshops on critical and creative thinking, students learned also how to build their language and their life skills abilities and other skills such as in science and technology, innovation, music, sports or literature. According to this experience, they will enable them to join an international universities of highest level.

As a part of this training project, these cultural tours were carried out, respectively, to four abandoned and marginalized Palestinian villages; such as Kader al-Sheikh in Jerusalem, the village of Batir in Bethlehem, the Hashemite Mountains and Burqin Church in Jenin, and the village of Aboud west of Ramallah. According to these four tours, the Palestinian youth learned about historical and ancient religious sites of each village where they learned about their environmental sources, water and agricultural.

The Palestinian youth participated also in a recreational activities such as the preparation of Palestinian food which attempt to revive their heritage cuisine. Also, they participated in a competition of historical, cultural and political knowledge that concerns these 4 villages.

According to Ahmad Hamo, the responsible of this project “The objective of these activities are cultural, historical and political which the Palestinian youth should retain in their minds and daily life”