A Taste of Things to Come

Far more comics will be posted, along with explanations of them, but for now please enjoy this excellent one page comic by the talented Holly Meyer-Dymny depicting Rebecca's arrival in Nablus.

Grass Roots in Palestine

To friends, family, donors, students, teachers, and random Internet surfers, Welcome. Graphic Novels of Nablus is a project that Michael and Rebecca are organizing this summer in coordination with Project HOPE, a grassroots NGO in the West Bank of Palestine. In this course we seek to create awareness through the stories depicted by university students at An-Najah in Nablus and help refugee kids use graphic novels as a learning tool for English and Art, but also (and more importantly) as way of creatively processing their own experiences. The art, stories, and comics the students create will later be published in the West Bank and Canada, distributed for fundraising purposes. A more detailed and far more erudite description of our aim/manifesto written by Rebecca can be found at our Give Meaning website, which is the central forum for our fundraising initiatives. This blog will feature our thoughts on using comics as teaching tool, reflections on the media itself, our experiences of teaching, feelings about the conditions of the children living in and anything else that relates to the project of GNN (Graphic Novels of Nablus). The link to Rebecca’s personal blog is http://rebecca-summer2009.blogspot.com/, fel free to read.

FUNDRAISING: Give Meaning, as already mentioned, is a website devoted to the fundraising of our program. Project HOPE is a well operated NGO with major impact in the community, but not one with huge amounts of resources. The distribution of the students work is only one of the many fundraising initiatives we have, and the Give Meaning website provides a very useful hub for people to donate. If you support our project, and have anything you can feel you could give, we'd appreciate it enormously. We also have a facebook group, hopefully we'll get more people to join, and it will serve as a communication hub for when we've got something really special to share.

UPDATE: The link for the wonderful journal Yalla, which will be publishing selections of the children’s work along with a variety of articles, stories, poetry and essays about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Cultural Comparison's and Lesson Planning

Flying to Tel-Aviv today, the finalizing of class schedules for the next 7 weeks for our students will begin tomorrow as well as lesson planning to cover all stages of the program. Our first stage is to begin introducing graphic novel literature and the requirements for the final project, which are very flexible. Beyond the final graphic stories, our main initiative is to build relationships with the kids and university students. The processes of war and civil conflict can deeply disrupt the flow of cultural capital, threatening the historical continuation of their works of art. As a Canadian, I can compare this to the cultural materials of our aboriginal people. Without recent efforts to promote their works, there is a direct threat to the survival of the community's culture and a loss of such a rich and valuable wealth of knowledge and history. Help us continue these efforts witht the peacefull Palestinian community of Nablus. Donate to: http://www.givemeaning.com/project/nablusnovels

Nablus in 5 days

In just five days the 'Graphic Novels of Nablus' program, developed by Micheal Carens-Nedelsky and I will begin with two groups of children and adults. This program is multi-dimensional in its ability to teach a new genre of literature, artistic expression and an inventive way to assist teaching English as a second language. Currently busy lesson planning, I will arrive May 12th, while Micheal will begin his journey to join Project Hope early June. Upon completion of this project after building valuable relationships with the kids, we hope to publish a resource of graphic stories that tell the tale of resilience from a child's perspective. The course focuses on artistic technique, development of story boards and translation of vision to paper.