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.