YMCA Graduation at Um Solomona

MCC workers were able to visit the village of Um Solomona with the YMCA, one of MCC's partners in Palestine Israel. The Women's Training Program offers 6 month training courses in rural villages to help educate participants about animal husbandry and care, crop production and farming, and economics and environment. We visited on the day of graduation and were able to take some photographs with some of the participants. Not wanting to merely photograph the women and not see them again, we returned a few weeks later in order to pass out some of the pictures we had taken. We didn't know the names of any of the women, but with the population of Um Solomona being less than 1,000 people, we were confident we could show some pictures and ask around a bit. Sure enough, the first person we stopped and asked knew the woman in the first picture, and when we got closer to the house and asked a group of children which house we should go to, they were falling over themselves to help us find it.

We're always blessed when we're able to enter someone's home or village that doesn't usually have foreign guests, and on a personal level we almost always end up 'getting' more than we 'give'. These visits are our opportunity to be the face of MCC to people that otherwise wouldn't know about the work that people from home support.

YMCA WTP Graduation

Recognizing Partners

MCC works with a variety of partners here in Palestine Israel. Our three main areas of focus are peace work, community development, and relief. Some of our partners do incredibly interesting and effective work, and we want to recognize and highlight two of them in this post.

One of our partners, The Lajee Center, works in Aida refugee camp, which is located directly next to Bethlehem in the West Bank. Lajee means ‘refugee.’ The center works with children from Aida to help provide them with opportunities they normally wouldn’t have. Lajee has a library, computers, and provides an outlet for the children’s creativity through various art programs. One such program is their photography program. Through volunteers, the children are taught about photography and how this can be a means for expressing themselves and telling their stories. Recently one of the children from Lajee won first prize in the Al-Awda Awards festival in the category of ‘Photograph (photographer under 18)’. You can find MCC’s previous profile about the Lajee Center here.

Another of MCC’s partners is Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ), headed by Dr. Jad Isaac. ARIJ works in community development through water conservation and geopolitical research. MCC is proud to partner with ARIJ and would like to note that ARIJ was recently recognized as winning an award from UN-HABITAT and the Dubai Municipality in the category ‘Best Practices’ for ‘outstanding contribution towards improving the living environment.’ You can read about the project, ‘Wastewater Management on Household level in Palestine,’ here. Some of MCC’s work with ARIJ can be viewed here, where MCC and ARIJ helped the village of Nahalin build a wastewater treatment plant.

MCC is incredibly proud to be working with so many Israeli and Palestinian partners who do such meaningful work. These are just two examples of some of the many organizations MCC partners with that are working towards the realization of God’s Kingdom for the people that live here.

An Article about MCC Partner 'Zochrot'

An article about MCC partner Zochrot and some of the advocacy work they're doing in Israeli schools.