
| Supporting our Christian brothers and sisters in the Holy Land | |
| Introduction | The Facts |
| Aboud Village | |
| More Information | What you can do |
| Diocesan Pilgrimages | |
| The Lord's Prayer in Arabic | |
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12 of our parishioners visited the Holy Land in 2003, and other groups from this and other local Catholic parishes have made numerous pilgrimages since then. There we met many people who are suffering greatly as a direct result of the political situation. It is easy to forget that many Arab families and communities are Christian, and that many have been so since the time of Christ himself. As well as raising our awareness of the suffering there and increasing our prayers for peace, the visit opened our eyes to poverty of an extent that tested our Christian hope. Many Christians are emigrating to get away from the increasing spiral of hopelessness. They feel abandoned by the Christians of the West and their cry is: “Please help us!” |
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Members of the groups who have
visited the Holy Land are very willing to come and speak to your club, society or
organisation. We see raising awareness of the situation as a vital part of
our response. Please
to make the necessary arrangements. |
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The Facts |
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Aboud Village |
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The village of Aboud is about 15kms from Ramallah on the West Bank. It is a Christian/Muslim village with a population of 2000. The Christian component consists of Orthodox and Latin (Catholic) communities living and working together. Food is very scarce and incomes for most families are severely limited.
School fees become less of a priority in these circumstances and so the education of the children – along with the future of the school – suffers. The lack of funds to pay teachers’, salaries or for equipment and maintenance leave the finances of the school in peril. A standing order of £20 p.c.m. will pay for a child to attend school for a year. There are 104 children attending the school, which has a staff of 15 teachers. The annual running cost of the school is $150,000. Presently 80 % of the children in the school are Christian and 20% are Muslim. Fr Aziz, the former Parish Priest of Aboud, estimates that there are about 200 children who are presently unable to attend the school as their parents are cannot find the money to pay the fees.
Fr Aziz says: “We are in great need. Many of our men are unemployed and their families suffer the consequences. I try to use any money we get not only to improve our lives and our village; but I use it to employ local men on any work we do. Your help and support is so vital to us. We are constantly 'locked in' by road blocks - only a few days ago many of our people did not arrive back in the village until after midnight due to being stopped at military checkpoints.” After our first contact with the village we felt as a parish that we should put our relationship on a firmer footing; as a consequence we have twinned our parish with the parish in Aboud. This twinning involves regular contact and visits, in February 2006 several members of our Youth Group made a visit to the Holy Land and stayed in Aboud for three days, staying with families, meeting the young people and spending some time in the school.
In July of the same year we hosted a visit of six young students and teachers from Aboud.
On our various visits we have listened carefully to the people who live in the village, to their concerns and needs. Whilst we cannot easily solve the political problems, we have made a huge difference to people’s lives by the small projects that we have involved ourselves in. We have raised over £3,500 to provide books for the school library.
Another project was to provide internet access for the school.
A third was to complete the building of a garden as a playground for the children of the village, both Christian and Moslem.
Our aim is to make life a little more bearable for people who live under very difficult circumstances. We are presently supporting a project that provides transport from the village to the secondary school in Ramallah. This is done by employing one of the taxi drivers in the village, and so not only do the students benefit but assistance is given to the local economy as well. The present difficulty for the villagers is the construction of the Israeli security wall. 35% of the village land has been forcibly taken to build this wall – even though Aboud lies 14km to the east of the 1967 border between Palestine and Israel. Thousands of olive trees – the main source of income for the villagers – have been uprooted, with devastating impact on their livelihoods. Despite appeals and pressure the illegal construction continues, cutting villagers off from their land and from the main water source for the village. We are exploring the next project, and Fr Paul will be visiting the village again in May 2008 with a group of parishioners. The link between our two parishes has given both communities a focus outside their normal horizons and made us aware of our belonging to an international Church. We also raise the awareness of the situation among our families and friends and on the political stage, believing that peace in that part of the world will have far-reaching positive effects on the lives of us all.
Here are some
images from Easter, 2006, in Aboudh. |
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More Information |
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The young people of Aboud have put together their own web site, which can be found at: www.hcsn.org/aboudyouth. This is still a 'work in progress', and a few of the internal links are either broken or lead to pages with Arabic text, but there is a great deal of local information on the site. A number of other Holy
Land-related links are to be found on our
Links page. |
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What you can do |
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