A school for all children, regardless of their and their families' cultural or religious backgrounds, as well as intercultural understanding through cooperation and encounters with Jewish initiatives - this has been the goal of the Hope Flowers School south of Bethlehem for more than 35 years. The Friends' emergency pedagogy team worked here for several days. The site, with its large school building and many rooms, is located on a hill directly opposite an Israeli settlement. Accordingly, the military is present and the atmosphere is noticeably tense for the team. The tension is due to the renewed escalation after the 7th of October 2023, which led to a complete lockdown and many military operations. In addition, the withdrawal of work permits from numerous Palestinian commuters working in Israel has dramatically worsened the economic situation of many families. Under these conditions, domestic violence is also on the rise, leaving many children and women without even safety at home.

The emergency pedagogy team worked with the children in the mornings and with the teachers in the afternoons. Of the 350 children at the school, around 270 children of nursery and primary school age took part in the different workshops; at least two sessions were held with each child. After the first day, the children were already asking if the emergency pedagogy team would come back. It was the first time in months that they had experienced something new and they were able to take their minds for a short while off the extremely challenging situation.

‘The work here is just starting; the need is huge and we are trying to respond as spontaneously and creatively as possible. We want to support the people here as much as we can to better process what they have experienced or even just forget about it for a few hours,’ says Lina Bäuerle about the work, who was on site as part of the emergency pedagogy team. She perceived the children as tense: ‘Many showed increased aggressive behaviour or appeared restless or anxious. It was particularly nice to see how enthusiastic the children were about the play of colours while painting. A murmur went through one of the classes we were painting with when they saw their yellow stars shining on a blue background. You could really see the children exhale and noticeably relax.’

It's not just the children who are suffering from the tense situation, it's also exhausting for the teachers to maintain a balance between worries about their own families, financial burdens and the challenges at the school with the children. In the afternoons, the team conducted training sessions with around 25 teachers from the school. In addition to theoretical sessions on trauma and emergency pedagogy, there were practical sessions - for example watercolour painting or free painting with wax crayons. The training sessions helped the local teachers in two ways: firstly, it gave them the opportunity to deal with their own traumatic experiences, and secondly, it provided them with methods for working with their schoolchildren.

Emergency pedagogue Lukas Mall, who led the mission, had worked in Bethlehem and the Gaza Strip on and off for years, having completed his voluntary service there in 2006. ‘The hopelessness really affected me. The opportunity to become active on the ground gives us courage and we must not lose it. Traumatic experiences can lead to loneliness and a willingness to use violence, which means we no longer perceive ‘others’ as people. Emergency pedagogy helps to break this spiral of hatred and violence’.

In consultation with the school management, the idea is to plan a second intervention focussing on the teachers. They want their colleagues to be ‘further strengthened and capacitated so that they can be there for the children’. So we would like to hopefully return in the near future.