☀️Days 9️⃣ and 🔟: On Campus + Service Work

Today and yesterday were mostly on-campus days. We began Wednesday with reflections and free time for the film crews to develop their film ideas🎥. Then the campers split into their 3 groups again: Dabkeh🕺, sports🏃‍♂️, and cooking🍴. Some of the dishes the campers made included modern renditions of traditional such as mushakhan rolls and freekeh salad🥗, as well as extinct dishes like mlukheyeh salad which traveled with Palestinian refugees from Lydd in 1948 to El-Bireh, where immigrants from the city to the United States preserved the recipe as it is largely extinct today and not commonly eaten in the refugee camps, El-Bireh, or even in the remaining ghettoized Palestinian neighborhoods of Lydd. Following these sessions, campers split into two buses, one bus traveled to Um Suleiman Farm in Bil’in🌱 and the other went to Al-Yaa’s farm in Saffa, both villages near Ramallah🚜. These farms are a part of a mushrooming network of co-op farms in the West Bank. These farms plant Palestinian heirloom, non-GMO, organic produce🍅 as a way to promote the resilience of the Palestinian agricultural sector in the face of the Israeli agricultural industry which is attempting to flood both the Palestinian market with cheap, genetically modified produce full of pesticides OR sell Palestinian farmers cheap Israeli seeds and pesticides that are terrible for the environment and destroy our thousands of years of indigenous knowledge on how to grow food and produce in our land🌱. This is part of an Israeli multi-pronged strategy to remove us from our land by either separating us from it, or making us lose our intimate and deep knowledge of our land.