In the first phase of the project, 24 participants from Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon and the UK met in Cambridge to work together to create, develop and manage activities to get their peers involved in communities in their own countries and across the region.

While in the UK the group saw at first-hand community participation in action through voluntary services, community projects and youth work.

The group used thier experiences as inspiration and planned a series of activities to take place in the eight countries in the period from October 2005 to March 2006. These included an awareness raising road-show, a cross-region employment month targeted at young people and an international database of volunteers.

Activities

“Volunteer today for a better tomorrow..”

Under this slogan, Bridges participants organised a volunteering initiative involving school children from Ussama Ibn Zaid school in El Marg area, which is one of the less-privileged areas in Cairo.

The Bridges team of volunteers had been working with a group of Year 5 Primary pupils from the school giving them awareness raising sessions on volunteering and helping their local communities.

The school children were so enthused that they wanted to apply the knowledge they gained through the sessions by doing voluntary work inside their school as a start.  Together with the Bridges team, who had been trained on needs assessment and field research, they identified three areas where they could help their school with their voluntary efforts.  They were able to mobilise more school children to take part in the initiative.  

On that sunny Sunday, 11 March, 65 young school children of Year 5, 4 and 3rd Primary joined arms with the Bridges team and a few of their teachers, pulled up their sleeves and got on the job.  Some of them started planting plants in the school court-yard; others helped in building and painting a sheltering pergola for the area where smaller children waited to be picked up by their parents; the rest used their artistic talent to draw murals and teaching aids and charts to be put up along the walls of the school.”  I learned the meaning of the words: ‘co-operation ‘ and ‘participation’  I also learned to respect other people’s opinion and how it is good to work in a team.  I never knew I could get all this experience…it was so much fun..I did not want it to end” Mohamed Ahmed Younes..5th Primary, Ussama Ibn Zeid School.

Later in the month, the Egyptian Bridges team met with 6 Palestinian Bridges participants in a 2-day workshop at the British Council to review the activities they had planned together last year in Jordan, share their experiences and plan together for new activities for the coming year.  Some great ideas came out of this workshop and a lot of learning too..”This project gave me the opportunity to develop my personality and acquire a lot of new skills….the best thing about it is meeting and working with new people from other countries and getting to know how different and similar they way things are in our countries”.  Masa Al Jawhary, Bir Zeit University- Ramalla.

“This workshop was a real bridge linking young people from two neighbouring countries together to merge their dreams, ambitions and knowledge together in one joint project to help their communities” Yehia Mohamed Rifaat, Vodafone Egypt