After going to a really nice concert of a hebrew chanson singer yesterday I nearly overslept today. But with a little hurry I was right on time to meet N. who works as a volunteer at the center.
I didn't dare to ask Amoun about the old legends because I got the impression that she was leery about the intentions of some of my questions anyway. For example when I asked her what the other israeli groups could learn from the Dom I expected her to tell me something about cultural pride, keeping ones own roots alive, creativity and the ability to survive in a hostile enviorement. Well, she said: "What do you mean? Learn to be poor?" So, after this I really didn't feel like asking something like "Do the old legends reflect the Doms attitude to work and do you think this can be a problem?"
I just realized today that even though I've been reading and talking about the Dom for quite a while now they know nothing about me. Usually when you meet people you interact on the same level of trust, distance and interest. Doing a field study is very different. I hoped for quick answers but underestimated the trust that is needed to get even close to this kind of information.
Later the other volunteers were organizing and open house day at the center where some important and influential people from Jerusalem shall experience Dom live and art firsthand and they were working on proposals to get funding from international foundations. With me included there are currently three anthropology students and a couple who study ancient geology (? or something similar...) volunteering. Since I didn't bring my Laptop and the two computers of the center were used otherwise it was my job to tidy up and clean out the bookshelfes for the children. It was interesiting that there was just a very little amount of arabic books, even less books in hebrew (almost as many as in finnish) and the vast majority in english. From Books that explained the alphabet to small printet long tales, from neary untouched ones to books with more than just a few pages missing everything was there. There were picturebooks, too, but they were handmade scrachbooks with pictures cut out from magezines and put into a folder. And there were - for my taste - too many explicit christian books telling about gods love for children who belive in Jesus. The "worst" one showed cute blonde children wainting for christmas and getting a lot of presents. It made me wonder what kind of people donated these.
For lunch Amoun cooked a tasty soup with a lot of peas for us all. While still eating the first girl came from school, did her homework at the center with a bit of tutoring and left before the arabic-class arrived. Unfortunatly I didn't see how many kids joined from the beginning this offer because I was in the next room sorting childrens books in order of age but four kids arrived a little bit later and in the classroom is maybe eanough space for 15, maximum.
While writing the proposals the question occured how many children used the tutoring program and succeeded in their education because of this. After a short discussion "more than 50" seemed the most realistic answer. Regarding that the center was founded only ten years abo in Amoun Sleems own house, also works in the women empowerment and is constantly in the need for donation and money (the rent alone costs about 10000 $ per year!!!) that is an impressive number, I think.
So, even though my blog and my study will not be about the Center alone, let me just mention here that this for sure is a good and trustworthy project if someone wants to contribute:
https://www.paypal.com/il/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=-l-C3Ap76RlqDiXI2qtai_o6L3YwcHPsXPtMMBxtd4nXZAZ3d1IUajOcMIy&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1fc53a056acd1538874a43d73a07f26b2cc3a8a5dff46470e3
