Wednesday, July 8

YMCA Graduation at Um Solomona

MCC workers were able to visit the village of Um Solomona with the YMCA, one of MCC's partners in Palestine Israel. The Women's Training Program offers 6 month training courses in rural villages to help educate participants about animal husbandry and care, crop production and farming, and economics and environment. We visited on the day of graduation and were able to take some photographs with some of the participants. Not wanting to merely photograph the women and not see them again, we returned a few weeks later in order to pass out some of the pictures we had taken. We didn't know the names of any of the women, but with the population of Um Solomona being less than 1,000 people, we were confident we could show some pictures and ask around a bit. Sure enough, the first person we stopped and asked knew the woman in the first picture, and when we got closer to the house and asked a group of children which house we should go to, they were falling over themselves to help us find it.

We're always blessed when we're able to enter someone's home or village that doesn't usually have foreign guests, and on a personal level we almost always end up 'getting' more than we 'give'. These visits are our opportunity to be the face of MCC to people that otherwise wouldn't know about the work that people from home support.

YMCA WTP Graduation

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