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Date: August 09, 2010 at 11:29:01
From: Jack Spillane, []
Subject: The Fairhaven Project: A chance for Israeli and Palestinian kids to sa |
URL: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100808/NEWS/8080351/-1/NEWSMAP |
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August 08, 2010 12:00 AM
South Coast Today
Eighteen-year-old Odai Hourani is maybe 50-feet in the air, his legs wrapped around the mast of the tall ship, "Fritha," as she rocks back and forth in the wind over Buzzards Bay.
Odai is watching 17-year-old Einav Liberman, who's maybe 10-feet above him on the yard-arm of the same mast.
She's having just a bit of difficulty getting in position to unfurl the sail.
"She needed help," Odai tells me, when I ask why he, a young Palestinian, had remained in the challenging mast position — so high in the air above the sea — waiting for an Israeli girl.
"I think she was having trouble doing the sail," he says matter-of-factly.
Einav says she actually didn't need help, but she seems happy that Odai was hanging around, just in case.
"I ... heard Andrew (the ship's mate) yelling 'Don't go, she doesn't need your help.' Einav remembered. "And then I said, 'No, I'm all right."
"I just wanted to do the job," Odai says, shrugging his shoulders sheepishly, seeming to misunderstand the English, and that he's being complimented.
"It's just normal."
"She ignored me," he jokes.
The two kids are talking with me during a break in "The Fairhaven Project," a three-week tall-ship program that brings Israeli and Palestinian kids together to learn the very challenging task of working together to sail a tall ship. The Fritha is a 74-foot, 6,600 pound brigantine captained by Northeast Maritime Institute (NMI) instructor Bob Glover.
Eric Dawicki, The Fairhaven Project's founder, and Odai's and Einav's crewmates, begin teasing the two teenagers about flirting with each other.
"He thought ... " Einav starts, and then begins giggling, not finishing her sentence.
Dawicki — who has worked with Odai and Einav for two summers now in the Fairhaven program — says he thinks he knows what was happening high up on the Fritha's mast.
"I saw two people who actually cared about one another, trying to help one another," he says.
He addresses Odai directly.
"I know you. And I probably saw you being a little protective of your friend," he tells the Palestinian youth, who has a reputation for being overly protective of women.
"Is that fair?" he asks.
"Yes," Odai acknowledges, that, in fact, he was worried about Einav and that was why he was waiting on the mast.
It's an amazing revelation because outside the required tasks, the Palestinian and Israeli kids don't seem to talk with one another much.
"It was a nice moment," says Eric.
Those nice moments do not come easily on The Fairhaven Project.
The teenagers are selected on a number of criteria, including leadership potential, but also including the trauma they have suffered from growing up in the world's most relentless war zone.
This year, the third year of the summer program of NMI, an 18-year-old from the Gaza Strip (still reeling from what amounts to an economic blockade) for the first time participated in the sailing program.
He joined two girls, including Einav, who live in the constantly shell-shocked Israeli kibbutzes near the Gaza border.
There were nine participants in all — one Palestinian was not able to make it back for the second year.
So I spent a day last week sailing back from Martha's Vineyard with four of these best kids in the world.
Nice kids, but kids with whom, after just a few minutes of conversation, you can see the strains of post-traumatic stress as a way of life.
To say that there was tension between them would be an understatement.
Everything from a comment calling Gaza a state to attempts to directly bring up politics could, and did, lead to "incidents." The ambitious program this year took place just two months after the controversy over the Turkish flotilla .
The kids, even though they're more than 5,000 miles from home, gravitate to their counterparts: Palestinian to Palestinians and Israelis to Israelis.
They slip into Arabic or Hebrew when no one is around; mostly working together only through the supervision of the American third parties.
Everyone almost always seems on guard, tip-toeing around the ideologies that have ever and ever divided Palestinians and Israelis for more than a half-century now.
The focus of this program, however, is not politics, but mutual experience, cooperation and learning. That's what it takes to sail a tall ship.
"A lot of teamwork goes into this," says Dawicki of the big sails. "It becomes a dance."
So The Fairhaven Project takes the most unlikely young people imaginable and introduces them to a set of maritime experiences, that Dawicki hopes could one day change their lives, and even the region, and in a big way.
Dawicki seems all about organic experience and practicality so he doesn't make the Arab-Israeli politics strictly out-of-bounds. He knows it will inevitably come up anyway so he just sets some ground rules.
"You have to acknowledge everybody's point of view is important," he said. "If you have an opinion, you have to back it up with facts."
This year, politics came up most forcefully from Mohaned Sakall, the 18-year-old Gaza resident, who has grown up watching the territory's economy go underground before his young eyes.
His father's pharmacy business has dried up and the only way to make money in the isolated enclave, he said, is by charging money to the people and goods who travel through the illegal tunnels to Egypt.
That and by selling illegal drugs.
Mohaned, hoping to be a doctor, will attend Egypt's University for Science and Technology next year and then his father wants him to leave Gaza.
"He knows I don't have any future in Gaza," he said.
The Israeli girls, headed for the army next year, are less willing to talk politics. There's a weariness and apprehension about the subject in their eyes.
Adva Cohen, a resident of what she says is a beautiful rural kibbutz near Gaza, acknowledges that her grandparents fled Nazi, Germany and that their relatives died in the Holocaust.
She looks downward.
"We have nowhere else to go," she says, of the Israelis.
She's doubtful that peace can happen in the near future.
"I don't think we can do peace with Hamas," she says of the terrorist-affiliated party that two years ago won free elections and now controls the Gaza government.
In fact, none of the kids on either side seems hopeful that Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace. Asked whether two different peoples can share the same small area of land, Odai, whose background is both Christian and Muslim Arab, says simply, "No."
The kids may have their doubts about whether two such different peoples can share the same land, but Eric Dawicki doesn't.
He says point blank that people who have economic prospects are not interested in war. And that his goal is to develop maritime commerce as a way of economic viability for Gaza.
"The bottom line is that economic security is security," he said. "People aren't going to do bad things if they can feed people."
This year, the three-week Fairhaven's Program's academic project was to design a secure-from-terrorists-and- smuggling port of Gaza. A port that, in theory, could eventually develop an above-ground economy for the Gazans.
That's Dawicki's audacious goal.
"Business is a proven way to deal with tough issues," he said.
In the meantime, The Fairhaven Project, for three years now, has given some very challenged Palestinian and Israeli kids a set of positive shared experiences.
Dawicki hopes that one day those experiences will pay dividends in the level of trust needed for future Palestinian and Israeli leaders to work successfully together.
He talks about watching Odai's eyes darting back and forth as he watched Einav on the tall ship's mast, when he thought she might be in trouble.
"I gotta tell you, that was a really proud moment for me," he says.
Contact Jack Spillane at jspillane@s-t.com
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