All Nations Café

One people One planet One spirit - all we need is Love

The second week of August was one to remember. While the eyes of the whole world were turned to the war in Lebanon and Gaza, a group of Palestinians and Israelis managed to live and work together and create a sense of family of women, men and children who trust and help each other, and feel deeply related to each other.

Our site was just a kilometer away from the Israeli army checkpoint, where Palestinians are not allowed to go any further. A couple of times soldiers were sent to inspect us. At one time, they interrogated the people they found at the camp site and eventually decided to leave us alone. At other times, they were simply friendly and accepted our presence there as a fact, even at a time of war, when a closure had been in effect to prevent Palestinians from coming so close as we were to Jerusalem. The local people, including the original owners of the land, accepted us whole heartedly, expressing a hope for continuing our presence in Ein-Haniya.

A couple of days after the camp ended, Lisa and Dhyan went with Abed to Dheishe refugee camp to visit Abu-Adel, a beautiful 73 year old Palestinian, who used to live near Ein-Haniya until 1948. He told us that they used to stay outdoors during the fruit picking season and the boy scouts used to come there to have a summer camp each summer, much like ours. He added that the place where we held our dinner parties and harvest moon celebration, was the same place where in the old days they used to bring all the grain at the harvest season and hold a Hafla, a celebration with traditional food and dancing, for the farmers and their families. 

Nature – Our Shared Home

We begun the week by clearing rocks, making a path and stairs to walk down the hill, setting up a big tent and a kitchen tent and cleaning the old house we used for sleeping and creative sessions. Daphna and Ali, working side by side without knowing each other’s language, looked like a picture from the 19th century, when the first east European Jewish idealists came to Palestine to work side by side with the local farmers.  The first theme of the camp was our relationship with the natural surrounding, the earth and water, the fire and the air, the animals and plants growing around us, and the people who live in our proximity. We took time to clean the Ein-Haniya pool and the mountain spring that feeds it, and to redirect the precious water that had been spilling on the road to nourish the thirsty agricultural terraces.  We were led by two local farmers, Abed and Muhammad, to their plots of land on the hill right above the army check point, where we received fresh cucumbers and local herbs, za’atar and sage, from simple and remarkable people who love and care for their land.

Love and Relationships

The other theme of the camp was inspired by the Harvest Full Moon night at the middle of the week, which since biblical times marked the Love Festival, when young women used to come out to dance in the fields and the young shepherds went after them to look for brides.

We invited guests to join us for a celebration that night, with music, belly dancing and an original production of Romeo and Juliet, where Ali from Palestine played a young man who fell in love with Israeli Miriam, but his mother (played by his 17 year old daughter May) forbade the relationship. We had a happy end, of course, with reconciliation and a wedding, but not before Romeo’s brother (played by Ali’s 9 year old son Murat) had a Karate fight with Miriam’s sister (played by Amit, a 13 year old girl from the north of Israel who came to find refuge from the war). The chant of the camp “One People One Planet One Spirit” was translated to Arabic and Hebrew for this event by May and Dhyan, and Daphna invented the movements to go with it, so we could all sing and learn a dance of universal peace. Later, our own Esperanto expert Jeremi completed the song with this universal language of peace.

The vision that came out of this camp is an All Nations Café, a meeting point of hearts and family on the border of Israel and Palestine, with people from both sides reconstructing the fabric of life that was there for many centuries and is still a strong, viable and uplifting possibility for all of us today.

Support

We are looking for people all around the world who share this vision and wish to be part of it, by joining us physically on in the spirit, and by sending financial support for this project. You are welcome to contact Dhyan Or, our focalizer

Watch more camp photos..

For the past year we have been nurturing the dream of conducting a camp for kids and parents from different nations in the peaceful and serene atmosphere of the Sinai peninsula in Egypt. The idea was to invite children from countries in the Middle East and elsewhere to a camp where they will get to know each other on the heart level, have meaningful interaction between themselves and with the surrounding environment and create something new together.

We chose a particular beach on the beautiful coast line of Sinai called “Ras a Satan”, or “The Ras” for short. The owners, Sigal, an Israeli woman and Ayash, her Bedouin-Egyptian husband, shared our vision and created both the physical and the emotional space for the kids camp to take place.

We invited several families from Israel, Palestine, Egypt and other countries to participate in the camp. Due to financial and organizational difficulties, only one family came specially for the camp, while the rest of the children were already on vacation or living in Sinai.

The plan was to have a morning and an afternoon group session, and in between everyone was free to enjoy swimming, scuba diving, playing and doing acrobatics on the beach.

The opening session of the camp was held in a large ventilated hut made of palm trees and straw dedicated for the kids. We held a sharing circle and each member received a quality card written in English, Hebrew and Arabic with a specific quality he or she had to exercise during the following day. Then each person chose a partner with a complementing quality to co-operate on acting both qualities out.

On the second day each person told the group what he or she did in the past day to practice their quality. We then had a Mayan astrology reading with Miso from Switzerland and a Mayan yoga class with Zoe fron the UK. In the evening, when the sun started to descend, we went with Kelvin on a trip to the Bedouin village in the desert next to “The Ras”.

We were hosted by Bedouin women who gave us sweet black tea and flat bread they made on an open fire and offered us beads they threaded for sale. Zoe’s two year old son, Phoenix, was fascinated by the free roaming goats, and eight year old Matan collected fallen goat hair for an art work we were planning to do. The adults were asking the women questions about their lives, and twenty two year old Adam and ten year old Yael translated the questions to Arabic and back to Hebrew and English. We also saw a few camels hanging around the village, and Daphna, together with Matan and Yael, made up a catchy camel song, which later became part of our theater show.

We left the village and walked into the dusky colorful desert, where we sat and shared the different experiences of being out in the ochre red desert, compared with the turquoise blue ocean. On our way back we were invited to sit in the yard of another family, this time with the men. They gave us more sweet black tea and told us something about their lives in mixed Hebrew, Arabic and English.

The next morning we used different colors of sand from the desert to make paintings. Bushra, a seven year old Bedouin girl, loved it so much that she made about 10 different paintings, some of them together with Yael. After drying them up we hanged the paintings in passpartouts on the wall of our hut and they looked fantastic.

In the afternoon we played a game of guessing words connected to the Bedouin life through pantomime. We invented a version in which two people come up with a combination of words and have to guess who their partner is without speaking, then the whole group has to guess what their words were. This game was one of everyone’s favorites.

The next day we had a clay workshop. After a short introduction by Kelvin, the kids and parents went on to make remarkable cups and kettles, animals and decorations from yellow and red clay found in the desert nearby. Kelvin himself made dolphin and bird shaped flutes from clay as a souvenir for the camp participants. Twenty one year old Yael had an idea to recycle used plastic bottles found in abundance on the beach and she transformed them into colorful hanging rotating decorations for the camp’s hut.

In the afternoon we had a brain storming session about the closing theater show, and we decided to make three scenes about meetings and interactions in Sinai and to call it: “Encounters of the Sinai Kind”. The first was about a meeting between a stressed Israeli businesswoman (ten year old Yael) and a Bedouin couple (Dhyan and seven year old Kamar), where she loosens up to the tunes of an ethnic melody sang by a Bedouin child (six year old El-Yam) and all of them learn to better understand each other. The second scene was based on the camel song we wrote on our desert hike. It was about a camel race (four and a half year old Avner gave the start signal) where two competing camel owners (El-Yam and Matan) are inspired by the friendship between their camels (Kamar and Yael) to stop arguing and begin communicating and getting to know each other. The last scene was about a fisherman (Yael) who catches a talking fish (Kamar), and is persuaded to empathize with the fish and release him, and eventually decides to join him for a game of underwater “Taki”.

We spent the last camp day rehearsing the scenes and inventing and improving the songs accompanying each scene. In the afternoon the kids put up a musical show in our decorated hut, in front of their parents and many guests who were on vacation there.

The show was a tremendous success, and the audience was thrilled by the way the acting and by the message and the spirit of the performance.

We closed up with a sharing circle, where all the kids and adults who participated in the camp spoke about their feelings and about the things that moved them most during the camp.

The strong positive response we received from everyone who was involved in the camp, and especially from the participants, encouraged us to start thinking about doing a camp next year, with enough funding to bring more children, especially from countries such us Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

We send a big heartfelt thanks to all people who made this camp possible:

Hosts:
 Sigal (Israeli), Ayash (Bedouin) and the Bedouin tribe

Organizers:
Dhyan (Israeli) and Daphna (Israeli)

Helpers:
 Kelvin (British), Adam (Palestinian), Yael (Israeli), Zoe (British) and Miso (Swiss)

Participants:
 Yael, Anat and Peter ” The Keinans” (Israelis), Matan (Israeli), Kamar (Israeli),
El -Yam (Bedouin and Israeli), Bushra (Bedouin), Ahmed (Bedouin), Avner (Israeli), Leo (French), Manuel (Spanish) and Liza (German)

   This season the All Nations Cafe is focusing on the young, encouraging kids to tap into their individual talents, to share and to learn from other kids, and together create beautiful realities.

We are currently working on a weekly basis at four locations: “Downtown” in east Jerusalem, A-Toor - a neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, Jabel Mukaber in south east Jerusalem, and Al-Azariya - a Palestinian village in the West Bank.

On occasion, we also work with kids from west Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth and from other places around the the world.

Our activities include storytelling, theater, dancing, singing, playing instruments, artwork, crafts, gardening, recycling, emailing and more. This way we allow many paths of expression and can carefully address deeper underlining issues, such as non-violence, morals, responsibility and leadership.

We encourage visitors and volunteers, young and “young at heart”, to visit and
participate in our programs. During the last months we had many different
people taking part in our Al-Azariya program, among them a Jewish settler and a
girl serving in the Israeli army.

We also had a Jewish Israeli girl join the activities of the Arab girls and boys
in A-Toor for the first time. All these encounters were extremely beneficial for
both parties involved, breaking through the superficial generalizing image of
“the other”, and meeting the actual human being behind it, playing together,
embracing and learning from each other.

You can see many photos depicting these activities in our web site
AllNationsCafe.org under Photos.

The All Nations Café is hosting a 10 day full board winter camp at a peaceful beach in north-east Sinai for children aged 7 to 13 from different countries in the Middle East. The camp’s goal is to launch a Middle East Kids Council which will take responsibility over various issues -  ecological, social and spiritual - concerning the region as a whole, and will work together on a regular basis, across political borders, to create a sustainable, peaceful and co-operative Middle East.

Kids from the following countries have already stated their interest in joining the camp: Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Morocco and Libya. Children living in other places in the Middle East as well as elsewhere in the world are most welcome to join.

The camp’s program includes:

> Meeting and getting to know kids from other countries.
> Sharing beautiful things between the different nations: folktales, songs, dances, food and drinks, games, etc. 
> Learning about issues* facing the region today and working in small mixed groups on creative developments to be presented at the conclusion of the camp and published on the internet. 
> Researching, planning and doing hands-on environmental activity at the campsite: Setting recycling points, preserving the coral reef, planting an organic garden, converting the camp to solar energy, sea water desalination, etc.** 
> Snorkeling, swimming, hiking and lots of fun.

* Environmental concerns: Coral reefs preservation, re-desertification, clean water supply, recycling, awaking environmental awareness, sustainable energy, etc. Inter-Cultural issues: Language, myths, drama, music, dance, etc.
Spirituality: Prayers, sacred ceremonies, manifestation, the Elements, Gaia, etc.

** Some of these activities are long term and will be implemented during the following months and years by the locals and by the camp members.

For the past two months we’ve been developing a children’s parliament in Jerusalem where the children take responsibility for the situation in their villages, in their lives, and apply their creativity toward a solution. We’re looking to develop the same model throughout the region at large. During our peace caravan to Jordan, we met children from Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, and they volunteered to be ‘ambassadors’ to this parliament in their countries.

Now we’re envisioning a Middle Eastern conference for these children — coming from countries from all over the Middle East, together, during the Christmas break.

We had a thought about how effective and wonderful it would be to invite the children from Vernon in Britich Columbia, Canada to participate. They have been learning about the tradition of the Caucasus all of their lives — about how to live in love, and how to apply love to life situations. I think it would be a tremendous contribution to a Children’s Middle Eastern Council.

The location for the conference would be in the Sinai Desert, which is in Egypt. It borders Israel and Jordan. It is a lovely resort on the Red Sea, very peaceful (not anywhere near a conflict zone).

The children could also raise some funds, and we can think together of avenues which may want to contribute.

  We have a recommendation to appeal to UNESCO to obtain support for the All Nations Cafe in Jerusalem and elsewhere.  The UNESCO website is:  UNESCO.org.  We are to click on “on-line services”.  UNESCO is a branch of the UNITED NATIONS that deals with economic, social and cultural matters.  I’m wondering whether there may be some grants that we could access for the very worthwhile All Nations Cafe endeavours.

One idea that just came up was to apply to the MAB biosphere program through UNESCO for nature reserves. We could apply for such status to a Sinai beach resort and convert it into an All Nations Cafe. It’s first activity would be a Middle Eastern Children’s Council. It could be a model for countries all over the region.

With peace in our beings,

Lisa

The kids cabinet from A-Tur has held its first meeting at the 7 Arches Hotel on the Mount of the Olives - overlooking the Dome of the Rock and the old city of in Jerusalem. The newly formed cabinet - comprised of 7 kids - has unanimously declared peace with all nations and continents of the world.

The local members of cabinet - aged 6 to 12 years - were joined by two colleagues from Nazareth who learned a Circassian dance and helped phrase a letter to Nancy Ajram, a popular Lebanese singer, who has been acknowledged as an inspiration to oriental dancing throughout the country and is honorably invited to perform with the kids dance company.

During the first intermission, the cabinet performed Kafa and Chechen dances from the Caucasus mountains. During the second intermission the kids chose to perform yoga asanas, such as lotus pose, fish pose, head stand and sun salutation.

Among other ideas, such as cleaning the neighborhood, planting flowers and educating other kids to take care of the environment, the cabinet is planning to design and paint unique All Nations Cafe T-shirts to send with love to kids in Europe and America.

The last part of the day was a pulse-to-pulse prayer circle overlooking the city of Jerusalem, where each kid made a wish and all answered: “Ameen”. The kids wished for different things such as peace, disappearance of separating walls, success for the cabinet’s projects, happiness of all humanity, prosperity and marriage for the older girls.

The meeting was adjourned with three All Nations Cafe traditional Wooshes, sending out the good energy to the sky.