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Before I was born and as I grew up, there were many gender stereotypes that negatively affected women and girls. These included beating wives and not appreciating baby girls. In my culture, girls were deprived of education, because taking them to school was considered a waste of resources. Parents and the general communities looked at girls as sources of dowry (bride price) and so they were married off at an age of 14 -18 years.

Ecumenical Accompaniers walk children to school, accompany shepherds, serve as a presence of peace, and share what they see. They are the fruit of the WCC-EAPPI, and offer reflections from a variety of settings and the life around them.

Ecumenical Accompaniers from the World Council of Churches Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (WCC-EAPPI) report that residents, international non-governmental organizations, media, politicians have joined local Palestinian and Israeli peace activists in nonviolence resistance, protesting demolition actions by Israeli forces in the Khan al Ahmar Bedouin community.

Although the Israeli authorities declared Wadi Qana as a nature reserve as far back as 1983, the decision to turn it into an Israeli leisure and recreation area was only taken in 2006.
This did not fail to impact Palestinian landowners. who are not allowed to dig new wells to water the fields or to repair existing facilities, whereas the Israeli settlements on the hilltops get their water from deep wells on the valley floor, with water pumped uphill through thick pipes.

Although idyllic Wadi Qana is barely 50 km from the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv as the crow flies, the gap is great.

Rizeq, our local contact in the nearby village of Deir Istiya, leases grazing land there. Together with three friends, he owns a small herd of goats. The herd sleeps in a large cave that serves as a shed, with an entrance enclosed by walls and gates. Rizeq and his partners built a small hut nearby out of field stones for storing tools and spending the night.

With mega cities "mushrooming" all over the world, one must wonder how they can be supplied with enough, and healthy, food. Ideas range from an increased rural production to urban gardening and technically complex solutions like vertical indoor gardens. As Christians, we are called to side with people who live in poverty and who are marginalized. For me and my colleagues at Bread for the World, it is important to ask: What does all this mean for the rural population and for small scale farmers?

When it comes to the stance of churches towards the so-called conflict between Israel and Palestine, it is useful to understand it as a process of grief. The theory of the five stages of grief from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is a creative way to describe the “dying” and “mourning” process of the churches and international community. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was seen by the Western world as a sign of justice for the suffering Jewish people after the Holocaust and centuries of persecution of Jews in Europe. Two elements played a major role in this initial excitement: the historical guilt of Europeans and the fulfilment of biblical prophecies related with the reestablishment of Israel.

The word pilgrimage is a linguistic double-edged sword. On the one hand, it connotes a kind of movement towards a higher, even spiritual or religious, end that one has in mind. When thought of in this positive sense, I think of the pilgrimages of the desert fathers who migrated into the sun and sand longing to be alone with God and who were eager to shed off the weight of this world so that they could experience His world more intimately. However, in our post-colonial context, the word pilgrimage equally stirs up mixed emotions, most of which might be negative, particularly amongst Indigenous peoples across the globe.