Graduation day

20 June 2009

On Saturday 13th June 2009, over 100 young men and women from the East Jerusalem YMCA’s vocational training centre are graduating.

This is the 57th graduation ceremony of the Vocational Training Centre in Jericho and at least 200 parents, siblings and other family members have turned up. As their names are called, the 114 young men and women go up to receive their certificates from Ismail Hamdan, the Centre Director, who grins from ear to ear with pride.

For the past year and a half, these young people have been trained in skills such as carpentry, mechanics and metal work, others in graphic design and computer maintenance. Like so many before them, they have spent 11 months in training, followed by a seven month work placement.

Over 80% of the centre’s students find work, which is more than graduates from universities around the West Bank. Over half of the current graduates have found full-time jobs in their related field and most of them found work within six weeks of completing their training.

The day after the graduation, I visit some of the employers around Jericho who have taken on graduates as apprentices. Many of the employers are themselves graduates of the Vocational Training Centre (VTC) and tell me that they prefer to take on students from the YMCA because of the high standards of teaching.

On the walls of Ismail Hamdan’s office are pictures taken from the early days of the centre, which dates back to 1948. Ismail proudly tells me how the VTC started life in the Aqabat refugee camp in Jericho, one of the many camps established to deal with the Palestinian refugee crisis. At that time, 125,000 Palestinians were living in the camp. It is still there today, but concrete houses have replaced tents and fewer people (8,000) live there. However, Palestinian refugees are still the largest refugee population in the world. The number of refugees in total now numbers 4.6 million.

During its first four years in Jericho, the YMCA provided emergency relief to refugees. In 1952, it become clear that there was a need for young people to be trained in new skills; they had lost their land, so many of them would not be able to follow in their family’s footsteps and carve a living out of agriculture. And so the vocational training programme was born.

Ismail has been with the VTC since 1985. In the 1990s, the centre took the decision to train girls. Ismail tells me how this was not an easy task for an institution rooted in a conservative community. In 1996, the first girls arrived. It didn’t take long for the girls to settle down and find their feet, and it soon became evident that they would be a strong force for change. It was the female students who asked to be trained in computer maintenance and graphic design, rather than traditional trades such as hairdressing and tailoring – they realised that they could earn more money with such skills in the larger West Bank cities of Nablus and Ramallah.

The YMCA also offers short courses along with the standard training programme, to encourage young women who may have to fit training around family life.

While the political landscape of the Occupied Territories has changed dramatically since 1948, the VTC still has at its heart the core values of the worldwide YMCA - helping to address the holistic needs of disadvantaged young people, which is still as relevant today as it was in 1948.

By Gemma Abbs, Communications Manager