We have received an appeal for help from the Atfaluna School for the Deaf in Gaza City. Atfaluna (“Our Children” in Arabic) has for many years been one of the main sources of the beautiful Palestinian crafts, including embroidery, ceramics and wood products, that we market in order to support Palestinian livelihoods.
Atfaluna sells these items both to benefit the craftspeople and to support their school for deaf children.
Due to the continuing (and worsening) crisis in Gaza, the school is facing the possibility of having to close some classrooms. They sent MRSCP the following message:
We are writing to you today in hope that you may be able to support our most urgent school campaign which aims to secure funds for the upcoming academic year 2017/2018 for all 20 of our deaf education classrooms. Our school serves 300 deaf girls and boys from extremely fragile backgrounds and in light of the deteriorating situation in Gaza, Palestine we are struggling to maintain our services for the deaf.
We are working hard to avoid ending our educational services for the deaf children in our care and have therefore setup an online fundraising campaign. We were hoping you would kindly circulate, share, contribute to our appeal for classroom 1A which comprises of 10 deaf girls and boys. The link to our online campaign is
Please consider making a donation to this online campaign. These funds do not go through MRSCP but directly to Atfaluna. We are looking into the possibility of doing some direct fundraising for the school, and will let you know if you could therefore make a tax-deductible contribution through MRSCP, but in the meantime we wanted to circulate this appeal.
Finally, you may want to check out these articles about the current situation in Gaza:
- Gaza Hanging by a Thread (Churches for Middle East Peace)
- Gaza Power Cuts: The Worst its Ever Been (Al Jazeera)
As always, thanks for your support.