Today we visited the Yafa Cultural Centre in Balata refugee camp, which is near Nablus. Violence inside the refugee camp raised over the years since the second intifada, especially domestic violence, due overtly as a result of the physical, psychological and systemic violence of the military occupation of Israel.The Cultural Centre provides a therapeutic programme to the brutal military occupation to children living in the refugee camp including theatre, painting, filmmaking, dancing and music workshops.
The cultural centre further resembled a box of experiences, emotions and observations from children, whom live under military occupation and provided them with the skills for developing both academically and personally in many key areas. The cultural centre provides a variety of workshops to do this. Many of the workshops are adapted to their own personal stories such as the theatre play being developed, which converges and captures various of their own experiences and visions of the occupation. We managed to interact with the children within the organisation by visiting the filmmaking workshop and talking with the sound and light system crew about the cultural meanings of colours in our countries. The workshops managed to mitigate the levels of embedded violence from the occupation on children and provided an oasis for them to express themselves.