Stolen Childhoods

RESO Podcast & News

2 weeks ago

Stolen Childhoods

Transcript

00:00So today we are joined by a remarkable guest, a wonderful speaker, a wonderful researcher,

00:15outstanding academician as well, Gary Oswaldman from Ireland. So it's once again a possibility,

00:20an opportunity and a great pleasure for Reso Platform to have you ma'am and you've joined

00:26us from Ireland. Thanks a lot for that. So we are going to cover a wonderful topic today.

00:31That's certainly a very, very important topic. We're going to cover is certainly a wonderful

00:36topic, a very relevant topic in today's context. It says stolen childhood, the untold story

00:42of Palestinian children living through conflict, a powerful podcast of hope, humanities and resistance.

00:50So man, once again, thank you so much for joining this podcast. So we're going to be covering

00:54your question. I'm going to be asking my first question, which is certainly a very important

00:58question. It talks about motivation. What first inspired you to volunteer in the West Bank?

01:06Well, thank you, Saranda, for inviting me and hello to all of your listeners. I worked for

01:14many, many years as a facilitator in community development projects in Ireland, mainly with

01:20projects that received government or EU funding to work with people that experienced marginalization

01:27or disadvantage. And I was often asked to facilitate or to mediate conflict during those years.

01:34Yet I didn't formally train in mediation until 2010. But how my interest in the West Bank really

01:42developed when I was on a holiday in Egypt in 2008. And for the first time, I became aware of Al Jazeera

01:49London TV. And on that news station in the evenings, I watched the 2008-2009 war on Gaza unfolding.

02:00And it shocked me. It really shocked me. So on my return home, I happened to see an ad in the newspaper

02:07here looking for volunteers to work with a project as accompanies of Palestinians in the West Bank.

02:15It was funded by the World Council of Churches. So I applied for it. And I did my first three months

02:22volunteering in France volunteering in the south of the West Bank in a city called Hebron in 2010.

02:29And this was the start of many, many voluntary stints in the West Bank over the following years

02:34until COVID struck. So during that France first stint surrender in the West Bank, I became aware of

02:43children aged between 12 and 18 who had been picked up off the streets, taken to police stations in military jeeps,

02:54interrogated and transferred directly to prison before any trial whatsoever. And as I supported mothers

03:03who were looking for their children, one of them contacted me and introduced me to others that particular day

03:10I began to learn that there was a very prohibitive system around the arrests of children.

03:24It was very difficult to find out where they were, what prison they were, were they in the police station?

03:29There was a very, very, very little information until I discovered the Irish Red Cross

03:34and the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee who all had lawyers and Defence for Children International

03:42who all had lawyers supporting these children. So this started a long journey of trying to understand the system

03:51whereby between 500 and 700 Palestinian children are arrested and detained and imprisoned every single year.

04:01So when I was leaving after my three months, I thought, how am I going to get this message across?

04:08And I thought the only way I could do it was by making a film. Now I'm not a filmmaker, but I used film for

04:15mediating a rule case in training mediators. And that was the extent of my experience.

04:21But I thought it was probably the only way to do it. So I returned to Hebron about eight months later.

04:27And on my days off, I interviewed and I filmed the children I had known that were arrested.

04:37The film, if anyone is interested, is on my website. I think you have the address up.

04:42It's O'SullivanSolutions.ie, Surrender. And if they scroll to the bottom on the footer, they will find this particular film.

04:49No.

04:50No.

04:51No.

04:52No.

04:53No.

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