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Friday May 30, 2008

Arab children log on at Israel computer lab

by dan pine
staff writer

Shereen Mohammed’s 5-year-old son, Ahmed, looked up from the flat-screen monitor and said to his mother, “Mommy, did you have a computer center when you were growing up?”

She laughs when telling the story. Of course she had no computer center. Such luxuries have rarely been within reach for Arab Israelis, 50 percent of whom live in poverty.

But now, in the Arab town of Umm el-Fahm, south of Israel’s Jezreel Valley, a new computer center is up and running, and kids like Ahmed can barely let go of the mouse.

The early childhood computer center is a project of ECHAD — a partnership among the Israeli government, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation.

Open less than a year, the center serves thousands of Arab kindergartners from 123 area schools. For virtually all of them, this is their first encounter with a computer.

With a population of 44,000, Umm el-Fahm is Israel’s second-largest Arab city. It’s a poor town, located on a series of hills dotted with rocks and thirsty-looking evergreens. At least 2,000 children receive social service assistance, and most of them come from single-parent homes, largely because their fathers live in the West Bank, unable to travel into Israel.

But once at the center, these Arab Israeli children enter a world of 64-bit possibilities.

Dr. Mahmod Zohdi is one of the center’s organizers. He says getting kids to play computer games –– “edutainment,” as he calls it –– has far-reaching consequences, even beyond meeting the educational needs of children ages 2 to 7.

“Parents and kids take computer lessons together,” says Zohdi. “Children are not the center of [Arab] family life. There was silence in the home but now they talk.”

Because of demand and space limitations, children visit the center only twice a month for daylong sessions. But once there, they take on visually stimulating and intellectually challenging computer games.

Compared to “Guitar Hero” or “Grand Theft Auto,” the games are simplistic, but for these children, such programs provide a good first step toward computer literacy. They cover topics such as music, art, reading and social skills. And the classes don’t just exercise their minds — they also give the children opportunities to play together, as well as interact with their parents.

Gila Noam, the S.F. federation’s Israel-based coordinator, says programs such as this not only help Israel’s Arab minority. They also help the Jewish state overall.

“We are trying to strengthen Israel as a democratic, pluralistic, tolerant society,” she said, as she joined a tour of the center for Bay Area visitors on the S.F. federation’s Israel@60 mission. “This is the other reality of Israel we need to come to terms with.”

Through ECHAD, the federation also helps support well-baby clinics, a nurse’s initiative program and other efforts to bolster the Arab Israeli community.

With 14 percent unemployment and a skyrocketing birth rate, the Arab Israeli community faces increasing social problems in the years ahead. Noam says that is why Arabs and Jews work together in Umm el-Fahm to stave off the worst.

It even has the added benefit of reducing tensions between Arabs and Jews.

“When the Jewish community comes from abroad to help this community,” Zohdi says, “this is a good story to tell my son.”

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