Palestinian and Gainesville families came together this weekend to raise money and awareness for a proposed school for the deaf in the West Bank, near Palestine.
Gainesville’s Oak Hall School hosted 12 delegates from one of Gainesville’s sister cities in Qalqilya, Palestine, to promote the campaign.
Richard Gehman, Oak Hall’s headmaster, said this was the first time in the program students from Palestine stayed with families of Gainesville students.
“It’s one thing to talk about global education,” he said. “It’s another thing to have face-to-face interactions.”
Steve Kalishman, president of the Sister City Program of Gainesville Inc., said the visit will bring attention to the Oak Hall students’ project to raise about $350,000 to build the school.
“There are 43,000 deaf people in the West Bank, and right now they can only get a ninth-grade education,” Kalishman said.
He said Gainesville’s relationship with Qalqilya started in 1997 when delegates from Palestine and the Israeli city of Kfar Saba came to Gainesville looking for help building a water-treatment plant.
“In the media, everything you see about Palestine and Israel is all about violence,” Kalishman said. “But what gets lost in all that is the majority of people don’t care about all that conflict. They want to learn how to live together in peace with their neighbors.”
[A version of this story ran on page 3 on 4/14/2014 under the headline "Palestinian students visit Gainesville in sister city program"]
