I’m so excited to launch our latest project, Learn With Palestinians!  For so long I have watched displaced Palestinians struggle to provide for their families and they have told me over and over that they just want to work.  It is our hope that this project will help many thousands of them do this!

This website started out as an idea that we could link Palestinian teachers with people who wished to learn Arabic in an online setting.  However, once we started building it, it became so much more!

While retaining our original plan of teaching Arabic lessons, we started to think how wonderful it would be if could learn culture as well as language.  As we thought through this we then expanded to “What if someone wanted to learn how to play the Oud?  They would learn Arabic, learn Palestinian culture and learn an instrument all in one lesson and it would be fun!  The possibilities seemed endless at this point…  Cooking classes, Sewing or Embroidery classes, Art classes, History Classes, Business classes, you name it!

We also realized that for many of these things the Palestinians don’t need to be certified teachers although many of them are.  Someone teaching you cooking or guitar is an expert in that and the Arabic becomes secondary. But someone who needs to learn business Arabic for example may prefer a qualified teacher.

We have developed a system therefore where each of the Palestinians who signs up will have a profile which details their expertise, skills and classes offered.  They can use this to provide references, pictures or even an introductory video.  All of these profiles will categorized so you can easily search for what you’re looking for and find all of the teachers who offer this.

Once you have selected a teacher you will contact them and at this point your relationship moves offline.  You can use Zoom or whatever tools you decide on and agree on payment as well. We are suggesting a starting rate of $11.  No payments are taken through our website, we are connecting people only.

Special thanks go out to Coconut Media for building the site and supporting Palestine! Please support them for all your website needs! We have also hired a coordinator for this program and all teacher applications will be reviewed and then each teacher will have a video interview before creating their profile.  Applicants will need to speak at least some enough English to teach.

Many of the Palestinians came out of Gaza with nothing and are sorely in need of laptops in order to work on projects like this.  As such we have sourced laptops here in Egypt but we need to raise funds to purchase these.  If you can donate towards this project it would be much appreciated!