YDD's Jericho Winter Camp

This week, staff at YDD were busy preparing for the Winter Camp, a two day activity weekend held at the Palestinian Security Sciences Academy in Jericho. YDD worked in collaboration with CBOs and local institutions to organise the camp for 120 youths from the areas of the Old City, Al-Eizariya and Shu’fat refugee camp as part of the Promoting Healthy Youth Development project. The aim of the camp was to provide the youths with team building activities and health awareness sessions that would not necessarily be provided to them in their communities. The camp was held towards the end of the week and I attended alongside staff from YDD and photographed the different activities and meetings that took place.

The Academy is run on a military style basis so as soon as the children had settled in they were taken to the main court where they were taught how to stand and salute appropriately as well as shown basic military exercises. The youths then split off into smaller groups where they had percussion sessions, dance classes and running exercises.

The following day we were woken at the early time of 5am so the children could run laps of the court and do some exercises. The breakfast afterwards was definitely welcomed by all! The day commenced with a football tournament for the boys and team building activities for the girls which included a 3-legged race and tug of war. As well as these activities there were also drug awareness sessions and a team building activity for both the boys and the girls where they had to build stable structures out of spaghetti and marshmallows!

The final day took place in a local garden in Jericho where more activities were held for the youths as well as an evaluation session so that YDD could determine how successful the camp was. Although the weekend proved tiring, the wide variety of activities provided to the youths gave them the opportunity to meet new people and work alongside their peers. 

The staff at the academy were very friendly and accommodating and the beautiful Jericho sunshine really added to the weekend.

I am very grateful for being invited to photograph the Winter Camp as it gave me the opportunity to see how YDD works with local CBOs to implement their projects and I hope to be able to photograph more activities in the coming weeks.