Beduin women in the Negev. (photo credit: HADAS PARUSH)
With the home accident rate among Beduin children in the Negev seven times that of their Jewish counterparts, a group of organizations that have the funding and support of the US Embassy in Israel are jointly running a program promoting child safety among the population.
According to Beterem, about a quarter of all Israeli children who died last year as a result of unintentional injuries were Beduin. Among the causes of death were falling from a roof or being run over by cars backing up into young children, but fires, poisonings and other accidents were also involved.
Be the first to know - Join our Facebook page.
The project results from a collaboration among Beterem – Safe Kids Israel, and the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation-Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (AJEEC-NISPED) active in the Beduin community and includes Beduin grandmothers from the village of Abu Queider, southeast of Beersheba.
AJEEC-NISPED, which works among the Beduin population in the south, recruited for the purpose of the project 15 grandmothers from the Abu Queider in the Neveh Midbar region. Beterem initiated the project and is responsible for the professional content.
The grandmothers get 16 hours of training in four meetings, plus 24 hours of mentorship and guidance from a counselor who joins the grandmothers and helps them individually. After each training session, the grandmothers go out into the community to transmit lessons in preventing child accidents. Following their activities, they attend a peer-learning session where they share their experiences, challenges and difficulties, and come up with solutions together.
The grandmothers receive professional tools developed specifically for this project by Beterem. Since some of them are illiterate, their tools for transmitting their messages are graphics-based. For example, a checklist for guiding families in making their home child-safe includes a picture of a kitchen with specific spots that might pose a hazard for children.
The activities in the community include three distinct programs – home visits, house meetings and guidance for new mothers. The grandmothers go into homes with a checklist that helps them identify problems that endanger children and explain to the parents how to create a safe home environment. They teach home safety, using pictures, to small groups of up to five mothers.
The program’s counselor personally visits each new mother and provides information about the safety of newborn babies, such as safe bathing, use of a safety seat in cars and preventing falls. Mothers who participate in the project receive home safety kits that include a mechanism that prevents door slamming on children’s fingers, locks that prevent young children from opening cupboards and drawers and reaching dangerous substances such as cleaning materials, pesticides and medications.
AJEEC-NISPED explained that “in Beduin society, the grandmother is the family’s pillar. She has a unique position supporting, advising, embracing and educating the family. The grandmother’s home is the center of family life, and family members come and go very frequently, visiting for varying lengths of time.”
Over the past decade, the organization continued, as more women leave the home for university studies and for employment in teaching and other fields, grandmothers have another vital duty – taking care of their grandchildren and teaching them. The participation of grandmothers in this project provides them with knowledge and raises their own awareness of the need for a safe environment for their grandchildren and entire family. “We hope that in the future these grandmothers will assist in transmitting their knowledge and raising awareness throughout this community of limited knowledge resources.”
Beterem director-general Orly Silbinger said that one of its goals is to promote safety in Arab society in general and Beduin society in particular. “We congratulate our partners in this important endeavor.”
Silbinger added that “a visit by representatives of the US Embassy is planned for one of the group’s meetings. We are also looking forward to what should be a very interesting meeting between the Beduin grandmothers from Abu Queider and Arab grandmothers from Turan in the North, where a comparable project has been operating successfully for the past two years under the leadership of Beterem and Healing Across the Divides, an organization focusing on health.”
Recently, when embassy representatives participated in one of the grandmothers’ meetings in Abu Queider, they heard moving stories from them about how the intervention had made a real difference. Families made changes in their homes such as separating play areas from driveways with fencing and gates to reduce the risk of children being run over.