Friends Schools Centennial
 

ElBireh, Friends Boys School – The barefoot students of a century ago in their bright fezzes and crisp aprons have become a page in history. The basic education of reading, and writing and arithmetic has been replaced by advanced courses that have prepared students for Tawjihi, GCE, SAT and now IB. Segregated education is now a memory. Where once girls and boys gotogether only for Sunday Meeting at the Friends Meeting House, they now mingle daily in co-ed classes and are friends. The simple blue tunic with its box pleats has been replaced by a unisex uniform of trousers, shirts and jersey. The simple village children of a century ago have been replaced by sophisticated, cosmopolitan young people who access the internet, watch films brought by satellite dish, travel abroad, and carry cellular phones in their bookbags, the simple has been replaced and often forgotten.

 

In the hundred years of the Friends presence in Palestine, governments have come and gone. The Ottoman Turks, the British Mandate, the Kingdom of Jordan, the Israeli Occupation and now the Palestinian Authority. Throughout these turbulent times the schools have survived. The library books were burned to warm young Turkish soldiers. The grounds of the Friends Girls School and the Meeting House were refuge for those fleeing Haifa and Jaffa during the 1948 exodus. The FGS was an emergency hospital in anticipation of the wounded of Black September in 1970. Illegal Palestinian flags were sewn in Swift House during the Intifada. The Friends were leaders in developing emergency education during the years of the Uprising. The history of Palestine has been the history of the Friends Schools.

   

School days always have special memoires in one’s life. Friends Schools emphacized the importance of taking what is learned in class and applying it thoruhg extra activities such as special poetry competitions (Souk ‘Okath) or sports. Jaad Michael who attended the school in the 30’s and 40’s recollects that the school used to participate in matches against other schools from different cities in Palestine. Students were promised Kunafa (a delicious sort of Arabic cheese cake type) if they won a match or lentils if they lost a game. Students were sent in buses to learn swimming in Jerusalem’s YMCA since there were no pools in Ramallah/ElBireh then. The boys and girls Friends School Christmas Choir performed in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Jaffa and other Palestinian cities.

 

In 1989, the FGS Centennial was celebrated in a very modest and simple style during the first Palestinian uprising amidst crisis, military orders and in between curfews imposed and lifted and schools closure. Then the FGS and FBS were merged into one Friends Schools. This year FBS celebrates its 100th anniversary under somehow similar conditions of unrest that may impose changes in the plans to more suitable ones to fit the situation.

Such changes have become part of the history of the school as part of the history of Palestine