Ag Roads, Water Cisterns, Pools Improve W. Bank Farmers’ Lives

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TEQOA, WEST BANK (MCC)—It was a bouncy, 25-minute ride on a twisting, rutted, dirt road. Once or twice, the driver had to back up and navigate the hair-pin turn from a different angle. Along the road were farmers, who had come from the village by horse or truck, weeding and spraying their newly sprouted wheat.

Shepherds were calling their flocks scattered along the steep slopes. Half way down one of the valleys is a cistern, which Mennonite Central Committee had helped two farm families build.

The cistern enables Esa Jadua and his family and neighbors to water their crops and their sheep without hauling water from the village, explained Yacoub Amer, MCC rural development officer in the West Bank. THE CISTERN is one of many that MCC helped West Bank farmers build this past year.

MCC provided an average of two and a half tons of cement to each of 142 West Bank farmers who built cisterns to collect the winter rains in 1986. These cisterns and the other agriculture projects are some of the ways in which MCC supports Palestinian farmers who are eking out a living on the hills of the land once known as Palestine.

In another valley town, Quazeebah, east of El Aroub, are seven cement pools that farmers had built to catch and save the water that flowed from three springs just above the village. MCC provided the cement for the pools and plastic pipes so that these full-time farmers could increase their vegetable production, Amer said.

MCC ALSO HELPED build 31 kilometers of agricultural road, connecting 14 West Bank hamlets to the markets and services of a nearby town in 1986. Visiting MCC representatives saw five kilometers of one of these bulldozer-carved roads and ate a “thank-you” feast prepared by the villagers whose lives had been improved.

The villagers live in Khalet Wahsheh, just south of Hebron, on top of a mountain not far from the “green line” that separates Israel from the West Bank. The road, in which MCC invested $10,000, just a portion of the total cost, enables the 80 people in the hamlet to bring their farm produce and their sick to town by car instead of by horse.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead or page date line survives — the clipping is trimmed to the two-line headline and two text columns, closing with a house filler. Nothing on it names the paper or the date, so 1987-07-09 and “Mennonite Weekly Review” could not be verified.

The dateline credit “(MCC)” and the closing house line, “• A REVIEW WANT AD provides wide advertising outreach at low cost.”, are consistent with a paper called the Review carrying Mennonite Central Committee copy.

Cite this clipping

"Ag Roads, Water Cisterns, Pools Improve W. Bank Farmers’ Lives," Mennonite Weekly Review, 9 July 1987. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1987-047. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1987-047