The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

Recreation
Summer Games
Since 2007, the Agency has run a huge summer recreation programme
for children and young people, who are the most vulnerable of Gaza’s
residents. The annual Summer Games season is the largest recreational
programme for some quarter of a million children in Gaza. Children constitute
the majority of 1.5 million people in Gaza. For them children, life
is overwhelmingly characterized by conflicts, poverty and despair. Pupils
in UNRWA schools spend their days in overcrowded classrooms. Years
of destruction, conflicts and deprivation have left few or no spaces in
which children can participate in recreational or artistic activities, particularly
during the long, hot, summer months.
The Summer Games in 2011 gave about 250,000 children in Gaza an
experience typical for most children on summer holiday – a safe place
for playing, making friends, learning and expressing themselves freely.
Summer Games is a key pillar in UNRWA’s human development programming
in Gaza, promoting human rights and gender equality through
action on the ground. Through art, theatre, sports, beach games, music
and dance, the children participate in camps across the Gaza Strip at almost
300 locations, in school, on beaches and in orphanages and hospitals.
The Games give Gazan kids a chance to have fun and a sense of
normality, in an environment which is anything but normal.
World champion children
In the past two years, children in Summer Games have proved they can
be the best in the world by breaking four Guinness World Records were
broken. On June 30, schoolchildren from across the Gaza Strip gathered
at Khan Yunis stadium, southern Gaza, in an attempt to set a new record
for the “most simultaneous games of parachute at one venue”, comprising
3520 children playing with 176 parachutes, more than doubling
the previous record set by pupils at Plymstock School in Plymouth, England,
on April 4, 2006, when 1547 children played with 58 parachutes.
On July 14, the children of Gaza set their second Guinness World Record
for the largest number of footballs dribbled simultaneously; there had
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