Renowned violinist gives gift of music to young refugees

JERUSALEM - As a boy growing up in Palestinian refugee camps, Ramzi Aburedwan was immortalized in a well-known photo, holding stones to throw at Israeli soldiers.

He has since become a respected musician and composer, and today he provides musical training to around 2,000 young refugees through a project called Al-Kamandjati (The Violinist).

Aburedwan, 38, who grew up in the Al-Amari camp in the occupied West Bank's Ramallah area, said he hopes to create a "strong future generation capable of expressing itself" through such projects.

He launched the project in 2002, wanting to offer youngsters from the camps and other poor children access to expensive musical instruments and music theory classes.

The violinist, who studied music in Angers in western France, began by collecting instruments donated by institutions across Europe.

On his return to Ramallah, he extended the project in 2008 to Beirut's Shatila refugee camp as well as the Bourj el-Barajneh camp in Lebanon.

Aburedwan's project now counts eight music schools and more than 2,000 young students ranging in age from 5 to 18. In March, Palestinian officials named him cultural figure of the year.

The composer, with a neatly trimmed beard, thinks back with pride to the old photo of himself as a child in a red jacket with stones in hand, taken in 1988.

At the time, "we had to protect our camp from the soldiers", he said of Al-Amari, one of the camps set up to house Palestinians displaced by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

With another mass exodus caused by the Six-Day War of 1967, almost eight million Palestinians are considered refugees, with most living in camps across the Middle East.

The future is bleak for many who grow up in such poverty, and that could have been the case for Aburedwan had fortune not smiled upon him.

As a teenager, he worked odd jobs to earn money, hawking newspapers and doing gardening work for families in Ramallah.

One of the women who hired him "heard something about a scholarship to learn music in France", he said.

"She proposed my name and I landed in France, where I learned music before starting Al-Kamandjati," said Aburedwan.

Recently, a group of music students from the Qalandia refugee camp, north of Jerusalem, were training along with musicians teaching violin and cello as part of Aburedwan's program.

"I started to learn music in the Qalandia camp with the Kamandjati group when I was seven," said Tayib al-Hamouz, 16.

Teacher Montasser Jibreen, 25, started to learn music in 2005 with Kamandjati.

"I learned to play the clarinet and after I finished school I got a grant for music at Angers University and became the conductor of the orchestra," he said.

Beyond teaching music, Aburedwan decided to spend this year inviting musicians from abroad to perform for Palestinians.

Agence France-presse