Supporting womens education and children's health and play in Palestine
With one week to go it is time to sign up!
You can see from these ‘heatmaps’ when we most need help ensuring the run is supported and safe. Click on the images in the slides to get a full screen image.
You might not think it but signing up to take part at night time or very early morning is exciting, fun and invigorating . Owls, foxes and supportive marshals can be spotted making all sorts of noises, from hoots to hoorays!
small park BIG RUN is a community solidarity event in support of Palestinian people. For a day, in the heart of Sheffield, Palestine is visible – in spite of continuous efforts that would encourage us to forget Palestine and silence voices in support of Palestinian people.
So, we are really pleased to have a programme that has Palestinian voices loud and clear both on 3pm Saturday afternoon and 10 am Sunday morning. (Free coffee and cake on Sunday morning!)
On Saturday, we are privileged to be able to welcome Mahmoud Zwahre who has been tireless (and brave) in his activism to defend Palestinian farmers.
Mahmoud will be helping us plant a native tree in solidarity with these hard pressed famers close to Meersbrook Hall; this will be followed by a talk in the Palestinian Voices tent.
Mahmoud will show us how Palestinian farmers bear the brunt of the environmental destructions perpetrated by Israel whether – this is uprooting of trees or denial of access to land or water. he will talk to us too about his campaign to plant native trees in Palestine to replace the ones uprooted by settlers.
Just as Palestinian farmers have to confront, daily incursions, so Palestinian women have to confront climate and environmental change. Dima Alshami will follow Mahmoud and discuss what climate justice means for Palestinian women.
Dima is a Rotheram-based Palestinian student.
Finally, our own Jawad Qasrawi, ran at the Palestine Marathon event in March this year. He will talk to us about what this means to him, his attempts to see his father’s village and meeting up with his family. Bring a hanky!
Look out for the Palestinian voices tent! For times see the programme.
As always we will be having a celebration at the end of small park BIG RUN – the Lord Mayor, congratulations to the 24 hour runners and all the people who have helped, and as always a special zoom call with children and childcare workers in Khan Younis, Gaza, at a centre where the money your raise goes.
This year we will be doing something really special.
We have invited six choirs to come and help us sing you’ll never walk alone. We want you and your friends to join in too …
…in the park or on the zoom.
We want you to feel the joy of singing with lots of people and we want the children and their carers to hear us say loud and clear they are not forgotten, that we think about them and we shout out for them.
But for this to work really well as a broadcast, we need your help now to raise £2000 in order to have the right technology and make this a truly memorable event.
We have set up a crowdfund: https://chuffed.org/project/sing-for-gaza.
Please like, share, spread the word and , if you can , make a small donation. Lots of small donations will do it!!
#smallparkBIGSING
This year at small park BIG RUN we are raising awareness of how Israeli state policies have been labelled by Amnesty International and Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem as apartheid.
We have recently written about how Palestinians are denied access to clean water.
Here we want to highlight how indigenous Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and apartheid, with no control over their land or natural resources, are highly vulnerable to the actions of settlers who defended by the Israeli army, regularly tear down trees that Palestinian farmers depend on for their livelihoods.
In a previous small park BIG RUN we welcomed Khaloud Ajarma who told us about the legacy from her family’s forced removal from their land.
This year, we are really pleased to be welcoming Mahmoud Zwahre, an academic and grassroots activist at small park BIG RUN at 3pm on Saturday 17th June.
He will plant a tree, native to the UK, and talk to us about the daily fight that Palestinian farmers face to hold on to their trees their land and their livelihood.
Home is a place you can go back to at will
where your history sits
Our beautiful park welcoming the spring, holding tight till midsummer’s weekend. It reminds us of the freedom we have to simply take a stroll. It is part of our home.
The wonderful poem below brings to the fore the torment of being forced from your home and the things we might miss.
So join us from small park BIG RUN this summer, midday June 17th to midday June 18th, to celebrate and show solidarity with Palestinian people forced from their homes still waiting to return.
More details coming soon.
I have left my history
clothes in the cupboard plants in the garden
who will eat the beans now?
the litany of what I should have brought gets longer: a stick to walk with
dried fruit matches better shoes door key
but they could change the locks
and now I think: scissors scissors of course if only I had scissors.
What exact thing should I have brought to remind me of me?We can’t look at once in all directions and can be seen for miles
unless we lie flat and still in clothes the colour of ground
all we have as defence is how we move and what we have on our backs
if we are found we could be lost
we must stay lost to find the way
beetles ants we creep up the slope scan the hillside for men dogs
we cannot rest too long those who pass us might forget us or take our place
shouts in the distance thundering feetI am ablaze with dry mouth sandpapered rough
thickly sticky lips cracked tree bark throat closes over words unspoken
I flash a dripping tap a bubbling spring a watering can
a wave that never comes never crashes
someone gives us bread sweetness spreads as I chew
now I can wash my feet tension skimmed off but not poured out
I reach out to feel the soil beneath me fall into desperate dark,
someone drops a pan and I start up shaking how do I know it is safe?Home is a place you can go back to at will
where your history sits where the language spoken is your language
days punctuated by those small routines
kitchen cupboards with the spices you need to cook a pan big enough for the family
the locked door the shuttered window
rattle of army trucks roared into the village
it’s not my home now people roam round it
plan a future that doesn’t include me.
So many lovely moments and so people to thank!
Thank you to :
Let’s have more next year – #spBR23 -> 17th and 18th June 2023.
Last Saturday we were delighted to welcome Alexi Dimond , local councillor for Gleadless Valley ward, to open the run.
He spoke very movingly and powerfully about the importance of striving for justice for refugees in general and Palestinian people in particular . His full speech is here
Thank you Alexi.
Bit by bit the pieces are coming together – more runner registrations this week , a few more marshals (still not enough though: fancy it? And on top of this rather prosaic administrative jigsaw, is a little bit of magic as we start to see and hear all the art and love people bring to make small park BIG RUN such a wonderful event .
Here is a little taste of Body of Sound, who once again will sing at Turners Hill (hopefully not in the rain this year!), at 8pm on Saturday June 18th. You will have to be there to hear more.
You can see the full programme here
A short programme of films in the walled garden, from Saturday midday till 4 and Sunday 11.30 till 1.30. See our programme
There are many films about Palestinians as refugees, so central has this issue been to the Palestinian experience since 1948 – and some would argue since 1917, when the British mandate started. This selection is inevitably biased: based on what we have easy access to, the available time to review their relevance and a suitable programme length for small park BIG RUN. But we hope it gives the essence and breadth of that experience as well as its contemporary relevance.
The films we are showing have all been made by Badil (badil.org), a refugee rights organisation in the West Bank. Badil make many films and we recommend you review them all! These particular films have been made over a period of time to convey information about the plight of Palestinians as refugees, the theme for small park BIG RUN in 2022.
We start with Nakba in numbers which is a fast paced run through of the numbers of people who were expelled or have been forcibly displaced during the Nakba.
As you will see in the next films, expulsion is an ongoing process and pressures brought to bare on Palestinians by Israel are designed to force them to leave. But their resistance is both courageous and long lived as shown in We Will Never Leave and Here We Will Remain.
For those that live outside of Palestine and Israel, in refugee camps in the Lebanon, life is harsh and the craving to leave to find a better life is the focus of the next two short films: No place to be and Stranded in Lebanon.
Last but one, we have a longer film (16 minutes), The Sun is Due to Rise. This film takes us through both the initial creation of refugees between 1947 and 1949 and subsequent policies enacted by Israel to force Palestinian people from their homes.
We finish with a determined cry for the right to return in Why we should return.
We hope these films are informative and inspire you to continue your support for Palestinian people to fight for justice.
The programme is about 40 minutes in length.
