Saba Nader and Ola Haniya are both 16-year-old juniors at the Evangelical Lutheran School of Hope in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. Since they were small children, they have been practicing dabkeh, a traditional form of Palestinian dance.
The students, members of the school's Al Raja Palestinian Folkloric Dance Troupe that performed Thursday night in Beatrice, consider dancing a way to reach out to the rest of the world. Al Raja, after all, means “hope.”
“We want to show the world that we are like them,” Nader said. “We live and love and express our feelings, too.”
The School of Hope is run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land and has about 400 Christian and Muslim students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The dance troupe is on a two-month tour that is part of the ELCA's Peace Not Walls campaign for justice in the Middle East. Local churches pitched in to host the dancers during their three days in Beatrice.
Thursday's performance, one of dozens the group will do on their tour, included about an hour of dancing as well as audience participation and presentations from school and church officials. Since arriving in Beatrice on Wednesday night, the dancers had spent time with local host families and visited the Homestead National Monument of America. Before leaving on Friday for Fremont, they'll tour a local farm. After performances in Fremont and Omaha they'll head west to California to continue their tour.
This is the second international trip for the dancing troupe, which formed two years ago. They went to Norway in 2004.
Najwa Kreitem, a teacher at the school who accompanied the students in Norway and is traveling with them in the U.S., said the tours are important because they get people from different cultures to meet face to face.
“These trips are a bridge between people,” Kreitem said. “They know more about us and so they support us. It's a cultural exchange program.”
Dabkeh, a high-energy line dance of celebration and community, is part of that exchange. Like Nader and Haniya, most of the students learn dabkeh at an early age, and they practice twice a week as members of the dance troupe. They said they keep dancing because their parents and grandparents danced.
In some ways, some dancers see dabkeh as a form of nonviolent protest against the conditions in the West Bank, where the Palestinian people are under strict travel restrictions and are hemmed in by a 25-foot high wall that Israel began building in 2002 to separate the Israeli and Palestinian populations.
On a broader level, the girls said, dabkeh is a way of both celebrating and protecting their cultural identity.
“Dabkeh is part of our tradition and culture. It's the way our grandparents danced 100 years ago,” Nader said. “Without the past we have no future.”