You might have noticed a few posts over recent months written in Arabic shared on our social media pages. We wanted to keep you in the loop and explain why you may have been seeing this on your feed.

As part of our 2023-2025 strategy and commitment to ‘inspire’ caregivers to use music in the care they provide, we wanted to use our Facebook page to reconnect with our Partners in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We wanted to find out if they were still running their own music sessions, if they wanted any support from us and what the best way to reach out to them was.

Over the years we have seen many of our Palestinian Partners follow us on Facebook and use it to communicate with other people. Historically we have relied on email, but this year we thought we’d explore if Facebook was a more effective way to stay in touch with this group of care givers. COVID and heightened local tension has prevented us from travelling to work alongside our Palestinian Partners for a number of years, but we believe many of them are still using music with the children where they work. The messages you are seeing in Arabic are invitations to our Palestinian Partners to get back in touch with us, to tell us about their music sessions, and to guide us as to how best we might support their practice from a distance (or in person, when it is possible).

Our callout was a huge success as we heard back from 11 Partners, including two Partners who we have not been in touch with since 2013 and 2016! We were so excited to learn that 8 of them were still using music in their care and for the remaining 3 who were not, they are eager to restart this.

Since all of our respondents said that they would love to keep in touch through Facebook to receive updates and resources, you may see some infrequent social media posts written in Arabic aimed at our Occupied Palestinian Partners. Of course, Facebook is an extremely clever platform and what you may actually see are auto-translations of our Arabic posts, relayed to you in English. We try to make it clear what language a post was originally written in to remind you of this, but if ever you notice a post with awkward grammar, unusual terminology, strange capital letters or misspellings of names, these could result from autotranslation software.

We hope to keep you updated and share some more good news on our learning from our Palestinian Partners in the coming months!