Well, we may have only had one participant, but we thought both of his photographs were amazing. Mujahed Aghbar, age 15, is from Nablus. He learned about photography through Tomorrow’s Youth Organization, and has since gone on to compete in several photography competitions. You can read his story and see other examples of his impressive work on the TYO blog.

Mujahed, thank you for sharing your photographs for International Youth Day. ACP invites you to become our first guest blogger from Palestine so our readers, especially here in the United States, can see more of your photographs and hear more of what you have to say!

!!!مبروك

–Elizabeth Arend

Photo by: Mujahed Aghbar

“It’s so important for us as youth to go and support Palestine to improve, to change and to have our own state called Palestine. It’s a big dream and a big hope for us to have it. Even a small kid, as you can see in the picture , is getting out from his school early he holds his hope in his innocent eyes and he went to march for freedom and peace for Palestine. He does not want toys or balls to play with.  He does not want to live his childhood as any other child does.  All he wants is to have his dignity and to feel like a human; to see if someone, somewhere, wants to hear from him, to see the sunshine behind that separation wall!  This is our dream as youth and we will keep dreaming until it happens. We will keep dreaming until we have our own state and live in it because we believe that one day this will happen!”

Photo by: Mujahed Aghbar

“This picture describes the life in Palestine and hope that we have in our thoughts. The line symbolizes our life and the boy walking represents youth. It represents us youth trying to go from the darkness of “bad education, no food, no freedom of movement ” to the sun or to the light of  “good education and food, having our basic rights as Palestinians and humans, to have a state and live in freedom”; the wall is the occupation that we live under!”