Camino 2025: Make a Child Smile! #giveachildhope

published: 15 March 2025

Hello, I’m Matthew, trustee and treasurer for ABCD Bethlehem. ABCD is a small, UK-based charity that improves the lives of children with disabilities across Palestine regardless of faith, race or gender.

ABCD has been providing equipment and care for these disadvantaged children for the past 40 years, and within the last decade has established children’s rehabilitation centres in 6 refugee camps in the West Bank.

Sadly life in these refugee camps has become much more difficult these past 18 months, with the West Bank as a whole subject to lockdown and repeated raids on the camps. In February our children’s centre in the Nur Shams refugee camp was forced to close entirely as the camp itself was invaded and evacuated. A once thriving centre of rehabilitation, and source of both joy and hope to many children and their families, has had to be abandoned.

ABCD needs urgently to raise funds to support disabled children displaced from Nur Shams, as well as those in its other centres, as the crisis in the West Bank deepens and the needs of both children and their families multiply. We are rapidly implementing remote learning and therapy solutions, and providing emergency funding to all our centres, but cannot do so without your help.

As a charity we rely entirely on the generosity of individuals. Please give what you can to put the smile back on the face of a child, and to provide a beacon of hope in a land where there is so much darkness.

A pilgrim’s progress

My challenge is to walk the famous Camino de Santiago, from Porto (in Portugal) to Santiago in north-western Spain. A journey of 250 km (150 miles) spanning 19th-31st May. I’ll do my best to travel lightly and avoid the slough of despond, but my steps will be in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Palestine whose own walks have been of displacement and despair, and who so desperately need our solace and support.