Learning

Hello again, all!

Gabriella and I just finished up our first week of classes here in Nablus. Friday and Saturday are the weekend here, so we have a couple days off before we resume teaching on Sunday.

Drama class has proven quite the learning experience. Our kids love us, as far as we can tell. As soon as we walk into the camps the girls shout our names and wave and offer us their juice packs and Arabic cheetos from snack time. The boys constantly do impressions of me being ridiculous in an example of how to act out a one-minute fairytale that Gabriella and I performed in class one day. I'm calling it adoration and not ridicule, for the sake of my own self esteem.

That exercise in particular was actually quite revealing. Our thirteen kids tend to break off into three groups, the young girls, the young guys, and the older guys. So far we haven't been able to get either younger group to do anything but mimic Gabriella and I. We give them an assignment, something along the lines of 'act out a one-minute fairytale,' for example, and they generally prance about in character but without any semblance of story. Gabriella and I explain what's missing, they do the same thing over again, we perform an example of what we're looking for, and they copy us. It's adorable, but it'd be nice to find some way to access their own imagination. The young girls are led by the oldest in their group, a tall girl with a constant smile and a ponytail who gives the others direction and constantly looks to Gabriella and I for approval.

The older boys, on the other hand, led also by the oldest in the group, and perhaps the most creative and theatrically bravest in the whole class, execute each exercise to perfection, making adjustments as we ask them, telling complete stories. Their stories, however, are incredibly violent. In the fairytale assignment, they opted to forget about doing a fairytale and instead acted out a hostage situation, complete with a prop toy gun (which looked rather real and frightened me for a minute) that one of them just carries around, tucked into the back of his pants. They fulfilled everything we asked in terms of story, and all the successive adjustments we asked them to make (do it in slow motion, do it again with a different ending, etc.), but they also managed to immobilize, trip, and hold each other at gunpoint with moves that seemed straight out of the Navy Seals handbook. I recognized several martial arts take-downs. They cupped their hands over their victims' mouths to maintain stealth. It was frightening how precisely executed the mission was, acted out by these 12, 13, 14-year-old boys.

Noticing this we've begun to encourage less violent stories, and next week we'll begin working with the whole class on a small play Gabriella and I have concocted, which they'll hopefully perform for the rest of the camp at the end of August. The message of the play: non-violence pays. Our goal is to give them enough structure where they can actually start to come up with dialogue and nuances on their own, since starting from scratch has so far proven futile. More on how that goes next week.

Gabriella has spent the rest of the week observing and teaching more English classes, in which she's had to deal with a range of abilities. My classes don't start until Sunday, but I've had the opportunity to meet most of my students so far nevertheless, through meetings at the various centers that Tharwa, the English coordinator, has set up. I think my favorite class will be Advanced Conversational English (at least that's what I'm calling it), which has about a dozen or so 17-20 year-olds in it, almost entirely boys, with a few girls, including one firecracker nicknamed 'Duck,' or 'Bata' in Arabic. Their English is uniformly impressive, so at our meeting everyone was able to introduce himself -- name, age, and hobbies -- and we also discussed what they'd like to learn, which ranged from how to properly introduce oneself in English to proper English terminology when discussing the Occupation. One of the students even offered in his introduction: "My hobbies are...well I love my country very much, and I want to show the world that Palestinians love peace, so that we can finally be free." Rock on.

Between classes Gabriella and I have been talking with the other volunteers and exploring Nablus piece by piece. We interviewed the one volunteer I mentioned in my previous post. That deserves an entire post of its own, though. I'll try to post some of what she said after I transcribe the tape. We also got to see a photography exhibit in Balata refugee camp, put together by one of the volunteers here from Ireland who teaches photography and art, and featuring photographs taken by here students in and around the camp. There was a whole celebration and ceremony surrounding the exhibit, complete with certificates for the students, dancing and music, and pastries. Gabriella brought her own camera and managed to sneak a couple priceless shots of the children before they rushed her and demanded a turn each at taking more photos.

Walking back from the photo exhibit we stopped at a sweet shop to pick up some Arab desserts, and wound up in an hour-long conversation with the shop owner about the conflict, about Islam and its perversion by certain terrorist groups, and finally ending in a mini-Arabic lesson. It was fascinating, if a bit exhausting and filling (he kept force-feeding us cookies and baklava between lectures). We hope to go back and interview him later, along with a radio DJ I met who served as a translator for the government when they were first holding free elections.

Tomorrow we're off to Bil'in, which is a small town a ways west of Ramallah, where they've held weekly peaceful protests every Friday since Israel snaked its Security Fence through the town's land. It's become famous for its protests, where from several hundred yards off the IDF still fires rubber bullets and teargas at the unarmed protesters. Tomorrow should be different, though, because they've finally agreed to move the fence back one whole kilometer. So instead of the protest tomorrow, Bil'in will be holding a celebration. We look forward to attending along with a large contingent of Project HOPE volunteers from France. Wish us luck!

Much love,
John

P.S. One quick note before I go about Palestinian cocktails, which is what they call milkshakes. First, blend ice cream, chocolate, mango, and banana and pour into a glass. Then, sprinkle a layer of crushed peanuts to create a semi-solid platform of sorts, on top of which add two scoops of orange, coconut, or strawberry sherbet, and a giant mound of fresh chopped mango and pineapple. Seven shekels (two dollars) for a 16 ouncer.

I. Love. Palestine.