Every Child Have the Right to Play

Hello again, all,

The other night I had a great interview with Abe, Kim, and Anna at our flat. Abe and Kim I've mentioned before. Anna is a young Icelander who's been here several months, and ran into some trouble the other week returning from a jaunt to Jordan when she refused to lie to the border guard and just told them outright that she is a free person, and so she feels she should be free to tell them that she volunteers for a humanitarian organization in the West Bank. They were apparently flabbergasted for a while, and promptly stamped her passport with one-week to leave the country. Thankfully she was able to get her visa re-extended.

The four of us had a wonderful, two-hour conversation about the occupation, the history of the conflict, what might happen in the future, etc. Kim, who has also been to Iraq and the Balkans at wartime, explained to us that the solitary cracks we'd been hearing in the distance each night were indeed gunshots. Two years ago, when he and Abe were here, the sounds of machine guns were more common, signalling full-on shoot-outs between IDF and resistance fighters in the streets of the Old City, or the refugee camps. We'd only heard single shots ourselves, which he explained were clean assassinations. No more shootouts. Just pop. Done. About one a night, as far as I can tell, though I suppose there could be more while we're asleep.

Teaching is going really well. It's a little rough because I never know how many students are going to show up, or if new students are going to just start showing up, or what exactly they've learned in the past. But that's just kind of the nature of things here. You just go with it. Classes get cancelled. Class sizes double overnight. Whatever.

The biggest challenge has been the mixture of abilities within individual classes. It's been hard to find material to teach that everyone can understand but nobody has yet learned. Often I find that a third of the kids already have a handle on whatever grammatical construction or vocab category I'm going over, while another third have a lot of work to do before they'll be able to fully understand it. And on top of that they're very shy about speaking English, so it's hard to guage who's getting it and where they are because they speak up so little.

Despite all that classes have been pretty good so far, though. In my advanced class the other day we listened to Barenaked Ladies, Billy Joel, Queen, Tool, and NOFX (a punk band). We tried to decipher the lyrics, talked about the grammatical constructions within the lyrics, vocab, etc. That went over well. As have role-plays like 'How to Introduce Yourself to Barak Obama.' They're all very interested in American culture, politics, music. I used Bush when trying to describe what the word "repugnant" means. They liked that.

In my less advanced, younger classes, they seem to get a kick out of my willingness to make a fool out of myself in order to demonstrate a word meaning. I get the impression that their teachers are generally pretty strict, or at least uptight. Even after I dismiss them they don't dare move until I've packed up my own materials and am ready to leave myself, and even then they all shake my hand on the way out. I think I entertain them by just being casual, which helps keep them focused and interested. Gabriella has much much younger students, and has to concoct all sorts of games to keep them attentive. I've been lucky not to have to do that so far.

So far I've mainly been teaching tenses -- pluperfect and all that -- since almost across the board they tend to mix and match past and present, gerunds and infinitives and transitives, while remaining generally ignorant of things like "have been." We've also done a lot on the word "would," since it plays so many roles but breaks its own rules so often. It's crazy, I'm learning far more English trying to teach it than I ever did trying to learn it. I never realized how much grammar we take for granted. Try to imagine explaining the difference between "would" and "could" or "wash" and "clean" to ESL students. It's a trip.

Drama class has gotten more difficult now that we're into rehearsals. We've stopped playing theatre games entirely, so they get bored more easily and don't like having to share the spotlight. There was a big scuffle at the end of last week, in which some of the bigger kids started really pounding on one of the smaller outsider types. Our translator gave them a stern talking to, which I think did the trick. We still have work to do with them, though, and only three weeks 'til performance. Luckily they still really like us, and are always looking for our approval. In turn, they give us huge double-thumbs up any time Gabriella or I whips out the latest Arabic word we've learned.

My courseload has doubled overnight. My English class at Balata finally started, we split the advanced class in two, and starting next week I'll be teaching a six-class workshop in First Aid to local women. Today I played some theatre games with children at a girl's summer camp in a village just outside Nablus, which also might turn into a regular thing. There were about 60 kids, aged 6-13, so it was a bit much to handle. The village in which the summer camp takes place has an unusually large population of children who are mentally ill or handicapped, blind, deaf, or mute. The camp makes a point of recruiting a solid handful of these kids each session, to help them learn to function socially within groups. We spent most of the morning playing games, and then we sat down and they sang us a concert's worth of Arabic pop songs and traditional Palestinian numbers, and taught us some Arabic as well, to their great amusement. In arts and crafts they made a giant painted poster of a rose, above which they wrote in English, "Every child have the right to play."

Something like 60 or 70 percent of the population in Palestine is under 18 years old. The children and the opportunities and attitudes they have (or don't) really are the future of this conflict. I take that back. Would be the future of this conflict, if the people ever really had a say. The government, like in Israel, like in the USA, really doesn't represent them, especially with the condemnation of the Hamas majority in the last election. Someone mentioned the other day that Jimmy Carter had quoted a poll of Israelis in which 60 percent supported negotiating directly with Hamas. The Arab nations have handed Israel peace on a platter several times over the past decade, and while I'm sure the general population would have accepted it, the Israeli government refuses. The Palestinians don't even want their whole country back anymore. They understand that was lost in '48. Withdraw Israeli borders back to the Green Line, as they should've been since 1967, remove the illegal settlements that are currently partitioning the West Bank into over a dozen enclaves, and give the Palestinians East Jerusalem, where they already live anyway. That's all they want. That's the Two-State Solution, clear and simple. And most Israelis would give it to them. But still the government refuses.

That aside, Hiba, the activities director here, estimated the other day that Project HOPE now reaches about eight or nine thousand children a year. That's gotta count for something.

Much love,
John