Week Two, In the Bag

Hey everyone,

So here we are at the end of week two, starting week three. It feels like we've been here for months. I'm looking forward to the rest of August...and September...and October, but quickly realizing just how long a time that really is.

Last week was a busy one. Gabriella and I have been teaching a pretty full schedule, and every minute outside of class seems to be spent planning lessons, or walking the city's hills and markets in search of food, costumes for our drama kids, or our next class. Gabriella's schedule is much more intense than mine. The English program director, Tharwa, decided after talking to us for all of five minutes that Gabriella would better with younger kids, me with older, and promptly saddled Gabriella with every younger class there is, which far outnumber the classes for teens and young adults. She teaches four English classes that meet three times a week each, plus our drama class, while I only teach two English classes, twice a week each, plus the daily drama class. I was supposed to teach a third English class in Balata camp, but so far it hasn't met. Today we're going to try to start it up again. They're giving me a drama class to teach on my own one day this week, as well, and I'm hoping first aid classes and some more English classes might pop up in the near future. It may not sound like much to you veterans of education out there, but each class has its own thirty minute commute each way, and no set curriculum. And they don't speak English. And we've never done this before. Ahhhh.

As if our schedule wasn't busy enough, we've now begun private Arabic lessons with Project HOPE's resident instructor, Hassan. I'm excited to finally get to work on the language, nevertheless. We've got all the greetings down pretty well, and I've been working on the alphabet on the side. Arabic is right-to-left, and many vowels are implied rather than represented by a character. For example, the transliteration of the Arabic letters to spell "shokran," which means "thank you," is actually "shkrn." Oh, and there's no "p," so this morning for breakfast I had "Froot Loobs." Gabriella's had a hell of a time trying to teach the English alphabet to her youngest class, which we refer to lovingly as "the monsters."

We've also moved to a new apartment, as Gabriella mentioned in the previous post, one that has a private room for the two of us and feels much more like a real living space rather than squatting in a dorm. It's smaller, so there are fewer volunteers buzzing around, but the ones that are there are fantastic, particularly Abe and Kim. Kim is a crabby middle-aged Australian man with a wonderfully dry sense of humor. Abe is a bit older, born in Palestinian but moved to Oregon after high school, so he's fluent in Arabic but has an American swagger, always a cigar in his mouth, very chill. The two resemble a comic duo, slouched together on the couch, Abe watching news in Arabic, while Kim says dryly of the language, "Frankly I think they all have a speech impediment and need to see a doctor." They were both here two years ago as well, when the sounds of machine guns in the streets were a nightly soundtrack. Things are much calmer now, by comparison, they report.

Drama class has been going great, though no less chaotic. We've begun to stage our play with them, and some of them are really getting into it. Others we still have to work on. We told them the full story of the play the other day and our hero couldn't stop blushing when we told him he'd have to profess his love to the princess. We're still having issues with bullying in the classes, though our translator Hiya laid down the law last week and hopefully that will do the trick.

English classes are also a work in progress. In my advanced class the other day, I showed some of the video footage I took of the protest in Bil'in to the kid who had said his hobby was loving his country. He looked at the video, looked at me, and said, "Ah. Now I respect you." After class he came up to me and asked, "This video you have, of Bil'in, can you take it back to America and take it to CNN so that the people can see what it is like for us here?" My classes have been fluctuating in size and ability. My advanced class started with 14 superb English speakers, but last class attendance jumped to 26, the extra 12 students well behind the original bunch in their handle on the language. I ask, "I am speaking too quickly?" and half say, "No! You're fine!" while the other half have no idea what I just said. I talked to Tharwa, and I think we're going to split the class, and I'll teach each group separately.

The news continues to cover (barely) the tit-for-tat arrests between Fatah and Hamas. I asked one of our Palestinian translators what he thought of the situation. Here are his thoughts: "Fatah are fuckers. Hamas are fuckers. But Fatah are bigger fuckers. You see, it's levels. But really the people are fuckers, for keeping silent about everything that happens here. You see, we have two occupations here, the one you see at night and the one you see in the light, in the day. The people that protect you are the people that arrest you, and you are not even safe in your own home."

He explained that the occupation you see at night is the IDF, with their nightly incursions and arrests in Nablus, and the occupation you see during the day is actually the Palestinian police force, who were re-instated in 2007, but who either flee the city whenever the IDF decide they want to enter, not out of fear but according to protocol, or stay and help the IDF make their arrests themselves. We see them on the streets carrying AK-47s -- old, beat-up, Russian automatic rifles held together by tape, the kind terrorists buy on the black market. The Israeli Defense Forces, of course, carry M16s, like the US military. Of the Palestinian police, our translator had to say:

"Why carry a gun and show it off, stopping cars and waiving your gun at them, if you're just gonna stick it in your ass when the Israeli army shows up?"

He's not the hugest fan.

Yesterday we had the pleasure and honor of interviewing Bassam Shaka, a former mayor of Nablus, very popular during the '70s and '80s, who had his legs blown off in an assassination attempt by Zionist terrorists working with the Israeli army. He is rather famous in these parts, and indeed, to get to his house you hop in a cab and say, "The house of Bassam Shaka." We talked with him for a good hour and 45 minutes -- or rather he talked at us. He very much enjoys telling his history to anyone who will listen. And quite a history it is. He was born in 1930, so he was 17 years old during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, when Israel was founded, and has seen every war, Intifada, and peace process since. His belief is that like the British in India, like every other imperialist occupation in history, this one, too, will inevitably end (I know there are those out there who would say such occupations still go on under a different name, but bear with me). He thinks it impossible that the world won't eventually see what's going on here, and demand that it end. "The facts are all in favor of the Palestinians," he says. "But not everyone knows the facts because of the control on the media." He thinks this will change one day soon, though. I'll post the transcript as soon as I have a spare minute to do the transcribing.

We've begun to set up interviews with Rabbis for Human Rights, Doctors for Human Rights, the Jenin Freedom Theatre, and International Women's Peace Service as well, the former two groups Israeli, the latter two Palestinian. We're also looking at ICAHD (the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions), Mach'som Watch (an Israeli women's group who monitors the checkpoints for abuse), and Breaking the Silence (a group of discharged IDF soldiers who speak out on the inhumane practices of the IDF and give tours in Hebron). And of course we'll be interviewing individuals here as well -- our students, the Project HOPE staff, locals, etc.

Breaking the Silence has put out several booklets of testimonies, one of which we found lying around our apartment. Highlights include standing orders to shoot on sight anyone "with binoculars," "bending down," or "looking at the tanks." Also, revenge killings ("they took six of ours so we take six of theirs" -- "ours" being armed soldiers, "theirs" being unarmed civilian police), and setting up posts in Palestinian homes by locking the family in a room, punching a hole in their wall with a bulldozer (in order to unload the Armed Personnel Carrier inside the house), and then demolishing with the bulldozer every home surrounding that house.

The penalty for shooting a child is 100-200 shekels (about 30-60 dollars).


Check out their website at http://www.shovrimshtika.org/.

There have also been reports -- you can find them all over the internet -- that at the weekly protest in Bil'in, which we attended not this Friday but the last, the IDF guarding the fence have now begun to spray protesters with sewage water. We missed this by one week. Apparently several of the protesters got sick on the spot. Others managed to collect samples of the water for analysis. Unbelieveable.

Just when I start to think, "Yes all that happened when things were hotter, during the Intifada, but now things seem manageable. Yes international laws are being violated left and right, yes there's still the refugee problem. But people can almost go about their lives." -- just when I start to think that, something like this happens. Something uncalled for, low, demonstrative of the ugliest kind of racism. The kid who got shot point-blank with rubber bullets. The sewage. Volunteers being deported for working with apolitical, humanitarian organizations. It's not at all the worst of what goes on in the world. People elsewhere have it much harder than the Palestinians. But few situations are so completely twisted around and misrepresented in the media. This "conflict" is so completely imbalanced.

Please send us questions if you have them. Please look past Fox and CNN and the presidential campaigns for the real facts. Thank you for following us thus far.

Much love,
John