voice of music

honestly, there is something extremely unique that gently bellows out of an Oud.  i think the first time i heard its sound was at a show that was being organized by some friends at UNC and a palestinian student had taken the Oud to stage, explaining that it was a very traditional instrument, and by just himself and his instrument on stage, he had strung its strings and hummed a soothing song in Arabic.

the shape makes me think of a wooden tear drop and i have to admit at first i wasn't completely struck by its sound. it was a foreign voice to me.

the teacher's room at school is a realm of its own i feel at times.  and so entirely different from how work rooms in the States would be.  during the two daily recess periods, a large tray of tea glasses and a large kettle of tea is brought out accompanied by a large pot of sugar. fresh mint leaves are sometimes brewed with the tea which leaves a deliciously sweet and subtle aroma steaming out of the kettle.  that's usually the morning breaks.  the afternoon breaks are spruced up a little more strongly with smaller arabic kettles of harsh, strong turkish coffee being served in tiny, miniature cups. the turkish coffee needs to be served in cups that small because each sip is like taking 10 espresso shots. it's better to not serve them in glasses or normal sized cups.

tea and coffee is served and everyone takes out their mini sandwiches to munch on, usually the round pita bread (except calling it  pita bread is unjust because this bread tastes about a million times better because its just so darn soft and delicious) stuffed with cheese, or cucumber and tomatoes or humus.  or a pack of biscuits is ripped open.  if one person opens a bag of anything, be it a small bag of chips, or cookies, or nuts or whatever, they go around the entire room asking everyone if they would like one.  it is such a sweet gesture.  and everyone freely just helps themselves to a piece.  it's a small gesture of hospitality that i think says volumes.  i am uber appreciative of it when my stomach is grumbling a little more than usual by break time.

and so with each teacher coming in and out, also comes in and out different personalities. there are the older, traditional, conservative Muslim men teachers, dressed in stiff and crisp suits that never interact with the females who sit on the other side of the single long table in the room.  there are a handful of first year young teachers and women teachers, ranging in age from a nice spectrum of early 20s to maybe early 50s, who chit chat away (about things that i dont understand).

my favorite is the music teacher.  he's got crazy hair and i love it! and he brings his Oud to school every day and every Tuesday he takes it out in the teacher's room to play a tune that everyone in the room knows.  and that sends the room in a subtly comical but extremely sweet and melodic trance.  teachers sometimes shout out suggestions for him to play a tune, and there was even ONE time when i saw one of THOSE stiff, and traditional muslim men teachers who not only was softly singling along BUT for a split second he put up both of his arms to snap his fingers and dance a little.  i gloat to have caught that moment because the next time i see mr. no smiling man, i think to myself, you dance and laugh after all, just like the rest of us.

those are the times that i REALLY wish i knew arabic.  i want to understand the words that everyone hums along to with so much endearment and attachment.  these are not pop songs, but decade old songs about nature, struggles, or life in palestine or the arab world.  i have to ask for translations sometimes, but coming from a background where english is not my first language, i know that so much meaning is lost in translation, especially with songs or words of poetry.  words can sometimes be translated, but emotions attached to those words certainly can't.

Somehow, this instrument, so unique in its voice and sound, speaks so much as its sound are strung out by hands that have taken ample amount of time to know it.  It sweeps everyone off of their unrelated daily tasks and brings them together to literally sit together, and sing with it.

Over a plate of sliced apples and a side of pistachios

Oudy's mom brought out a giant platter of fruit, filled with sliced bananas, peeled oranges, tiny yellow plum like fruits (i have no idea what they are called in English, but they are delicious; one of those fleshy, juicy, sour, mouth puckering fruits with a couple of seeds inside of them that you have to spit out and you have to tolerate the fact that almost always a little bit of the juice squirts out as you pierce your teeth into them), and sliced apples.  I was sitting in their living room, with his dad sitting on the sofa adjacent to mine and Oudy sitting on the other side, watching some random Arabic game show on T.V.  Two days prior to that I would have never thought that I'd be in their house, enjoying a hospitable serving of fruit and pistachios munching away and talking to them like family friends.

 But here I was, graciously welcomed into the home of yet another student.  I'm almost used to the chain of events that lead up to this moment now.  What starts out as a concerned parent either waiting inside the main office or outside in the playground (an empty parking lot, not really a playground) to talk about their child, asking me what it is that we are doing in class, asking me about who i am, with their guard up drilling me like a sergeant and requesting  things from me that no other teacher is required or even expected to do (like sending home a detailed "objective" sheet that outlines the chapter objectives and what I do in class, or creating a password protected account for every single one of my students on my blog so that I can evaluate every student every night and send notes to parents) turns into a 30 to 40 minute conversation between them and I,  and as I answer all of their questions in detail without losing my patience I see their defensive guard slowly melt away and then the conversation ends with "Are you free tomorrow night? Maybe after school?".  Of course I never reject an invitation, because getting to meet my students outside of class and school, and getting to meet the entire family is thrilling. And it's always fun for the kid to have his teacher come home with him to watch tv. 

I learn a lot through these conversations, which is why I love meeting families so much.  They hyperactive but extremely brilliant kid in class, whose mischief  is sometimes skin crawlingly aggravating but sometimes cute in retrospect (sometimes) I discover has a dad that works in the Palestinian Military, who speaks fondly of having lived in Maryland for a year,  and a mom that works with the Ministry of Public Health.  Their curiosity about me is fascinating to me, but kind of fun, I get to explain why it is that I love what I'm doing right now so much.  I'd be lying if I didn't say that I feel an unspoken pressure having to prove myself to them though, especially when they ask me about my age (his mom literally said "oh my God, only 23? you are a babbbyy!").  Every single one of them asks me if I like Palestine and their faces break out into an appreciative smile when I tell them that I don't just like it, I really love it and I think the land is beautiful, and that I am truly grateful  to be here, and that in my brief stay here so far I've encountered incredible amounts of kindness.

And in these situations, there is always a moment of brain and heart jerking comment or conversation that leaves me a little (by little i mean a lot) dazed, and inches me toward understanding the occupation a tiny bit more.

Oudy's dad was candidly talking about living here, in Ramallah, and his village, and how he'd like me and M to meet his extended family and take us there one day.  I can't even remember how small talk after small talk led to this but maybe it was after a comment about how checkpoints were closed last week.  Or maybe it was after talking about how soldiers do whatever they feel like whenever they feel like, or maybe it was after his comment of "you realize that you are not living in a free country right?" when he started telling me  story after story of what happens in checkpoints.

"they don't let pregnant women go through the checkpoint sometimes, as she is going into labor, they stand in her way and the hospital.  and you know how Qalandia is, the queues of people are crazy, it's always so crowded.  there was one woman who they wouldn't let through and she was forced to give birth at the checkpoint.  You know what the soldiers did after she gave birth? they took the newborn and held it, and then passed it to another soldier.  And you know what he did?"  I shrugged no.  "He took his M16 and shot it, and left the mother alive, and she went crazy"

The TV was still going, Oudy and his siblings were crawling in and out of the room, we were drinking tea at this point, still munching on the pistachios, and he told me this the same way someone would tell you what the weather was like that day.  I stared at him for a good 10 seconds at least, not knowing how to respond. My face was stuck in a grimace for a long time, as I was trying really hard to comprehend what he just said.  A soldier shot a newborn at a checkpoint after the mother had given birth.  In front of a crowd, where everyone saw what happened.

"Things like this happens all the time.  This is not news to us" he said after all I kept on saying was "..I can't believe that".

I don't know what perplexes me more, the fact that there is a possibility that an incident like this happened/happens or that they are not jarred by this at all.  He continued to tell me more stories (one was about a father and son trying to cross a checkpoint in Gaza, and the soldier opted to repeatedly shoot 17 times at the kid, leaving him dead on his dad's lap)

It's one of those things where your mind stops grasping, and all you keep saying is "wait that can't be real.  a human being can't be capable of doing that to a newborn can they?"

but isn't that the same way  people had reacted when the incidents of the Holocaust were slowly being revealed for the first time? so shocked and disgusted that people denied that any of it was true? The irony here is that the victims of that historical mar, are now doing the same exact thing to another group of people.

M and i have had many conversations, and at the crux of everything is that people here are not seen as people or human to  proponents of the other side of the conflict.  Take any genocide, and that's the crux of the matter, when one group of humans start regarding another as beasts , the paramount of evil that spews out is unbelievable.

And somehow the predators of this situation have convinced the world that they are the victims in the situation and that their "right to exist" must be defended at all costs.

Happy Palestinian Mother's Day

School Saturday was a hectic chaos because everyone was up in arms about the Mother's day show that the kids have been practicing for (for months) and today was finally the day they'd be able to light up the stage with the poems and songs and skits that they had learned.  Parents started spilling in around 12 and the mass confusion of which class goes into the auditorium at which time, which classes don't, where the teachers are supposed to be, who they have to take in, if there was a recess or not, which building certain classes needed to be in, all of that was a hodgepodge of confusion and almost a calamity.  I felt like a headless chicken running around; first taking my class to another building where supposedly all lower grades would have to stay until their cue to come in would be announced, then being told that that information was wrong and i had to shift my class, then being told that all of that was wrong and there was a new schedule, and then at some point realizing that i was inside of a classroom with only half of my class, and i had absolutely no idea where the other half had gone.

by the end of the day i was a mess and I used all of Sunday to decompress and detox from Friday (by doing absolutely nothing but writing, sleeping and finally praying) and I had completely wiped out "mother's day" from my mind.

Until this morning.

One of my student beaming in smiles handed over a red carnation to me and said "Happy Mother's Day!", and then another student followed, giving me a small red rose.
Can a teacher ask for a more wonderful way to be greeted?  lol I don't think so.  Not only was I touched by the flower, the gesture and her smile, but I had to stop for a few seconds to actually think of what that gesture meant. Almost all of the female teachers in the school got flowers from various students, each walked into the teacher's room with a couple of red or pink carnations at least.  One of the biggest things I had to get used to in the school system, here outside of the States, is the level of endearment and physical affection that teachers and students mutually show each other.  Not a day goes by now that I don't get attacked with hugs (at least once a day, some of those hugs are killer ones, like the ones that actually hurt physically), and each class period is infused with hugs, but strict reprimanding, lots and lots and lots of yelling, but loving as well, and of course teaching  :)   ...kind of like the relationship one has with their parents, with their mothers. 
And so it makes sense for teachers to also get Mother's Day gifts, don't you think? We don't do that in the States, someone should really suggest that one.
I've never been on the receiving end of a Mother's Day gift, and so today getting those flowers certainly meant a lot, .now I suddenly feel like I went from unmarried and single to having 60 children.
Cheers and happy mother's day to everyone!


(after Friday, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a lot of things and being stuck in a mental warp. i got some nice nuggets of wisdom from my roommate who told me it was ok to be overwhelmed by everything that is going on around me, but it's not so great to internalize everything.  life goes on, and you have to do the little things that make life go on (like stop watching the news obsessively and go grade some papers, make dinner, watch a movie and read a book and go to bed).  I kept on thinking about the 2 teenagers that were shot dead by Israeli officers on Saturday in Nablus and 2 more on Sunday, feeling frozen by the amount of violence and inhumane deaths that this place has endured and is continuing to endure.  However, there's things one can change, and there's things one can't.  I know I will not be able to refrain myself from being opinionated about the political situation here but I also realize that feeling immobile doesn't help anyone and getting caught up in that would unjustly turn me blind to seeing the daily beauties of life here, living and working in Palestine.  And that is something that I definitely would like friends back home to get a glimpse of, Palestine beyond the violence)

"Why Protest Rebuilding a Synagogue"

Recently, along with the clashes, a synagogue in East Jerusalem was re-opened which caused extreme violence in the area.  This is an article that I received over a listserv that I'm on that I feel does a good job of explaining why the reopening of the synagogue was so offensive and provocative to many. Enjoy the read. 

Why protest building a synagogue

The Hurva synagogue was destroyed in the 1948 war by the Jordanian army.  Before 1948, synagogues were used by Zionist underground forces for illicit activities including hording weapons.*  But why is there a furor over building it again? First we must recognize that International law is rather clear that East Jerusalem is illegally occupied by Israel and per the Geneva conventions, and buildings or activities in the occupied areas are subject to those conventions.  Any transfer of population to the occupied areas including infrastructure for these individuals is considered proscribed settlement activity contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law. 

Second, Israel News reported that: "According to a centuries-old rabbinical prophecy that appears to be coming true, on March 16, 2010, Israel will begin construction of the Third Temple in Jerusalem.  During the 18th century, the Vilna Gaon, a respected rabbinical authority, prophesied that the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem, which was built during his day, would be destroyed and rebuilt twice, and that when the Hurva was completed for the third time, construction on the Third Temple would begin" http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=178&nid=20063 Many Israelis believe this and there is a proliferation of designs, ceremonies and other events to launch this coming age of building a third temple. There are Muslim religious sites there: the first Qibla or direction of prayer for Islam and the third holiest site are the Haram Al-Sharif on this site.  There are Israeli digs underneath that threaten the site already and this only added fuel to the fire.

Third, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and much of humanity, wonder why is it that such a synagogue is reconstructed but none of 1200 mosques and nearly 200 churches destroyed by Israel over the past 6 decades not allowed to be reconstructed? For me personally and for mostPalestinains, we know the history shows Jews, Christians, and Muslims living peacefully together for 1400 years under Islamic rule (with very few exceptions).  We know that it is possible to simply have a Jewish area, a Christian area, a Muslim area or even mixed areas.  We know it is possible even to intermarry, have friendships, etc.  But Zionism had a different idea and it did not revolve on coexisting but on ethnic cleansing and destruction of others.  How else can we explain the destruction of 530 villages and towns? How can we explain the rapid growth of colonial settlements on Palestinian land or even inside Palestinian homes? There is surely enough space here for all. Why are Palestinians denied the right to go to school just this week (see story and picture where they even held school at the checkpoint, http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=269548). Why not simply live and let live.  The density of population inside the Green line is now nearly 1/8^th that of areas of the West Bank and Gaza that are designated reservations/ghettos for the native Palestinians. If Jews want to live in the old Jewish quarter of East Jerusalem and rebuild the synagogue there, why not allow the Palestinians to return to the old neighborhoods in West Jerusalem and rebuild the many churches and mosques there?

AIPAC issued a statement supporting Vice President Biden who claimed that there is no space between the US and Israel.  In other words, the US and Israeli interests and policies are/must be one and the same including on starvation, oppression, colonization etc.  (and oh yes, we have to always put Iran first now that we finished off Iraq for the sake of Israel). US General David Petreausdisagrees:

"Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas."

I would go much further and say the US interests and treasury have already been crippled by thesubserviant relationship to Israeli lobbies.  If the lobby finally succeeds in deepening the conflict with Iran, it will not be Iran that loses, but US and Israel will suffer a horrible blow.  The US economy would go into a tail spin and the value of the $3 billion dollars in US military aid to Israel will be reduced even further as the US dollar accelerates its decline.

ACTION: AIPAC and Christian Zionists are mobilizing thousands to write the congress and white house to keep funding and supporting Israel in its policies of colonial settlement expansion.  We can do no less write to the white house via http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ and to congress viahttp://house.gov/

*This was common practice for the Haganah and other forces to fire from synagogues and use them as military outposts, see http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtStEng.jhtml?itemNo=1061955&contrassID=19&subContrassID=1&title='WATCH:%20British%20Mandate-era%20arms%20cache%20found%20in%20Hod%20Hasharon%20synagogue'&dyn_server=172.20.5.5

Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD

Popular Committee to to Resist the Wall and Settlements-Beit Sahour

A Bedouin in Cyberspace, a villager at home

http://www.qumsiyeh.org 

http://www.pcr.ps 

__._,_.___

winnie the pooh

i have a lot to write that i will get to very soon, but I did want to say a grateful thanks to friends who have sent extremely heartfelt messages that has left me motivated and inspired. 
thanks to a friend for sharing this quote with me, because it's certainly helping me get through the week :)
"Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think" - A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Friday prayer, Tear gas and Rocks

Friday morning I woke up unsure of the day's plan, still distraught from the week, still uncertain about how to perceive what's going on around me.  It was a mental tug of war trying to decide if I should go to Jerusalem, the epicenter of where things have been really going wrong, with my roommate for the day or not.  I finally decided to go for it, because the alternative would have been to just sit in my room to brew over things, ask and ask questions that had no answers.

My roommate, another friend from Nablus and I caught the 9 o'clock bus  from the Ramallah bus station to head towards Jerusalem.  The checkpoints supposedly earlier in the morning are not 'that bad' and as an international we had an alternative option of taking an alternative bus that goes around the checkpoint and not actually through  it.  This privilege is given to those with Israeli ID's and to those with international passports.

Qalandia checkpoint was eerily quiet in the morning, however, the remnants of the week long clashes were more than visible.  Mounds of displaced dirt, evident of where the soldiers had chased down protesters, soot on the streets, evident of fires, and burning tires from earlier in the week.

This was my first time in the Old City of Jerusalem.  Gated on all sides by ancient high walls, like a monstrous fort in the middle of a spacious western bustling city, the old city is like an intense mixture of the world's oldest structures, most sacred sites, meeting at the same spot.  The proximity of things, how incredibly close together  everything actually was, was something that I was completely unaware of and not only baffled by but completely perplexed by.   I felt frozen.  Standing in one spot, in front of me was the Dome of the Rock, the oldest Islamic building in the world, right in front of it was Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, and in between was the Wailing Wall, the holiest of sites for Jews, and behind me was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a spot venerated by Christians as the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified.

How about all that for a nice Friday morning?  I couldn't take enough deep breaths to take it all in.

Around 11:30 we walked around the winding streets, covered with shops, weaving in and out of the Muslim, Jewish and the Armenian Quarter (all of which are so close they might as well be rooms in a big house) and the crowd kept on getting bigger and bigger.  Why? Like I said this was the epicenter of where things are really going wrong.  Last Friday, Israeli soldiers had prohibited Muslim men under the age of 50 to even enter the Old City, let alone pray the Jumaa prayer at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and this week they had done the same thing. The city streets were littered with soldiers.  As prayer time crept up, so did the tension.  Standing on the entrance to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, we saw the soldiers blocking and monitoring who is going in, turning away those who were under 50, and arguing over who actually looked 50 or not.

Outside of the old city, soldiers with masks, grenades, guns, tear gas stood around hundreds of Muslim men who stood on the streets to make their call to prayer.  They pulled out their prayer rugs (laying them out horizontally so that more than one could pray on one), or grabbed  pieces of cardboard from the shops and bazaars behind them to serve as prayer rugs for their obligatory weekly prayer, as soldiers stood firmly with their M16 rifles watching them intently.  Photographers and journalists hovered around snapping away pictures from different angles of this event.  You probably won't see this on any American mainstream news.  The Israeli soldiers were also filming internationals who were watching, because they have a tendency to record those who shouldn't be seeing the 'wrong' things, they film internationals who attend protests so that at immigration they can be turned away.

It was heartbreaking to stand there and watch.  I kept on wondering what went through the soldiers' minds, what were they thinking, what were they defending, and if any part of them felt a glitch in their hearts for standing in the way of those who wanted to pray at their place of worship with guns and tear gas.

I made my way home a couple of hours after that, after walking around the city for a bit more.  When I got to the Arab Bus Station to catch my bus number 18 to get back to Ramallah, the bus driver told me that he would only drive to the border.  Normally, that bus goes straight through and drops everyone off at the center of town in Ramallah.  I was too tiered from the day but aware enough to realize ok that must mean that Qalandia has been closed off, and there's probably problems at the checkpoint.  About half an hour of driving, and seeing some protests on the way (protests about the new settlements that are being built), the bus stopped in front of Qalandia and everyone walked across the checkpoint, and on the other side I found a bus driver who asked me if I was trying to get to Ramallah.  Once inside, a friendly man told me that yes I was on the right bus and this one would drop me  off where I needed to go.

Again Qalandia was eerily quiet.  However, as soon as it started driving off, I could see a crowd of men slowly emerging closer.  it was funny because it was the typical, stereotypical scene that I've seen in news clips, young men with Keffiyahs wrapped all around their faces.

Suddenly there was a loud "POP! POP! POP!" and white smoke, I realized that it was a soldier shooting tear gas at the Palestinian boys and then a loud CLANK that made me jump out of my seat.  It was a rock that was hurled at the bus.

I couldn't have been happier to walk back home when the bus dropped me off.  It felt good to walk the same street that I took to and from school every day and turn the corner to walk in to the apartment thats been mine for the last two and a half months, it felt really nice after an emotionally draining day to feel like I got home safe and sound.

...with more questions on my mind, then I had woken up with in the morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1mArePD-M

clashes and confusion

emotions here have been running high.   a series of raids in the Al-Aqsa mosque (why Israel?) to more raids (come on Israel), to prohibiting palestinian muslims (anyone under age 50,  like the age group that is most likely to get really pissed off) 

from Friday prayer AT the Al-Aqsa mosque  (really? forcing people OUT of their place of worship while they are worshipping?  not letting people pray the most important prayer of the week AT the place they consider the 3rd holiest site in their religion? no thats not intentionally provoking anyyything at all) to blocking off the west bank entirely.  At first I woke up on Saturday hearing that the west bank is blocked off until Sunday, then it was Monday then it was Tuesday. The clashes have just been getting more and more intense, at the checkpoints especially.  Demonstrations and riots have been getting increasingly worse, and everyday its been a pattern of checking different websites to see which city was locked down that day, or which city reeeally had it bad.  The images running through BBC and CNN of the clashes in Qalandia checkpoint, the checkpoint that you need to cross to go to Jerusalem have been alarming for me, because though I have not physically witnessed them (since I am in school or tutoring until about 6 or 7pm daily) I know that those clashes are taking place 5 miles down the road from me every afternoon. Where I come from, that means I'm in the danger zone. 

The provocations have been getting irritatingly worse.  But as I’ve learned from sitting for hours pointlessly in a narrow corridor without any windows or objects for no reason other than the IDF just wanted me to sit there without my passport, soldiers do things just for the hell of it. These series of events in the recent past, like Israel confiscating the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and declaring it as an Israeli hertage site   (http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=263273),    

raiding Al-Aqsa, rebuilding a synagogue in East Jerusalem (honestly just to make people more mad and pissed off, almost as a testy move to convey that they can do whatever they want whenever they want no matter how inappropriate or pointless it may be, to show that palestinians can't do anything about it, and if they do, they'll be marked by the world as terrorists), declaring new construction plans for more settlements, has made many people say that this may be the start of another Intifada, the third Intifada.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8571399.stm


hold up.  the 3rd Intifada. 


this is the part when my feelings get really mushed up and muddled.  first of all, I didnt and still don't understand the Intifadas fully.  at school i keep on getting snippets and snapshots of what life was like during the Intifadas.  One teacher told me, "we were just locked in our house for 3 months at a time, we couldn't go out, we couldnt open our windows, have the shutters open, because if they (the soldiers) saw our face they'd shoot at us, snipers are ready to shoot, and about every 10 days we were allowed 2 hours to go out to get food, we were going crazy, my family played cards so many times that i thought my head was going to explode".  Israeli tanks surrounded everything, and people were imprisoned in their homes. stepping out meant rolling tanks shooting at them. the kids in school that are now in the 1st grade and 2nd grade, I think, were all born during the Intifada, and there's outrageously insane stories of how they were born, either in their houses, or en route dodging tanks to get to a hospital with no facilities or staff or better yet in their cars.

what i feel around me is stifling, it's as if everyone internally is under this pressure cooker machine, feeling narrowing walls about to crush them, but it never crushes them.  it perpetually inches inwards closer and closer but there doesn't seem to be a stopping point.  After a long week of school (it always feels like that on Thursdays), I stopped by a shop next to our school, and struck a very sweet conversation with the shop owner. A highly educated woman, native to Jerusalem, who can not leave Ramallah to get to Jerusalem to see any of her family because she married someone from the West Bank, she was telling me in her small shop that no matter what the world thinks, the truth is that "they" (Israel) just want the land without the people, they just want the land, she kept on repeating.  


I don't know what to think because extreme volatility is infused and mixed with extreme uncertainty.  One moment there's talks of a 3rd Intifada and the next people are like, O no, things suck but they're fine, we're not in a position to have an Intifada.  (http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=269138)  


I was told to stock up on food, because you never know what might happen.  My roommate and I looked at each other at one point to wonder wait is this the time to stock up on food or get rid of food? like is this a weekend stock up on food because some crazy shit might break loose or really get rid of stuff because we might have to pack up our bags soon?  


As comical as this is, when we did go to the grocery store, I stared at the shelves for a long time, wondering what the hell do you buy if you are preparing for a lockdown, and after 20 minutes of staring, I had a bag of pretzels and a toothbrush.   I don't even like pretzels.  On the way home, I was appalled at myself for not thinking about buying bottled water.  Clearly...I'm not cut out for this ( ? )


So at this point, in thinking about lockdowns, or Intifadas, I don't know if I feel really politically aware or really foolish because nothing might happen at all.


At the end of the week, I found out that the chances of an Intifada are slim because if there was one, it would be the Palestinian public revolting against their own government, not Israel.  The government doesn't want that.  So believe it or not, the government run channels here in Palestine are not showing that much about current clashes.   The internal strife in the country would butt heads for a raging civil unrest.


In light of all the Obama, Biden, Clinton talks about their embarrassment that Israel is continuing their plans of constructing 1600 new settlement homes, I'd like to end this post with this picture that I think says a lot.  For the first month that I was here, I saw this on my walk back from school, and all I recognized was Obama's signature silhouette without understanding the caption underneath.  It's funny, after the mainstream coverage of the Obama administrations's dismay about the settlement issue, then  Obama getting slapped with the label of being anti-semitic and then hearing how now the two parties are saying, of course there was never any tension, this poster makes more sense.

This was a giant billboard in Ramallah:

Roughly translates to : In the one year that Obama has been President, what has changed for us?

truly, people here really don't think anything is going to change.  a picture here, a meeting there and a handshake here appeases the outside world for a while, but people here know that nothing is going to change for them.  they have to continually deal with the obnoxious, unnecessary, inhumane treatment from a group of people who simply wants the land, no matter what the price may be. 

religion - part II

I was asked to substitute a 5th grade religion class one day as I sat down for my break.  They needed a teacher to cover the class and sitting in the teacher's room, I suddenly was the most suitable person to go cover.  "what do i teach them??" I asked, and the response I got was "I don't know, you're Muslim"
So I headed down and the entire classroom was a hectic chaos and they all seemed to quiet down for a bit wondering what I was doing there when I walked in.  I started the class slowly, first asking them what they were learning, and as I was asking them I was stopped by a student who suddenly shouted out "Are you Muslim or Christian??" and when I told them I was Muslim, I kid you not, there were gasps. and then a brief silence, and THEN students shouting out random things like "SAY SURAH FATIHA!!"  or "do you hate Israel??" and then transitioning into a melody of "say Surah Fatiha, say Surah Fatiha, say Surah Fatiha" or they'd point to their books, and ask "can you read this?? READ THIS!"

The sound of the bell ringing to mark the end of that class period was magic and bliss to my ears.  I came out, again appalled at how even at that age, there is a NEED for everyone to know which box every individual around them belongs to, a religious box is absolutely necessary. And I clearly do not fit into that box.

The most intense and emotional of these experiences actually happened less than 48 hours ago.  I'm still shaken by it.  Fadi's death has naturally made me think about faith, my relationship with God, and the fragility and value of life.  My mind was flooded with these thoughts and going to the service at the Church to see Fadi's mom and pay our respects to her and Fadi, I couldn't control my tears (even though I'm not a person to really cry, it's almost unheard of to have seen me cry if you don't belong to my immediate family).  We were greeted by Fadi's uncles on our way in and on our way out they were the ones showing us out.

Small conversation with them turned into something else.  One of Fadi's uncles started on a tangent of how astonishing it is if you really dig up the history of Islam and Muslims, and he kept on repeating "you will be astonished as to what you find.  you will be astonished".  Still wiping away tears, I was intrigued and puzzled as to where in the world this was going.  his tone turned more and more sour and he made the remark "Muslims claim that they worship 1 god.  But that is not true.  They worship 2 gods".  23 years of being Muslim, this was flashing news to me, so I asked him "which 2 gods do they worship?"  He looked at me and he said "They worship "Allah" and they worship the man Mohammad".  I hadn't said anything to his strange, crude, and disrespectful remarks, but to that statement I couldn't keep quiet.  Being inside of a church, at a service for someone that had passed away, I wasn't in the emotional state to even have the energy to feel outraged.  I simply told him "That's not true, Mohammad is a Prophet, not a god'. he looked at me for a brief second puzzled by why I would say that, and Maggie intervened to say "She's Muslim".  and there it was.  Both of the uncles who were there subtly making remarks about how stupid Islam was, immediately ganged up on me.  For a brief period of time both of them were asking awful things simultaneously, one asking "Who WAS Mohammed? why do you love him? Why is a he prophet?" and the other one asking "Why do you call him Mohammed? do you know what that means? that means the most praised, why do you praise Mohammed? why is HE the most praised and not Lord?"

I was in shock.  I just could not believe it.  But it didn't stop, they kept on going and going, saying awful things, each of which felt like a stab at the heart.  "Why do you read the Quran in Arabic? Do you understand Arabic?" to "do you know that Arabic translated into anything else doesnt mean the same thing anymore? Do you know that 90 percent of everything written in the Quran was stolen from us and the book of the Jews?"

there were many things that I could have said (for instance asking about the authenticity of the Bible, or asking the simple question of if the title of "most praised" bothers him, how does believing that God had a "son" not bother him), but all i could think was "I am here for your dead nephew, is this really the right time and place to be telling me how awful you think my religion is"
The cherry on top, was one of the uncles looking me in the eye to tell me "if you really want to know the truth, you must know Jesus Christ"
Being mindful that this was a service, that i was in a church, and that I couldnt take them anymore AND knowing that they wouldn't stop, I literally (and it was probably rude) walked away from them saying "I am here for your nephew Fadi, and I really need to go".

Suddenly there was an onpour of tears that came gushing out feeling so stripped and isolated from any spiritual comfort.  M needed to go inside the bigger church and I followed her inside, now crying inside of the church.  On our way out, Fadi's uncle was driving out.  He reversed his car seeing me, rolled down his window, and apologized.  I told him that it was fine, and that he was forgiven.  My roommate, being in such an awfully sticky position, replied, "well at least he apologized".
at least he apologized?? no he probably apologized because he's sorry that I haven't been saved by Jesus Christ.

I am just utterly shocked that truly, truly  people are blind and incapable of seeing each other as human beings sometimes.  I know that Fadi's uncles are loonies and nutcases, just like the thousands of crazy loonies and nutcases that exist in Islam or any other religion.  I don't see this encounter as something I would hold against Christianity, it would be foolish and dumb of me to think that way.  And I am not naive enough to think that that kind of insensitivity, hatred, and blindness doesnt exist  in the minds of people of my own faith.  What disturbs me most is to really see, feel and face the extent of hatred that exists, solely religious hatred.

When I walk in Jerusalem, and I see orthodox Jewish men and women dressed head to toe, fully garbed, I think to myself, how are you ANY different from really conservative Muslims? Seriously, you're just wearing a different style of clothes.  But the mental cage of thinking that you are the rightly chosen rightly guided all else are hell bound, is exactly the same. Seriously, crazy religious people, they just have different religions, but they are all the same people, almost like a reflection of each other.

Nothing like a nutcase to get you thinking.

The following images is to make you laugh if you think it's as funny as I think it is.  People are really silly if they see more differences than similarities.  These slight, sliiiiiiight differences somehow make it absolutely ok to hate one another, and fight like animals, killing each other over stupid things.  Honestly sometimes I wonder, as humans we pride ourselves in having the size of the brain that we have, our mind, and our conscience, and that we are above primitive animals.
Yet, if you think about it, there's no breed of primitive animals that brutally kill their own kind, their own species, unless needed for absolute survival.  But we humans, albeit having a conscience not only participate in brutality that animals would never think of doing to their own species, but more often than not we sit silently to condone it.

Here's the kick...this violence is at its worst with very little hope for ever attaining co-existence and peace in a piece of land called the "Holy Land"

                                    display 1.1 : muslim woman wearing a headscarf

         

                                     display 1.2 : a jewish woman wearing a headscarf

Display 2.1 : Orthodox Jewish men

Display 2.2 : Muslim Man

Display "important to notice".1 - Christian child praying

Display "important to notice".2 - muslim children praying

Display "important to notice".3  : jewish child praying

It's not that I think about only these 3 religions at conflict and that I feel only these 3 are the most important.  But in the context of where I am right now and what I'm seeing, these 3 are at it (although the Christians are more neutral than anything else, comparatively, in the whole scheme of things here)

religion - part I

when i was preparing to come to palestine, i sought out advice from friends and friends of friends who had been here before to get as precise of a picture as possible in terms of what i should anticipate when i'm questioned by the IDF at the border.  they all unanimously told me that telling them that i was Muslim would be a bad idea.  especially since my passport clearly says that I'm from Bangladesh.  given the circumstances, i needed to have a story, and being Muslim, even having heard of a Palestine, being socially aware in any way, being nothing but an Israeli loving dumb American tourist couldn't be a part of it.  I was even told to not bring a copy of the Quran, nor a prayer rug or any other symbolic item.

Naturally, I had to contemplate about this, a lot.  Practicality versus morality.  To say the least the mental tug of war was extremely difficult for me.

I made up my mind.  I needed to get into Palestine.  There couldn't be anything more pointless than telling IDF the truth, I'd get sent back to the US, back to square 1, and what good would that do? I wouldn't be able to do anything.  I wanted to be in Palestine, I wanted to work here, I wanted to be socially active for something that I believed in, and I did not want to let it slip from my hands because of political bullshit.  I prayed a lot, and I hope that at the end of the day God forgives me for the lies, and sees my intention inshAllah.

So it began.  I was Christian, as were my parents, I was going to Israel, I didn't even know what the Palestinian territories were and I loved Israel.  Did I mention that I love Israel? Because I really love Israel.

After 3 and a half hours of waiting, being interrogated, sitting around, being interrogated again, waiting, we got in.  Thankfully, they didn't check my suitcase that did have my prayer rug and my copy of the Qur'an in it.

Working in a Catholic school, my company has been predominantly Christian, although there are many Muslim teachers and Muslim students.  It's very hard to tell who's who though.  The way that others found out that I actually wasn't Christian, was when they'd invite me over for dinner and wine, and I'd have to reply with "sure! I'd love to come over.  but I don't drink wine".  They'd look at me in surprise and ask "why not???"  and I'd have to say with a chuckle "Because I'm Muslim."      ... "oh!":: awkward transition:: "well we'll have Sprite instead!"

As wonderful as it's been to be embraced without any judgement (though I'm definitely considered Bangladeshi at school and not American because I'm brown, and Maggie is definitely the American teacher) for the past couple of months I've felt like an outsider in my community and stuck in a strange limbo of neither belonging here nor there.  I'm so used to having a Muslim community around me that is receptive, and I'm so used to be able to go to the Mosque to pray that suddenly being stripped from that IN a Muslim country has caused mental discomfort and strife.

Earlier this year, before the Israeli govt took the Palestinian side of the Ibrahimi mosque, M and I had gone to Hebron to see it.  At the checkpoint, we were let through under the pretext of both of us being Christian.  When I went inside the mosque, a friendly looking man approached us offering to show us around, anticipating that I was Muslim, and when I told him that I wasn't (not wanting to change the story from what I told the guards), he basically treated us like shit the entire time we were there.  It was jarring for him to treat us the way he did thinking that I was something that I was not, and it was jarring to think that his treatment would be so different had he known that I was really Muslim.

Are people really incapable of seeing each other as human beings?

Rest in Peace Fadi, you will be remembered always

it never quite makes sense anytime death gets so close to you in proximity.  i've never been one to be able to deal with death well and this time around isn't any kind of an exception. i'm really appreciative of friends who have sent messages, it really does mean a lot.

the student that passed away had a disorder that made his body age a lot faster than his actual age (unbelievably, extremely extremely rare disease), so at age 14 he looked like a hunched over, slow and weak 10 year old, needing assistance with nearly everything he did. not only were his motor skills declining, but his eye sight as well. he was nearly blind.  so at age 14, his body was actually 70 years old.

his mother is a co-worker, and his brother is a student of mine in the 3rd grade.  his mother had invited me over to their house a little while after i had arrived, an invitation and an afternoon that i won't forget.  his brother Jack, is one of the brightest students that i have. they had prepared a really special lunch (that must have taken hours to prepare) and they welcomed me into their home with affectionate hospitality.  after enjoying the delicious lunch, the kids brought out their photo albums and showed me all their family pictures, some of which made Jack and his siblings giggle and others that left them embarrassed.

Fadi came out of his room, and I thought "o that's Jack's brother! they look alike! that totally makes sense".  Looking through the family photos i had been wondering who it was next to Jack that looked just like Jack, and as I looked at Fadi, I thought, oh my gosh it's him. but why does he look so different now?  I was uncertain of what his condition was and completely aware that its not appropriate to ask his mom.  I spent the entire afternoon after lunch playing with the kids, Jack played his Oud for me and his sister played the violin.  I was trying to make Fadi laugh so we were playing around with this giant beach ball and then after that we played board games for hours.

Rest in Peace Fadi

Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilayhi Rajiun

At school Fadi was always tended by his mother, constantly.  she preferred that he be at home, but he reeally wanted to be in school, and he was in school up until last week.   he was tenderly taken care of by the other students as well, they weren't their usual crazy selves around him (which says a lot).

no mother should ever have to see their child die.  i can't imagine any other kind of pain that is worse.

being far away from home, of course this makes me think of my own family.  it makes me realize the mortality of everyone around me and myself, how fragile life can be, and how little time we have to do as much good as possible.

mourning the death of a student...

inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun..

friday afternoons and green almonds

every day after school i'd walk home and stop at the grocery store on the way to buy at least one pomegranate.  pomegranates always make me think of my childhood in iran and i re-discovered how i loved them so much and after discovering how awesome it felt to pick one up from a freshly delivered stack at the market, pay so little for it, and come home to sit in our garden, slice it in half, flip the skin backwards to have the seeds fall out like loose teeth (weird analogy i know), sprinkle a little bit of sugar and lemon juice over it, i made this lovely activity a relaxing a routine.

until one day when i went to the store and there were no more pomegranates.  i circled the store about 3 times thinking maybe it was in some new location or something, but no no, there were absolutely no pomegranates.  i felt so cheated and i came home complaining to maggie and being like where in the world did the pomegranates in ramallah go? and she goes, o they're probably out for the season, there'll be giant fresh strawberries soon.

seasons! so used to plastic cellophane wrapped tightly over disposable trays filled with pre-picked amount of fruit in the produce section of chain stores, i completely forgot that in the natural order of things, FRUITS come in SEASONS!  and the pomegranate season sadly is gone :(

however.  there's new things to look forward to.  like the green almonds that have freshly grown into different sizes in our garden.  a month ago, the tree was bare, naked from leaves but dressed in cute miniature white flowers.  the tree shed itself from the flowers and then flourished into a green explosion and now there's these fuzzy coated green fruits, almonds, that have grown that you can pick and pop in your mouth.  they're chewy, tart, with a slightly bitter aftertaste sometimes. somehow they're a familiar taste.


friday afternoons are always pleasant, especially on a day like this with the sun beating down.  and the sun beating down is good for 2 reasons.  one is that it's the perfect day to do laundry, clothes hung outside will actually dry before you go to bed.  and 2 because the sun makes me extremely happy.  on friday afternoons i love hearing the sound outside, which is usually filled with clinks and clanks of the neighbors and the city.  stores, schools and offices are pretty much closed, so everyone is home, taking care of the chores that need to be tended too.  as i hang out my wet clothes to dry, i see my neighbor doing the same, and she gives me a smile and a nod of acknowledgement.

after that i can sit outside on the small dining table that we've shifted outside, skim through a book, and pluck off the green almonds, enjoy the sun and think about nothing.

...except for all the grading that i have to do before school because turns out all of the grades needed to be turned in on thursday, another memo i didnt get because it was posted in arabic in the teacher's room.

"this wall, does this limit the foundation of the human mind?"

one of the first things that i remember hitting me like a ton of bricks was a comment that a co-worker made maybe on my 3rd day of work.  we were just sitting in the teacher's room, and i was asking her if the students are rowdy and wild in all of their classes, or if it's just something that i have to break into because i'm a new teacher.  she said something really interesting. she told me to think of palestine as an entity :  really broken, really chaotic, with scattered pieces that are constantly pulled at and torn.  that's how every kid is inside.  she replied with a chuckle saying that, yes its not just your class, the kids are pretty bad in all of their classes. they feel trapped, they feel stuck, and they feel the need to lash out and school is sometimes their only getaway.

i think that was a defining point when i started to really look at the context of where i was and what i was doing differently, trying to conceive the bigger picture and putting effort into not regarding every day as going in and out of classrooms to deal with a bunch of 8 and 9 year olds. That was the first stepping stone and it kept on building after that.  i might have mentioned this before but my first month of teaching was dealing with a lot of pissed off parents.  and as trying as it was to sit and listen to an hour of angry arabic after an exhausting day at school and then spend another hour translating everything and trying to convey my concerns in english, it was through those interactions that i began to get glimpses of my students' families.  one concerned mom came who i later found out was blind in one eye because she had been shot in the face by an israeli sniper. i learned that my 'bad' classes were really bad because there were about 10 to 15 students with extreme learning disabilities and the special ed teacher in the school only had one simplified diagnosis for all of them (without ever really interacting with them).

coming back from tel aviv and jerusalem on the bus to cross over the checkpoint to get into ramallah, i started noticing how the road gets narrower and narrower, more and more broken.  at first i couldnt figure out why my eyes were bouncing around like ping pong balls walking around tel aviv and jerusalem.  its because every building didn't look the same! there were skyscrapers! there's no sky scrapers in ramallah and every building here looks the same, the same color, the same layout, just maybe different sizes. there were highways! like american highways! there were STREET SIGNS! there are no street signs in ramallah; everyone knows where everything is through landmarks.  so if you ever asked for my address, i live on the way to Tira (a well known neighborhood) and across from  Pizza Express, and that's as precise of an address i could give you. for friends and family that have wanted to send care packages, lol, i've had to tell them that i dont really have an address.  The cafes, boutiques, shops, stores, skyscrapers, slowly shrink and degrade as you make your way over to Palestine into smaller shops, open bazaars, lots of small mini marts.  you start seeing more of the terrain, because highways have not been built over it.

you start seeing the wall.  THE wall.

and even though i've seen the graffitti on the wall a lot of times, i noticed a new spray painted message from the window of my bus.  it said "this wall, does this limit the foundation of the human mind?"

thinking about how my american passport actually allows me to cross over from one side to the other, and most people here are trapped, thousands are having or had their homes demolished, and thinking about how mind fuckingly strange it is to go from a first world country and then end up in a third world country 8 miles down the road, that question lingered in my mind for a long time.  and then i think about my students, whom i love so much, and the underlying reasons behind why they are struggling...is because the trapped feeling, the occupation, the Intifada that ended a few years back (curfews where people could not leave their house literally for months or they'd got shot or run down by tanks), left the kids intellectually crippled.  the parents as well.  not my sentiments.  i dont think i'm in any position to say this, my american self tells me that i wont ever understand because i didnt grow up here and inshAllah I'll be able to leave this place when I want (an option that the majority of the people here dont have)  but the principal of my school would sit me down to talk to me about this, to explain what i'm dealing with.  'the kids dont know how to think, the teachers are not challenging them, the parents are thankful that their kids are alive, so they let their kids get away with everything, for the parents its ok for the kids to get into 'little' fights or 'play a little'.  'we have to fix the education' she says.  and i think thats what gives me so much internal strength.  knowing that without education there's nothing.

so yeah..the wall, every slab of it, is limiting the foundation of the human mind.

Conversations with a "lost boy" from Sudan

i remember when i first heard about gabriel.  "is it ok if my friend gabriel comes and stays with us? he's homeless right now". my rommate asked me and all i could think was ‘sure as long he stays in your room and not mine’. 

every day for 2 weeks there'd be a call from gabriel and he'd say that he's coming to ramallah to stay with us becuase he was just kicked out of his apartment in Jerusalem.  Obviously i was very curious about this person who just never showed up even though he was homeless.  the situation seemed urgent enough and i sort of just dismissed him as a really wishy washy person.  

"i figured you wouldn't mind him staying with us or that you wouldnt mind giving him a place to stay knowing that he was a child soldier, a slave, his entire family was murdered and is currently a refugee right now with no legal status".  this is how i started to know more and more about gabriel through M, who told me about her epxerience workign with the sudanese refugee community in israel where she would go every weekend to visit and volunteer.  She’d teach them English in small crammed rooms or help them with general things, like life advice.

as silly as this sounds, learning about him through maggie, he just became a character in my head, almost like a mythical creature, like some friend of my roommate that i would never acually get to meet .  A friend of my roommate who had a history that I couldn’t really fathom and  more unbelievable was the fact that  a person with a story like his is someone that my roommate knew so closely.

i learned that gabriel comes from an extremely important family and he is known in the southern sudanese community very well, and known because he comes from an extremely important political family  who were all killed.  I was told that it’s kind of like if Chelsea Clinton ever became an orphan.  Well thats who Gabriel is.  

my curiousity kept on building and building.  supposedly he could never keep a job, and he'd keep on getting kick out of his house.  i couldnt draw a mental picture of this person.  on one hand i had this image of a really sullen, serious, hard stricken person who carries with him a life long saga of trauma, on another hand I thought maybe he's like emmanuel jal an inspiration upon first encounter (in whatever form that may be),  or was he just some dude that was a  total flake? 

M and i needed to go to jerusalem.  gabriel gave us his place to stay.  ironic huh? maggie's constant mantra of "gabriel you need to get a job and keep it" had done some good and a month and a half later he was working 14 hour days, had a place to stay and was giving the two of US a place to stay.  

he welcomed us into his one room studio home.  a really really small place, but just enough space for one person.  i didnt mind at all, especially since it was so warm inside and i was concerned that maybe we’d have to freeze the night. it was just a bed in the room, and along the sides of the wall neatly lined up were his fridge, his stove and a sink and an oven.  inside his small bathroom he had his washer and dryer and his shower.  

what surprised me most about meeting him finally was his general demeanor of kindness and warmth.  It’s a kind of kindness that’s very rare. My interaction with him wasn’t long, only an hour or so after we got to his place.  Then he left to spend the night elsewhere and gave us his home and returned when we were awake at 6:30am the next morning.

Through  short conversations with him I learned about his disdain that so many people dismiss what is happening in southern Sudan, preoccupied with Darfur (which struck a chord, since UNC is all over Darfur awareness, how did southern sudan never come up?). I learned about his disdain about Egypt and learned about him getting arrested in Egypt 7 times.  Talking about these officers is when he said “I really think there are no good people in the world”.  He talked about Sudanese refugees just getting shot by the Egyptian officers after they’d been cleared to get into Israel as refugees.  He tells me that over 2,000 had been shot like this, among which were his friends.

There was an air of awe inspiring jaw dropping amazement after Emmanuel Jal had come to UNC last year and had done his show in Memorial Hall.  Everyone that was in that giant hall was captivated and speechless after hearing Emmanuel Jal speak and after hearing him sing.  His rawness and candid account of just his life was something that I don’t think any of us had ever seen.

When I mention this to Gabriel, he says “O Emmanuel! I just talked to him a few weeks ago, he’s doing well” Gabriel is doing his own thing, speaking in different churches, to different audiences, telling his story because he thinks that the story must be heard.  On his shelf I saw a stack of dvds with his face on it.  he made his own documentary about his experience and his story.

“but people just forget”.  “when you talk to them they gave you their full attention and they give you sympathy, and as soon as you walk away, they forget”

what's our responsibility about these awful awful things happening in the world? sometimes i wonder if we just take these pieces of news as entertainment. 

gabriel's story struck me because i realized how easy it is for everyone to separate themselves from problems that's not theirs.  child soldiering, slavery, war, displacement, living under an occupation..if your life has never been infiltrated by any of these things it's easy for the mind and the brain to separate it as something that happens to other people.  Why would you ever want to make it a part of yours in any  way shape or form if you didn’t have to? It’s nice for it to be left alone as  a thought provoking story, or a piece of news to watch, a lecture to attend or a show to enjoy. I’m not really sure what we do after that.  What can we do after that?

  

having a conversation, being in his home, or seeing him as a person, i realized how “ordinary” of a person he was with such an extra ordinary and unbelievable life.  It cracked me up when the only way he described Israeli girls at the clubs was by saying “oh my God, they are CRAZY! The cuter they are, the CRAZIER they are” and him explaining how dating them is so difficult because they cause the break up and then the get crazier after you break up.

He’s been in Israel for 3 years and his stay here is temporary.  he says he's understanding the Israeli mentality,  i can't figure out if he really loves where he is or if he doesnt, he seems to carry a lot of love for the place but then he talks about never looking the corner store shop ownerin the face when he is paying for his things.  "i want him to ask me one day why i dont look at him in the face and why i turn away when i pay for my things" he told me, “it's just the way that they look at you.  i stood in line but 15, 20 people went in front of me because the shop owner just ignored that I was standing there”.

He kept on saying that at 27 he was really old and that he needs to get married.  It may be a non chalant comment to make for a young person but it hits on a lot of issues.  For a refugee, there isn’t a sight of a place where he can feel ‘settled’ and there’s a bigger question of who he should and can marry.  He kept on saying “ I really want to get married but I’m not in Sudan”

Before coming here, I had worked with incoming refugee mothers in the Raleigh/Durham area.  I’m not in any way trying to clump refugees of different backgrounds and circumstances into one box, but the little interaction that I’ve had with them makes me reflect on so much about things that I can’t separate from mentally that feeds into my sense of stability and foundation as a person..like having parents, my family, knowing that there is security where I live and that I can pursue a higher education,  and I can inshAllah one day have a family of my own and practice my religion and raise my kids, and even though there is uncertaintly and moments of instability, these foundations are still grounded.  And how I think of these things as a bare minimum for a good life. But  then after experiences like this I realize to some people these are unrealistic luxuries.