"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.