حياتي من فلسطين

a few things that upset me

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:15:00 +0000

My friend had to go to Jordan today. Though I have crossed the bridge from the west bank to Jordan many many times, exiting “Israel”, paying a ridiculous exit fee on the way out each time, looking at, soldiers who I consider kids, men and women probably no more than 19 years of age, working in border security carrying guns bigger than they are, I’ve never exited through the Palestinian side. My foreigner privilege allows me to exit the bridge, by taking a bus to the foreigner side. It’s a process that takes a few hours but it's not that big of a deal. Palestinians are separated completely, in completely separate buses and they must go through the ‘palestinian’ side to exit the West Bank and enter Jordan.

So my friend had to go to Jordan today (not a foreigner, a Palestinian). The soldier looked at his ID. He didn’t like it. It was too old. So he tore it up, and told him, that he has to go back, get another one reissued and then come back. 6 hours later.

On the day of the Nakba, the clashes at Qalandia were inevitable. However we saw some new things that we didn’t before, in addition to surrounding Arab countries also responding to the significance of this day. New kinds of bullets. My friend looked at the five or so bullets on the ground at Qalandia checkpoint and got mad at the kid next to her, telling him to stop collecting rubber bullets and to stop playing with them (kids do that). He looked at her puzzled replying that he didn’t. The kid told her, no it’s not me, the soldiers are using new kinds of bullets. ‘ O really?’ she still didn’t believe him. Another gentleman passed by her to tell her, that it’s true, the kid’s not lying. They have a new kind of bullet, they throw it, not directly at someone, but they just throw it, and when it hits a hard surface, 5 or 6 bullets shoot out as soon as it hits something, in different directions.

Thank you state of the arts technology and US tax dollars.

On the day of the Nakba, something else caught people by surprise. Undercover Israeli policemen in civil suit, one disguised as a Palestinian woman, to ‘catch’ protestors.

In 2008, a reporting cited an undercover unit like this executing four Palestinian fighters. At the time of the killing these men were in their cars waiting for their dinners, unarmed.

“It was the moral equivalent of a team of Palestinians, disguised as Israelis, driving an Israeli car into Tel Aviv and gunning down four off-duty Israeli soldiers”

- (http://electronicintifada.net/blog/maureen/photo-gun-toting-israeli-soldier-disguised-palestinian-woman)

What makes me upset is this. In which other country would it be ok if you showed up and 'security' just ripped your passport, instead of respectfully turning you around because something was wrong with your paperwork? I guess these are the "simple" nuances of living under occupation, when you are the one occupied facing those who are the occupiers, the 'simple' things that you have to put up with.

What also makes me upset is the twisted reporting of events. Palestinians being regarded as unruly barbaric people ‘mourning’ the independence of Israel. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, those who are still in refugee camps across the Arab world ignored. What also makes me upset is how the terrorisers are considered the victims and the victims the terrorists. I’m not sure how an official military unit arresting children, intimidating civil population whether by force or by a lack of liberty, impeding on all their rights and violently traumatizing them daily through humiliation or weapons, are not considered terrorists. But an angry teenager throwing a stone from the ground by definition, somehow, is a terrorist.

Ramallah, May 15th, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Sun, 15 May 2011 12:08:00 +0000

I was strictly warned yesterday by several people to stay close to the premises of my home. living so close to the town center, around 12 in the afternoon, i heard massive thumping and drum playing and the heavy sounds of marches from my apartment. im hearing this after hearing ambulance sirens going in and out of the city, people at qalandiya checkpoint being tear gassed and all, ambulances going back and forth from the checkpoint to the city and back. soldiers in civil suit were also attacking those protesting at the checkpoint. all of this is described of course as 'light clashes'. as of 11 in the morning there were 3 head injuries of men who had tear gas canisters thrown at their heads. one woman had gone into shock from the tear gas and had to be helped by medics.

Not being able to resist the urge of stepping into what i'm hearing from my window, seeing pictures online of what is happening literally outside my window, i took my camera and left out the door. What I saw was an ecstatic energy of kids young and old, adults young and old, waves of flags and banners, music, food, and a stage filled with singers and dabkeh dancers rhythmically stomping their feet to the exuberant beats of traditional Palestinian music , young men piled onto vans, yelling into the bullhorn and making the crowd around the town center cheer, sing along and clap, and young school children scouts march with their drums and musical instruments around the center, with one cheek face painted with the triangular red cutting into the black, white and green stripe. The Palestinian flag.

An enormous make shift key stood upright near the "Manara", the town center, a circular area marked by 5 lion statues , each lion facing an offshoot street from the center. The old fashioned key, picturized in all sizes, is a symbol for the right to return, for those who were displaced in the catastrophic events of 1948.

I saw a child sitting peacefully on the shoulders of his father (i'm assuming father) facing the stage in front of him, holding a small key in his hand, a palestinian bannered flag wrapped around his neck, with a t-shirt that said 1948 in the back. Teenagers littered the tops of buildings, waving massive flags. When the dabkah music started, they would also dance along.

I am pleasantly surprised and impressed by how events have been organized within Ramallah. What's happening at the checkpoints between soldiers and civilians is a different story. Yesterday, 17 year old Milad Said Ayyash, was killed in East Jerusalem by live ammunition, which according to witnesses, came from a settlement private guard. The funeral procession of the boy, hundreds of Palestinians marching towards Al-Aqsa mosque, was attacked by tear gas.

Within the city, away from soldiers, what I see is a commemoration and a spirit that says that the Nakba is not a memory that has been abandoned. Nor is it something that will be forgotten.

I Speak in Colors

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:38:00 +0000

I Speak in Colors

I’m neither white nor black, I’m brown. And I often talk about brown people. In fact, when I’m with brown people I talk about us as collective brown people, and when I’m not with brown people, I feel the need to elaborate on the humorous things about brown people which make us special and the cultural things that make us unique. As a huge fan of Bollywood, I also love to educate people on brown music and demonstrate brown dancing, slightly, by doing the famous ‘pet the dog screw the lightbulb’ move. Brown people never mind when I say things about brown people, because they get it. Strangely enough a group of white people were offended when I once used the term ‘brown’, and I didn’t get that because as a brown person , I hold the right to call myself and my people brown. Living in white America, the black and the brown and the white discourse always come about. Somehow I’m comfortable with speaking in colors. Because it gets the point across. White people are one thing. Black people are one thing. Brown people are one thing. There are other colors too of course, but for now I’m just sticking to these three. The point is, the colors convey somewhat of a collective similarity in each group.

I am so used to talking about people in colors that I fail to realize how brainwashed I am with the fake man made construct of race, living in America. How the construct of race and color defines identity and the living experience of daily life in America. How absolutely unnatural and absurd it is to define your living experience using the colored boundaries. I didn’t realize how unnatural and absurd speaking, thinking, and living in color was until coming to Palestine and having to look at my closest Palestinian friend in the eye, to struggle coming up with answers to her simple questions “What’s with the colors? Why do you talk about people in colors? It’s so weird”.

“What color am I?” she asked. I am about to answer “brown” when I see the look on her face that tells me, that it's a rhetorical question with no sensible answer. One of her sisters has blonde hair. What color is she?

I think about my students. Pierre, one of my 4^th graders, is a white freckled kid with bright red hair. Palestinian. When I look at him through my American eyes, and think about my perspectives shaped by the exposures in America, nothing about Pierre says “Arab”. If I saw him in America, I’d classify him as a white kid. Yara, one of my 5^th graders, is a student of mine who some teachers say looks like she could be my daughter. Her skin tone and mine are the same and she’s got similar facial features. She looks brown. Again, fully Palestinian. If I saw her in America, I’d classify her as brown and Indian.

In Jericho, there are dark skinned Arabs who are “black” by my American lenses. As I think about my friend’s quizzical question, and her smirk and slight distaste with my speech, especially coming from me, from the land of the free, home of the brave, so called “melting pot” United States of America, where supposedly diversity and culture is focal, I struggle to make sense of my mental frames. And as I reflect on her question “Why do you speak in colors?” the only answer I can come up with is “How can I not?”. An Asian American’s experience in America is different from a European American’s experience, which is also worlds apart from Black Americans. I try to tell her that race is something in America that is definitive. Every application, every survey, every census will ask you about your race. As young, educated, minority students or young professionals in America, we feel more inclined to talk about race, to get it out on the open, to feel empowered by our colors or backgrounds or experiences in America to voice those narratives.

The first time I ever saw a black person was when I moved to the States at the age of nine. I went to an inner city Brooklyn school, P.S. 152, and there were maybe 3 other students my color and the whole school thought we were related. Most kids were black. And I remember distinctly my mother telling me to not play with the black kids. As a kid, I didn’t understand, because I would think but I’m not white either. I’m neither white nor black. And people always seemed to talk about the white kids and the black kids. Cafeterias would also always be white or black. So when I finally identified myself as ‘brown’ and finally attended a high school with a significant number of ‘brown’ kids, and found my first ‘brown’ best friend, it was ownership of my minority experience that I had not gotten before. In a strange way, it took a long time to identify myself as brown American. Brown meant , people like me. and American meant white, people not like me. It took years to reach the point of being comfortable in the color of my skin, my culture and race, and my national citizenship.

Suddenly all those discussions with friends, programming and coordinating and sessions of different 'diversity' programs and ‘progressing’ in dialogue about race, and color, and racism and stereotypes in college as a young activist, seem so silly that I feel embarrassed as an American. Because none of that should actually matter.

As I reflect on my friend’s question, I start thinking, why do we focus so much on color and race? How truly strange it is that, that fake construct of our identity means so much. The experiences that we have in our skins is not fake, but the construct of it is very much an intangible and baseless construct. In Palestine, everyone is Palestinian. Some are light complexioned, others dark, and most filling the whole spectrum of skin colors. There are comical stereotypes about the villager or the “falaheen” accent, or the stubbornness of people from Hebron, or the people from Nablus who love to gossip, or people from the north who are extremely conservative. But no one here talks about color. Everyone is Palestinian.

I wonder if we can ever reach that point in America. And I understand that quiet smirk in my friends voice and eyes as I hope for America by looking at the example of people living in Palestine.

Thoughts?

A Tuesday Afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:44:00 +0000

Every Wednesday I lose my voice But it’s great because if it’s Wednesday that means that the toughest day of the week, Tuesdays : 7 classes, as in nearly 7 hours of lecturing/talking/yelling/teaching/on your feet emotionally plummeting and skyrocketing dealing with kids/, day is over.

Tuesday this week I realized, at the end of my last class, that I hadn’t seen Salem’s mom in nearly three weeks. Last year, he was one of my 3^rd graders (now 4^th grade), for some reason really rebellious, he’d always act out, and he never spoke a word of English. His concerned mom, now a close friend and a sister like figure, came in one day to talk to me and tell me about this kid, who was born in Philadelphia, USA, but for familial reasons had to come back to Palestine. Her flawless American accent had thrown me off and had shocked me. The kids at school would make fun of him because he spoke with an American accent, so he completely shut down and stopped communicating in English. His mom and I made a deal, that I would work with Salem, to not only work on his language skills but also his behavior and attitude towards school. Her exact words to me were “my son is American. If there ever is a time when he can go back to America or we visit the States, I want to know that my son can be picked up from Palestine and dropped off in the middle of anywhere in America and communicate with anyone and everyone and not feel like a foreigner”. I would go to his house almost three times a week and spend hours with him, not as a teacher, mostly as a friend, and hear about his wild stories of being the most bad ass cop saving the world from evil. I discovered , as strange as it sounds, that he had literally turned off this emotional switch, and now it was fully reactivated and he was playing and laughing with me and communicating with me with perfect ease. It was strange and beautiful because I literally had done nothing nor ‘taught’ him anything, we would just sit and chat. Or read stories. Or play games. And his mom would come back surprised that all of that would take place in English. And she’d always be perplexed, slightly, and ask what I did, and my response would always be “absolutely nothing. We just read..kind of”.

Monday was mother’s day, so I figured I could show up at Salem’s house to say hello with some flowers. Flower buckets cluttered the streets in light of mother’s day.

I walked in to find both Salem and his mom super busy super cleaning for a super number of guests who were going to come to their house in the next hour. As soon as I walked in, she saw that something was wrong with my voice. “Are you sick?” “No” I laughed “just teaching, it’s tuesday”. In mid conversation she hurried to her kitchen and came back with a spoon full of fresh honey just scooped out of this giant honey jar, and it was in my mouth, the whole glob of spoon filled honey, before I realized it or could say anything. I struggled to move my mouth, it was so much honey and it had exploded my taste palettes so suddenly and the sweetness and the smooth stickiness of it made the attempt of getting any word out, such as “whoa”, come out really comical. Real honey is like real heaven. And it tastes so different from non-real honey. It was just too much in too little time and as I was struggling to ‘eat’ all of the honey, Salem’s mom kept on going about how my voice would be fixed in no time with this and how great fresh fresh fresh honey is for your health and then she scrimmaged in her cupboard and got out this yellow container filled with sticks of herbs inside. “you know zataar right?” “of course!” I said, ‘that stuff is awesome!”

“Well this is zaataar farsi, Persian zataar, you take this, put it in boiling water, and you’ll feel great” and she put the container in a bag and it was in my hand. I had literally been in the house less than 10 minutes and hadn’t even taken off my jacket, and already had two remedies.

It didn’t stop there. “why did you not take off your jacket? Come eat lunch with us”. “no I should really get going” She looked at me with almost a ‘are you serious? Are you stupid?’ look. “My mom made Makhluba yesterday, I can fix you up a plate right now, you sure you don’t want it? and we have fresh yogurt and goat yogurt. Salem go get the goat yogurt! I think she’ll like it! (turns back to me) you sure you don’t want a plate. It’s right here. We’re all going to eat, eat with us”. How can one refuse?

Salem’s grandfather came in, on his cane, limping slightly, but just like always, with his twinkling smile. “Ahlain Fahmida! Keefik? Shu akhbarik?” (welcome welcome fahmida, how are you, what’s new) and he sat down with me and we started talking about Libya. He asked if I knew of the number of Bangladeshis who were deported from Libya. And as I’m eating the delicious meal, I was enjoying the fact that Salem’s grandfather, probably a character who is dignity defined, is speaking to me in all Arabic, with no trace of any English syllable, confident that I am understanding. It’s really sweet and touching because it emanates a feeling of ‘you’re a part of our family’ not the ‘foreigner teacher’. I told him that I went to visit Sabastia last week, a village outside of Nablus, and how gorgeous it was, the hills, especially in the flowers! He told me only in Spring time will you see it like this, and he told me to go to Tulkarem and Jenin and told me how beautiful Spring time in Palestine was.

The conversation was refreshing, pleasant and heartwarming. It also made me realize the push and pull and tug of war relationship I have with the Arabic language. I am at a place where I can understand a significant portion of conversations, but getting my mouth to synchronize the words and string them together to create the symphonic beauty of the language that I hear is o so challenging. During recess I get my students to help, and they are very kind, and there are a couple who linger around the teacher’s room to see if I’m around and then they stop to see if I need help with Arabic homework. We practice, in reverse roles, where I let them be my teachers. And they are quite the phenomenal teachers.

Mother's Day and Political Prisoners

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:28:00 +0000

This year it didn’t feel that awkward to get the red carnation from a student who said Happy Mother’s Day to me early in the morning, before the 1st period of class. It was sweet, really cute, and the kiss that followed made me overwhelmed thinking of how much things have changed between my students and I. The teacher’s room has a giant wooden table in the middle, and at any given time you can find teachers sitting around it, grading or chatting, or huddling over the heater (toaster oven heater as I call it). This morning I walked into the room to find a giant vase of flowers of all kinds in the very center of that table! It was a gorgeous bouquet dedicated to all the female teachers of the school! And everyone greeted each other with “Kul Sana wa inti Salmeh” May every year be well for you (roughly translated).

I loved it. I love what this feels like. Last year I was so thrown off getting a mother’s day greeting from a student, but this year I graciously accepted it. It’s like a communal recognition to women, for mothers who already are and mothers who will be, and the greeting reaches out to both of them alike.

It was awesome to see one of my closest friends gleam with her twinkling smile at her small bouquet of flowers and it was equally pleasant to walk home with a couple of flowers sprouting out of my purse.

Palestinian TV, for some reason, is a channel that I realize I don’t watch that much (I am usually glued to Al-Jazeera International) but my new roommate and I flipped through it tonight, and what I saw touched another chord. Hundreds of women gathered carrying framed photographs of boys, and men..their sons. The rapid Arabic I’m still not quick enough to grasp when I’m watching a report, so I ask my new roommate what’s going on. “Those are all the mothers of the political prisoners who are in Tulkarem, and they gathered to commemorate mother’s day”. Then there were mothers of professional workers, mothers from different backgrounds, mothers working in different fields, all gathered in the same fashion, with a photograph framed, held in their hands. Some talking rigidly, some with full emotion, some patriotic, some sad, some proud, some blank. I don’t know what this term ‘political prisoner’ means. Why are they called that? From my background, when someone says prison, I am conditioned to think they did something bad (not anymore). When someone says, political, I think super pro-active (not anymore). In the situation and context where I am now, it’s as if all the right people are in the prisons and all the wrong people are out. These men in the prisons did not necessarily do anything political, the fact that they are Palestinian is what is ‘political’.

What is deleted from the dialogue, if there is ever one, about these prisoners is the realm of emotions and sentiments. You want to know anything about political prisoners? Look up statistics, how many women, how many men, and how many children are taken to jail and made to serve months or years for committing no crime at all. They will come in numbers, and the numbers will have years.

There are currently 750 prisoners who are held in Israeli jails without charge or trials. Since the year 2000, 2500 CHILDREN have been arrested. These numbers become numbers, to add to the statistics of 'human rights violations'.

What the numbers, stats, and prison names don’t include is the fact that each and every person who was put in jail without charge or trial was separated from their family, unjustly. Without reason. For an unknown amount of time. And they had to lose years off of their lives. What is deleted from our understanding of political prisoners is the human emotion of a mother being separated from her sons or daughters who are serving indefinite amount of time in prison. The psychological trauma that the family faces, all members no matter how young or old, is not observed. The psychological trauma of that prisoner being released and coming back to a halted adulthood is not observed.

Recently 5 settlers were stabbed to death, and it was gruesome. Instantly checkpoints were shut down and the West Bank was sealed off. 300 Palestinians were detained. Three hundred Palestinians were detained in prisons within a day.

A couple of days later we find out that it was not a Palestinian, but a Thai immigrant worker who had committed the crime. Yet the arrests continue. There are channels and news sources all over the world willing to cover the deaths of the 5, however, rarely any talking about the violations imprisoning, torturing, killing, displacing hundreds upon hundreds.

For more information about Palestinian prisoners : http://www.addameer.org/detention/background.html

i hate checkpoints

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:20:00 +0000

My eyes are fixated on the dusty green semi rectangular light that is not lit. The metal turnstill has two people sandwiched inside, stuck. Patience is running short and everyone waits, hoping that this small green light will light up, which will mean that the turnstill will turn, which means that 3 or 4 more people can go through the turnstill, put their belongings in the conveyor belt located about 5 feet from the turnstill and step in front of the soldiers behind the heavy glass window, to show their id. Before getting to that point, tens of people are waiting in crowds inside this space, the best way to explain what this space looks like is to describe it as a metal caged corridor. There is metal everywhere and you are stuck inside. Waiting in front of the turnstill, waiting for that stupid light to turn green. What’s taking so long? Why does the light turn green only once every 10 minutes and why does it let only 4 people through? Nothing, the soldiers are just taking their time, switching on the green light for a split second, and then chatting with their buddies or talking until they feel like switching it on again. Meanwhile, men, women, kids, elderly, Palestinians of all ages are standing in the metal corridor, waiting.

If you want to get to Jerusalem (no longer the West Bank but Israel) from Ramallah (the West Bank), this is what needs to happen. (Back in the day Ramallah used to be a suburbs of Jerusalem, and the distance between the two places is a mere 6 or 7 miles). You catch the bus from Ramallah, you get to Qalandia checkpoint to get to Jerusalem. As you near the checkpoint, traffic increases and cars and buses are lined up and people slowly start getting off from the buses. The cars go to another line, where they are stopped one by one, the drivers need to get off, open the trunk and all doors so the entire car can be inspected. The passengers from the bus get off and they go inside the metal barred corridor, crowding and huddling together, standing in front of a turnstill. When they are allowed to go through the turnstill, they put all their belongings on the conveyor belt, go walk through a metal detector, stand in front of the soldier to show their id, they are questioned, when the soldiers are done, they then take their belongings, then walk through another turnstill, exit the metal barred corridor and get on the bus again, wait for it to fill up, and then drive adjacent to the Apartheid Wall and continue the drive to Jerusalem, another 25 minutes away.

The part from huddling together in front of the turnstill to getting through the turnstill takes the longest. 3 or 4 people max get through at one time, every 10 minutes. At least a 40 minute to an hour wait, depending on how many people had been waiting before you including all the people that came down with you from your own bus. Sometimes the soldiers don’t like how you walk in through the turnstill, so after that long wait, they might ask you to go back through the turnstill into the huddle of people, and came in again, to repeat the process.

I counted how many times the turnstill turned the last time the light turned green. Once..twice…three times..and stuck on the fourth. Sandwiched again are two more people. “Allahu Alam” one man says (God knows all), as he gets stuck in the turnstill. I look at my watch. It’s been 35 minutes we’ve been standing in this cage in front of the turnstill. I peek in front of the crowd to see a woman in a purple hijab and a mauve jilbab, who had gone through the turnstill the last go, now separated from us (the rest of the huddled crowd behind the metal barred barrier) who repeatedly has to go through the metal detector because it keeps on beeping. Someone from our side yells out, “maybe it’s your hair pin! Or maybe it’s a clip!”. She turns around to look at our direction, with an annoyed look. Finally she takes off her boots, and goes through. “She wore THOSE boots? Didn’t she know she was going through a checkpoint??? The problem is in us! The problems are in us that we don’t understand” said one man watching the woman take off her shoes and go through the metal detector, finally without it beeping. Impatience runs high. People are waiting. More people are spilling into this corridor from other buses, the huddled crowd gets larger. When the turnstill turns again, people start bickering “your bus came AFTER mine sir, I go in first!”. “Allahu akbar” someone else says. People push and shove because they want to be next to get through the turnstill. Another man says “I wish the tsunami would come and wash all of us away”.

Now it’s been 40 minutes that we’ve been waiting. The anxiety, impatience, irritability is palpable. And I feel myself getting angrier and angrier. The first 15 minutes had been fine as I chatted with people I knew, trying to ignore the metal bars. But after a while it gets to you, and it becomes increasingly more difficult to control your thoughts.

Last time I was here, in this situation, the soldier didn’t like how a group of us had come in through the turnstill. He wanted us to go back, into the crowd. “he wants us to go BACK?” I had asked my roommate, who was with me, in utter rage and shock. We had been waiting for over 45 minutes. The handful of people being given this order were all equally puzzled, including the elderly women carrying their bags of vegetables. The soldier, without flinching, picked up his m16 and pointed it at us. The gun pointed towards us to make us understand that he wants us to go back. Standing in front of a soldier, with a gun, who points it towards a group of people, knowing that he is not regarding any of the humans in front of him as legitimate human beings, I observed my thoughts become angrier and angrier and turn violent. Who did he think he was? How could he so easily point his gun at us? Does he know what he has in his hands? Why are his fingers on the trigger? It’s an automated gun! Why don’t all the people, all the Palestinians just storm the checkpoint and beat this asshole up? And point the gun in his face instead?

All of us quietly had gone back into the massive crowd of people behind the turnstill, to wait once more. My blood was boiling with rage, not being able to fathom how someone could use their gun, to point it at people without a flinch.

A year ago when I had gone through Qalandia for the first time, I didn’t have to get off the bus. I had remained on the bus and just had to flip my passport to the page with my face on it and the page with the Israeli stamp on it and that was it. I remember thinking “this is not so bad. It’s like a bad traffic jam, and you have to sit for a while, that’s it”. The last time I had to get off the bus and I was with my roommate, she told me “just pretend you’re waiting in line at an amusement park, like Disney land or something”. And I remember thinking, hmm yeah..it’s just like waiting in line. Like bad traffic, like a queue for something, anything else, something else that is normal.

The absurdity of the existence of checkpoints didn’t hit me until I had to look at it repeatedly, from the windows of my bus, after coming back to Palestine from somewhere else (Jordan, Egypt, Bangladesh) and re-entering the situation, I would realize the abnormal and unnatural presence of this construction, the supremacist, revolting nature of this procedure that very few people in the world have to go through, where people’s worth are deleted, degraded and reduced. Human worth is reduced down to an ID. What color ID, what kind of ID, and the expiration date of the ID. You can pretend you are just in line for an amusement ride, you can pretend to sing songs to make the time pass, or chat about something else, or maybe peek at the encased video camera peering at everyone in the corridor, and just wait patiently, but the pointless 80/90/120 minute procedure to get from one city to another, having to face soldiers, an apartheid wall and going through security, to get to some place 6 miles down the road is outrageous to say the least.

6 miles. Boy is it going to feel weird to go home, back to the States, to travel from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Fayetteville North Carolina, 90 miles apart in probably less time than the time it takes me to get through these 6 miles from Ramallah to Jerusalem.

An Undignified Day at the Dead Sea

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 05:12:00 +0000

The soft, silky, black clay squishes through your toes as you step into the Dead Sea. There's no sand like there is in other beaches, it's just clay. You have to be careful to make your steps as you get into the water because your feet sink into this clay, sometimes slippery and sometimes planted right in, molding into the clay. Picking up a handful of this stuff, you feel like a kid, playful and excited to smear the black clay all over your body, which literally makes it look like you are smearing on a new layer of garment on your bare skin the clay is so dark. The blacker the better. Standing at the lowest point on earth, I saw other people, east asian tourists, americans, rusisians and israelis at Kalia Beach, relaxed, enjoying a great time by the sea.

For me, it was one of the most undignified days of my life that I don't think I'll ever be able to erase from my mind. I was trying to love what i was being told to love, "look you float! you can't drown even if you tried, you'd actually have to try to drown", "look how much fun this is!". for someone who doesnt know how to swim and has full fledged panic attacks in water if my feet are not planted and not touching the ground (I'm sorry, im not a fish, it's the most unnatural thing to do for me, and I frankly feel like I'm going to die), the fun was ok. No splashing, no putting your head in the water, and no swimming, were some of the rules, because it's the saltiest body of water on the planet, and it's the Dead Sea, nothing lives in it. In one brief moment when I felt like i lost control of my legs, I thrashed some water and got some in my eye. it burnt like hell, imagine pouring straight up salt water into the insides of your eyes. So much for a beach.

The only fun thing is the mud. And it's fun wondering at the natural formation of it, the clay and the salt. The fact that this particular beach is an Israeli ONLY beach (foreign passport holders also welcome), that Palestinians are prohibited from entering and that we were sitting there, in such an utterly disgracefully segregated, racist, supremacist place, had me feeling revolted and sick to my stomach.

The man who drove us on the orange van straight from ramallah, asked us at the crossroads "do you want to go to this beach or that beach". kalia beach is one that one of us had been to before, so we opted for that one. pulling into the parking lot, we saw two cars with Arabs be turned around. the driver told us "hoon Arabs mamnuya, and there Arabs masmuh". Arabs are prohibited here, the other beach down the road is where Arabs are permitted.

The fact that we willfully entered through its gates to deal with the rude service, and overpriced tickets and towel service, to sit in a place, watching all these human beings enjoy the beach and the water, where Palestinians are prohibited blew my mind away. We work in palestine, we deal with palestinians, we love palestine like a home, but here we were at a place where palestinians are prohibited, because we wanted a beach fix, to sit under the sun, to look at water, to 'relax'. i felt disgusted and felt little pieces of dignity be stripped away. It felt like i had stepped back in time, pulling out a historical memory from my mind that I only imagine from books, where segregation looks like photocopied pages from history books with signs from the civil rights era : "Blacks Only" and "Whites Only". And here I was in 2011, sitting at the beach where the "lower breed" of people are prohibited from entering. "Israelis Only"

we left in the morning, excited, to leave from Ramallah to go to Jericho. Fridays are slow, the orange fords which stand congregated in an empty parking lot, had its drivers sitting and talking lazily, as they were looking for passengers. buses/vans only leave when they fill up. the jericho ford van driver gladly took us 3 foriegners and took off to Jericho, 3 passengers was probably the best he could do for a Friday.

more coming soon..

Basel

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 23:48:00 +0000

Bassel Ezz's father stands outside the door 5 or 6 minutes before the last bell is going to ring as I am still teaching. He's mulling over his prayer bead being rolled around, each single bead at a time, between his fingers on his left hand. Basel Ezz is suddenly insanely sharp and alert and during these last 5 or 6 minutes, after having seen his dad stand outside through the little square glass window on the classroom door, frantically writes down the ten sentences that he was supposed to copy down from the board. The quiz had started as soon as the class started, 40 minutes before, and everyone else had finished, and were too busy, excited, packing up their things to go home.

The day before Basel Ezz had planted a punch in another kid's mouth in my class, and had given him a bloody mouth. The recipient of this bloody mouth is a rather quiet boy, studious, and one that generally stays out of trouble. I was livid to see this happen in my class 5 seconds into entering the room. By this point I can't count how many times I've given impromptu lectures/classes on violence and have had discussion with my kids about why and how it's wrong. I can't count how many ways and how many techniques I've tried with them to make them realize that it's something that Ms. Fahmida takes extremely seriously, and it doesn't matter if no body in the school cares about this, but if I find out that one of my student was beating up another kid, they are automatically at risk with their class grade. they didn't take it seriously at all in the beginning. some got it. after months of going at it with this, most now get it. especially if they study for hours for their tests and automatically get 15 points taken off their major class tests at the cost of a fight.

As the fight was going on in my classroom, everyone else in the room was chanting and singing, egging on the fight. Storming into the middle to drag out Basel Ezz and Yusuf, and furiously yelling to silence everyone, then picking out one kid and handing over the classroom marker and yelling in front of the class "if ANYBODY moves, talks, laughs, or makes ANY problem in this class while i'm gone, and your name is on the board, you are DONE!" (what I meant by that even I don't know) and I told the kid to just write names if any body makes a single noise instead of doing their work.

Storming up into the office, I was frustrated wanting to show someone what had happened. The social worker of the school didn't seem that moved, and instead asked me if I was free 7th period to talk. And all I could think was, do you see this kid with the swollen face? I need to get back to class, I don't have time for this. Basel is not coming back into my classroom.

He gets into a fight every single day. And everything is funny to him and everything is a game. Last week I had 'suspended' him from my class after walking in on him beating another kid. Suspension basically means sitting in the school office. No one talks to him when he's sitting there, I can't talk to him when he's sitting there because I'm teaching, and when the bell rings, he goes right back to his next class to continue his games. No one ever explains to him what he did wrong or how it was wrong and why he's being punished. He's 10. He is capable of understanding why people are upset with him. But he himself doesn't get upset until he sees his dad.

When I saw his dad stand outside the classroom door, my instant reaction was a sigh of exasperation. It was heartbreaking because I knew how Basel would react. He frantically was trying to finish his work, which he obviously cares very very little for. After the bell rang, the father with an embarrassed smile asked me (without saying anything) what was the problem. He looked at me with a quizzical face, hinting that I had to start the conversation. "Your son gave another student a bloody mouth in my class yesterday and I am sorry he's not attending my class anymore. I'm sorry but that is not something I will accept in my classroom"

Basel comes out embarrassed and scared and nervous, and his father starts lecturing him. A couple of months ago, the father had sent a gift with Basel to give to me, and the only thing that I had thought to myself was wow... these parents are doing everything wrong..bribing is not going to help the situation. Locking up your son in the closet is not going to help, and certainly beating the crap out of him at home is not going to help.

I knew that something was up with this kid, the first time I had startled him when he wasn't paying attention by going over to him to ask him to take out his books, and his instant reaction was to duck, taking cover under his arms, as if I was going to strike him. It had thrown me off too..and I had told him, "Basel, just take out your books, I wasn't going to hurt you"

By the end of Basel's dad's lecture to Basel in front of me and the school social worker, basel was crying and shaking.

It's heartbreaking. I am just immensely frustrated for many many reasons. Being in a situation, and teaching in a place with no structure, no discipline, no order and no consequences, sometimes i feel like i've ducked my head under quicksand and i'm struggling to get out. I feel like all the work and effort that I'm putting in trying to change the kid's behavior and attitude towards violence is undone and unraveled by other teachers who hit kids, and by the lack of enforcement for any kind of consequences for kids who are being violent, both with their peers and with the teachers.

A kid like Basel needs to be pulled out for some time for an insane amount of one on one attention, something that I can't give. He needs to be sat down and he needs a whole lot of love and encouragement, which is not something he gets at all. He needs to talk out this violence thing, something that probably makes no sense to him or to his parents. He needs to know that actions have consequences, something that is never enforced to him in a healthy way, both at home or at school. In the heat of the moment during a 40 minute class block, I feel like I'm observing the situation and the scenario from several different lenses, but i'm handicapped unable to do anything at all with any of them.

Israeli Newspaper

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 04:02:00 +0000

http://duckbar.mirror.waffleimages.com/files/13/13d6f663ea29a5d53193e1bf7af7161abeb22a74.jpg

A picture of a Palestinian child crying as a result of losing family members in the atrocious 2008 Israeli attacks in Gaza is used as the face of "Desperate Hungry Israeli Children".

A little twisted? Where does this money go?

Stop Shooting Children

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 19:42:00 +0000

I'm shocked that a congressman in America said this, and I feel that this is worth sharing.

"On this Human Rights Day, it's the least we can do."

Two Cracked Heads and a Terrible Tuesday

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 13:20:00 +0000

I saw Sleiman (4th grade), with his scrunched up eyebrows, pouted face and clenched fists, sitting in the main office chair with his feet dangling, looking at the ground, as 3 adults were screaming at his face. The secretary of the school, an otherwise smiling, sweet, soft spoken woman, was scolding him with full force exasperated rage. Two other teachers were also taking turns yelling at him.

Minutes before, as I was making last minute photocopies of some worksheets, I saw a crying child run into the same office accompanied by the Math teacher, who had a tissue pressed against the kid's face. Not his face, his eye. I recognized him, though I don't know his name. I knew he was Maher and Mohammad's (twins) younger brother, who was freaking out, because he had a busted head, and the injury was right above his eyebrow. With the clamor of the teachers, the crying kid and the photocopy machine, I couldn't make out anything of the story, except that the name Sleiman Izz was being repeated over and over agian. "damn, my sleiman?" I thought, realizing it was my 4th grader Sleiman who gets into trouble almost daily, almost in every class, and he's been 'kicked out' of the school several times now.

The last time I had taken him to the office was when he took out his pant strings and had playfully tied it around his friend's neck in my class, and by the time I realized what was happening the friend was choking, unable to breathe. The kid behind him took out his small pair of scissors and tried to cut it off. I'm not sure where this reaction and instinct came from, but within seconds I had stormed over to the other side of the room where they were. "BACK OFF!" and I had taken a pair of scissors to cut off the string from the child's neck so that he could breathe.

So here was Slieman again. In the office. Though I felt really terrible looking at him sit in the office with adults screaming down his face, I had absolutely no idea what to do. He's been talked to by the school 'social worker', the principal, his mom, i've had discussions with him, with the principal, and his dad, he's been suspended, kicked out, punished, everything. His answer is always the same when you ask "why did you do this?" "they hit me first!". It's like he never understands the gravity of bad actions, or the fact that pushing someone is bad, punching someone is worse and busting open someone's head is really really reeallly bad. for him, his reactions are all the same, and no matter how many times people explain things to him, he repeats the same things over and over again. during break, the other kid had done something (hurt Sleiman's fingers or something) and Sleiman threw a can at the kid's face.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the secretary came back into the office and sat down next to him, to talk to him softly to ask what happened. Sleiman burst into tears and by that time the bell had rung so I had to leave to go to my 7th straight class of teaching.

On my way, I saw the back of another kid's head. Carolene's brother. Carolene is a really really super slow student I have in 5th grade, who doesn't know much of anything, (the only thing she knows how to say is "Hello teacher!" and "Goodbye teacher!' and had to repeat grades a couple of times now). Her brother's head was bandaged up in the back, a spot the size of a fist, with gauze and bandage. Yesterday, he had busted his head open after prancing around, hitting other people, and jumping around and falling and hitting something sharp, and then he was taken to the hospital.

Yesterday I had a skype chat session with some folks back in the States, it was my first time doing something like this. I had mentioned that the kids here fight a lot and that the fighting is violent. I had grazed over the topic, and was reminded after the session was over, by my best friend, that it's important to distinguish how the violence and the fighting that I see here is different. Kids fight in the States too. People don't really get a picture when you say "the kids are really bad".

This week is no different than any other week, things like this happen daily and weekly. it's just somehow this kind of exposure to school violence like this leaves me less and less shocked each time, until someone reminds me that it's worth mentioning and pointing out what it is that as a teacher I actually do see in school everyday. and that it's not normal.

Zamzam Water and Kisses

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 18:23:00 +0000

A lot of people ask me why I don't teach in America. "If you love it so much, why not America? And if you really did want to teach, why travel so far away and leave home? Why here?"

Well let me tell you why. You know why? Because in America I wouldn't have students showing up to class excited to share a cup of Zamzam water ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamzam_Well ) with their teacher, that their grandparents brought back for them after completing the Hajj. Nor would I have students who start class only after they give me a kiss on the cheek Nor would I have students that I can be affectionate with. Showing them both kinds of parental affection: extreme kuchi koo cutness lovy dovy love to encourage them, and strict, reprimanding, scary, yelling, firm,discipline to straighten them up.

If I did that in America, I might have a lawsuit filed against me or I might be ousted from the teaching line all together. For showing feelings. Or not being a slave to bureaucratics.

I go through massive ups downs when I'm teaching. It's not fun breaking up fights, or having to scream, or having to feel like you're baby sitting kids instead of teaching them. 27 kids, 40 minutes at a time, 5, or 6, or 7 times a day. And it's not fun dealing with their tantrums or their sheer volume, which fires up your nerves into smoking, flaming, smithereens. Or pulling them out from beneath chairs, desks or cupboards. Or having to hear 10 of them speak to you in their loudest voices about 10 different things, completely unrelated to class. Nor is it fun when they are angry at you, nor when you've lost your temper, for the umpteenth time during the day. And it's really not fun grading stacks of papers and notebooks filled with incoherent, illegible scraps of writing that gives you a migraine just looking at it. Nor is it fun having to correct every snippet of conversation kids have with you to correct their verb tenses, pronunciation, or vocabulary.

But certain moments, when you have a student who runs up to you in class, and they share something with you that is extra special to them and you see them act in the most humbling, selfless way, opening up their hearts to you completely, which then makes you realize how lucky, and blessed you are as a teacher to experience raw, pure, selfless love that most people in the world probably don't know how to experience, you understand why it was that you chose this path in the first place. They live on the tip of their innocence, volatile and sensitive, yet forgiving and compassionate. It makes you realize how much you can learn from your students, instead of the other way around.

Shaheed

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 14:41:00 +0000

november 7th, 2010

“why do people have to shoot people in the mouth? like why not somewhere else? why in the mouth” i asked my roommate exasperated, frustrated and disgustingly bewildered. “well what happens is when you do that you make sure...” she caught the look on my face and paused to switch gears to ask “ wait was that a rhetorical question or did you actually want to know?” i didnt actually want to know, i was just not dealing with it, it being what i had heard a mere hour before on a car ride back home. i figured, ah what the heck “yeah ok tell me”

“what happens is, you blow out the back part right here, which controls your breathing and functioning, so you make sure that the person is dead, like if you shoot someone in the brain you know you could fuck them up, you could kill them but you could also have a chance where they dont die theyre just fucked up in the brain, but putting a gun in your mouth, you are dead”

ghassan’s uncle's blown out brain was splattered on the staircase after the IDF had stuck a gun in his mouth.

I was and am still frozen. I feel like i can’t function? why? i’m not sure. ‘im not thinking. im just frozen. the only thing i’m thinking is, ok maybe it makes sense to document what i’m feeling right now, this doesnt feel right, this feels unnatural, is this real? this actually happened to them. this actually happened to them.

i feel slightly immobile. maybe it was ghassan’s mom’s stoic face, her sweet and calm voice as she was telling me this horrendous story as we were driving back in the car, and the warmth of this family and the jovial childishness of his grandfather that makes this unbearable. maybe it was their gracious welcome into thier family farm, their family house, and into their village, and the delicious family dinner, and sleeping on the floor with the kids sprawled all over me after an exhausting day, that makes me feel this way. my heart is heavy and restless.

Its restless because conflict, war, weapons, death, violence, guns, soliders, settlements, suicide bombing, murders, checkpoints, restrictions, and resistence, these are not concepts to me anymore, and anyone who has not experienced these in their own reality, only deals with these notions as concepts, not a reality. when it permeates into your sense of self, life perspective and your external world, and when it affects people you know, and even worse care about, these concepts turn into an ugly reality that you wish never existed.
the juxtaposition of ghassan’s 8 year old free and strong spirit running around side by side with his grandfater in his village, and the shaheed pictures and portraits of his uncle hanging on the walls of practically every room was another testament to something that I feel like I've felt too many times in Palestine: witnessing the pureness and the innocence of humanity side by side, simultaneously, with the pure evil and worst of humanity.

we were on our way home from Kufur Thalth to Ramallah and we passed a graveyard. Ghassan's mom wanted to stop for a little bit and asked all her kids to pray and recite Surah Fatiha in their duas. She told me that her brother was buried there and every time they pass by the graveyard they pay their respects. The only thing I knew about this brother was what she told me every time she mentioned him "my brother. the Israeli people killed him".

I knew that he was in prison for 5 years, for being too 'outspoken' in college. "He was really shy and quiet. But he spoke up against a lot of things". and they would take him to jail, for indefinite amounts of time, and then let him go and come back after him again and again. I asked Ghassan's mom "wait why do they take people to prison?" it was a rhetorical question. with my time here so far and talking to people, i know that there are no good reasons why people are taken to prison. if the Israeli soldiers feel like putting you into prison, they'll put you in prison.

He was only 20 years old, with a really artistic spirit. Through his 5 years in jail, he made art in prison. The living rooms which carried the portraits on the walls, also had his artwork placed on all the shelves. like incredible art. he took cardboard he found around prison and made replicas of the Dome of the Rock, and built sculptors and frames, out of things here and there.

Artwork : made entirely of cardboard and thread

I couldn't believe this man had made all this in prison. He also taught himself Hebrew during his time and the last time he was in prison and then taken to court he demanded that he would defend himself. There was no evidence, or any reason for him to be locked up, and the judge let him go. After they let him go, he changed his identity. He moved to Nablus, changed his name, changed his looks, and started a new life and had disconnected himself from his family. They had no idea where he was for three years. He just did not want to go back to prison. So one day, jeeps showed up outside the family's house where he was staying, and they called him by his real name, announcing that they knew where he was and that they wanted him. The building was evacuated. He hid on the roof of the bathroom. When they raided the building, they found him, and at the staircase, they put a gun to is mouth and blew out his brain.

The mom found out watching the news, her son's face on the screen, who was now dead who she hadn't heard from in 3 years. She went crazy.

I kept on thinking about the locket that hangs around her neck, with her son's picture, framed in gold, that I noticed everytime she came over to sit next to me or talk to me.

Ghassan's mom at that time was in Gaza, and she couldn't get out. She heard about her brother, from her husband who heard from another family friend. She was only able to visit the grave, after their house was blown up in Gaza in 2008, they were able to get out, and start a new life in Ramallah and move to the West Bank under special sanctions.

When the dead body was given to the family in Nablus, the family took the body and wanted to bring it to the village Kufur Thalth to bury it there. At they checkpoint, the soldiers stopped the mourning family and told them that they could go, but the dead body could not go. Because the dead body is obviously a threat.

After hassles and chaos, the other brothers carried the corpse into the village.

Several months later, the soldiers showed up at their house again. This time wanting to take the other brothers into prison. "One is already under the ground. We have to show you people what you are playing with" This is how they would come to the house and interrogate the brothers, the ones that are alive.

I'm listening to this story, and my entire perception of my weekend changes. I am in utter shock hearing what I"m hearing and I'm replaying over and over again every single family member that I had met, and trying to imagine what they had to go through. A village turns into a battleground. And an innocent weekend turns into something else, I can't even explain.

I failed to realize how heavily their story impacted me until I realized that I was sort of shutting down, because there are some things and some feelings you just can't explain. And it's a slow process. Sometimes you go through feelings and you feel like you are in a mind warp where things just don't make sense. Or you feel anger when you realize how blind and deaf the world chooses to be.

I was telling my best friend that, I KNOW this happens, I KNOW what a Shaheed means, I know this happens in Palestine, I KNOW this place is under occupation. But then after experiences like this, I realize I don't know anything at all. It's different when it's real and not just a story. The reality becomes so shocking sometimes that you perceive it as a stranger and you feel foreign to it.

Sheep Milk and Duck Brain

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:18:00 +0000

I had never drank sheep milk before. But there it was, a hot steaming cup of sheep milk, which came straight out of the sheep that morning. Who could say no to that?(perhaps a lot of people) I took the cup eagerly from Ghassan's mom's hands only because I was curious about sheep's milk, and the strange bitter aftertaste wasn't that big of a big deal after two scoops of sugar. The fact that the hot steaming milk soothed my cramps, also left me quite happy.

The night before, I had arrived to Kufur Thulth, a small village outside of Qalqilia.

Ghassan is a kid that really does have a special place in my heart. I had heard a snippet of his story from my former roommate, who briefly had told me about this kid, Ghassan, whose house was blown to shreds in Gaza, who had gone to the States for 40 days, coincidentally taking the same flight to JFK as my roommate was. Having the same layover in NYC, my roommate took the opportunity to show Ghassan and his two younger siblings the magic and hype and madness of new york city in December, and the kids jumped at it, being crazier than the city itself, experiencing something they had never known before. The mom frightened out of her wits let her kids do whatever they wanted to, because she was grateful that her kids were alive to be running around.

For the past two or three weeks Ghassan would come up to me at least three times at the beginning of class and perhaps five at the end of class to ask "Teacher can you please come to our village on Saturday?". Each day it would be the same twinkling face with captivating kiddish gleam and the end of each class period was a pinch of dissapointment for him when I would mutter "I don't know Ghassan.." It would give him more motivation to be even more persistent the next day.

I had given up on the hope of olive picking because plans continuously fell through. And as much as I did want to visit Ghassan's village (and knew that there were olive picking opportunities there) I didn't actually think it was going to happen for some reason.
But one Saturday afternoon after school towards 5pm I was stuffed in their car for the hour long journey, passing through the beautifully hilly terrain of Palestine, passing through the not so beautiful checkpoint a new one that i had never used before and towards the fall of darkness we had squeezed inside a cramped garage after cautiously driving through a wobbly narrow village road.

Baby Danny, Dana, Yazan and Ghassan, myself and Ghassan's mom spilled inside the house and I met their jovial, playful grandfater, who was a thin, short statured man with more energy than the kids, running around (literally in circles) playing with his other 2 year old grandson. But his body boasted years of labor. You could tell he works in the fields, a lot. What I loved more about him, more than his youthful energy, more than his laughter, were all of his facial lines, and his face was absolutely filled with lines! And his smile would have an accordian player effect on his face. Ghassan's grandmoter was much quieter, and she didn't speak much, she just greeted me with a very warm smile, and called me to dinner which was a giant feast of Makhluba with sides of pickles and olives (like all dishes here) and though I didn't understand the family conversations, it was quite special to be eating a meal with Ghassan, who seemed to be in disbelief that I was there, his mom, his sister, his brother, his grandfater, grandmother, two uncles, one aunt and two more cousins.

Ghassan and Yazan took me outside to see all the birds they have, all the cactus plants they have, all the flowers they have outside, their lemon tree, fig tree, almond tree, banana tree and god knows what else. "There are more in the Mashtal teacher!". I didn't know what a Mashtal was but figured it was a place with a lot of plants. "We also have sheeps and goats! I will take you there tomorrow! you can milk one if you want!" he quite literally wanted to show me everything and his curiousity and energy was incredible.

What was also incredible was how hard, how absolutely hard, I was trying to ignore all the shaheed pictures of his eldest uncle, whose face was plastered in almost room with three or four portratis of him in each room, beside an ayah of the Quaran, with a green piece of cloth hanging out of the side of the frame. One picture was of him with a gun in each hand (have you seen Paradise Now? remember the thing they do in front of a white tapestry with the guns in their hands as a testimony to what they are about to do? that's what the picture reminded me of) and I was ignoring it, all of the pictures, this house that was a living commemoration and a museum of a brutal death, with all my efforts because I just did not want to know the story behind the portraits.

The next morning, we got up. I had gone to sleep after playing with Yazan and Dana (Ghassan had gone out to sleep under the stars in the farm next to the sheep, and he had invited me to go with him, but his mom thought it was rather inappropriate for the teacher to sleep next to the sheep. if it wasn't so cold I probably would have). Dana is this overly stubborn and spoiled 5 year old little girl who cries nearly every 10 minutes, sad or angry about something she didnt get. and for some reason she has a fascination with my eyeliner. so she climbs on me, comfortably sits on my lap facing my face, and starts playing with my eyes and my face. Yazan is always fighting for attention because his older brother, Ghassan, has all the stories, and he wants a chance to be funny as well. Both Dana and Yazan fell asleep on our floored bedding (prepared by their grandmother) on either side of me, with their legs strewn about on my back as I was sleeping on my stomach. I was too tired, maybe they were just playing on me and fell asleep tierd.

The next morning is when I had the sheep's milk. The night before I had duck meat and Ghassan had asked if I like duck brain. I didn't want to make a face so I simply said "no..never tried it before" and he took the cooked head of the duck and broke off the bones and ate the inside of the brains and chewed on the bones. Finger lickin scrumptiousliciously good.
He had been talking about the Mashtal, which I discovered was a piece of land with all kinds of plants that the grandfather tends to, and a place that Ghassan knows all about because he helps his grandfather and works side by side, or just runs around playing with his brother in the plant farm. Ghassan was telling me how some of the plants are bred and how long they have been around and every fact he knew about them. He showed me tall cactus plants, he showed me where they kept the chickens and the rooster, and the parrots, and all sorts of other things.
We hung around there for a while and then went to their main farm, stretches of olive trees and a shed under which several flocks of sheep were just chillin. When I was a kid, I remember going to the zoo with my third class and trying to feed a goat. And then getting attacked by a flock of goats. So a flock of animals, which resemble goats (the only criteria for resemblance : four legged creature with white hair/wool/outer coating, eyes and sometimes a horn) ompleteley freaks me out.
So going inside i kept on thinking 'o buddy..look at that..haha...ha..ha " It reeked and stepping inside you knew that you were stepping on top of fresh or old natural sheep shit fertlizer. And there was Ghassan storming through the crowd of sheep as if it all belonged to him, as if this giant flock of sheep should fear this little 8 year old boy. He would grab them by the ear and tug them around and put them in the right place in the shed. there were rules about where each one should stay, and in our excitement we had messed up the groups. one wrong move, and about 20 sheep stormed the small gate separating them from another part of the shed and mad rushed the entire shed. I was frozen. I dont like sheep running around me I realized (goat phobia kicking in).
We got out, and Ghassan and his grandfather saved the day. His grandfather was at the Mashtal and he immediately left and rushed over to the farm in his white little car and muttered and groaned and yelled at Ghassan and in 20 minutes fixed up the shed and told us that the reason why the sheep are separated is because different types are given different foods. So them mixing was a big deal because eating the wrong food would really make some of the sheep really sick.

The day ended with my walk with Ghassan's mom. She showed me the olive trees. Stretches of olive trees. We walked for a long time till we got to the edge of the hill, and from there, in clear view was a settlement. Ghassan's mom and I had been talking for a long time, about their family, about the farm, about the kids, about the weird type ant that lives under the dirt that comes up and swallows this fruit seed in about a quick hungry second if you put it on the already dug out hole that the ant creates for itself (to catch the seed I guess), and about cactus fruit that I had never tasted before. She casually looked at the settlement (which for me is always horrific, looking at settlements absolutely drives me nuts) and told me that the family had wanted to build a shed on their farm so that her dad could rest after working in the land, but building anything on THEIR land would become a bomb target. She casually muttered "the Israeli people would blow it up, we can not build anything"

On the ride back home to Ramallah, she told me about her brother.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

what is a settlement?
they are forced illegal communities built by the Israeli government in which citizens are paid to live, armed with state funded weapons on top of wiped out palestinian villages and communities. palestinian hills have had to be destroyed, families have been ousted, homes demolished to build these communities. residents of these settlments, known as settlers, are more often then not imported immigrants and more often than not staunch zionists. cases of settler violence are frequent (examples include settlers shooting at palestinian communities that they overlook, burning or uprooting olive trees as a form of instigation or destroying palestinian heritage, restricting transportation and basic utilities) palestinians have separate roads that they must travel on, which goes around settler roads, which makes traveling around extra difficult and more time consuming. palestinian communities often face a shortage of water, due to settlement communities.
this definition is not as articulate as it could be, but i hope you get the point. settlements are illegal and they suck.

Parent Teacher Conference

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:23:00 +0000

Yesterday was parent teacher day. I must say I was dreading it all week, but it wasn't so bad. I met 19 families.

I'm reeeeeeally enjoying my day off today. TGIF

november 3rd 2010 - thank you israel

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:12:00 +0000

“I need to see Jakeline” i demanded firmly as i looked at my cell phone watch at 8:59am . My appointment with Jakeline was at 9am. I had left the house at 6:25 am from Ramallah to get to Jerusalem to meet with her. After I lost my passport the second week of September, I’ve had no visa or documentation that makes my stay here legitimate in any way, forget about the West Bank, in Israel or in this area in general. Using my second passport, I was at least able to prove that I’m American, which is the only ID that I have on me that proves my American-ness. Losing an American passport outside of the States, is a huuuuuuge deal, because it sells for thousands of dollars in the black market. After waiting for 2 weeks for it to turn up, I went to Jerusalem to the Consulate to order a new passport, and was told that my old passport would be cancelled, and no one would be able to use it. At the Consulate, the man who was helping me, quietly told me that to get another passport and another visa I can’t have any documentation that says I was in the West Bank. That morning he told me to go walk 25 minutes uphill to Jaffa Gate, he told me where the police station was, and he told me to get a police report done there, and tell them that I lost my passport that day, that morning.
It’s almost jarring how I can lie now on demand to authority when it’s necessary. I casually went up to the police station, and during my walk, i thoguht for a second “hmm what should my story be for the police” and that throught twas followed by “meh dont think about it”. sitting across from the Isreali police, i just made shit up, saying that that morning I was in the old city with some of my friends, I was at the french bookshop (which I passed on my walk to the police station) and i had gotten a book which was the last time I had my wallet, and then when we were sitting down for coffee I realized I didnt have my entire wallet so I dont know where it is, I must have dropped it somewhere in the old city (which is a big place) and i need to report a lost passport because that’s super important.
Doing so got me my police report , and official piece of paper with lots of Hebrew everywhere, which is always a good thing in this part of the world when you have to deal with the IDF.

My new passport came after another 3 weeks. And then I had to set up a meeting with the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem to see if I could get a visa..the visa that I had been waiting the whole summer for in Jordan, the reason why I was stranded in Jordan for a couple of months in the first place, and the visa that i had gotten miraculously at the end of the summer..and the one that I managed to lose.

So that appoitnment was today. at 9am. with Jakeline.

The man looked at me for a split second like I was crazy. “Who’se Jakeline?” he asked. now it was my turn to look at him blankly. “crap” i thought, i dont even know Jakeline’s last name. I’ve just been in email correspondence with her for the past year. “i’m from Ramallah and I work for the Latin Patriarchate and I need to see Jakeline. she works here?” and he goes “ohhh the church is down the street, and then you will take a right and then you will go up the street and the church is at the end of the road”. Where the hell was I standing?? Turns out I had walked into a hotel with a church name that also happened to have the word “latin’ in it and had walked straight into the lobby of the hotel to ask the receptionist...about Jakeline. I kind of told the wrong person that I work in the West Bank. oops.

The reason why I didnt know where the church was, is because I had never been there before. Though I work for them and though I use their address as my residential address, this was the first time in about a year that I was actually seeing my ‘home’.

I walked into the church after the walking on winding roads, found Jakeline, and she told me to come back at 12 and told me to stay close to the area by the church, in case the interior ministry people who are the Israeli officials securing my visa, would want to see me in person to verify that everythign was ‘true’ or to see me since I had lost my passport and all of that. As I handed her my passport, I felt strange thinking “well this is it”. A month before that my boss had said to me “you need to keep in touch and follow up with Jakeline. I dont want you to get deported” and that was ringing in my ears. Would I get deported? Would I be leaving my teaching and my students? I”m not sure, I have no idea. In a strange way even though I’ve definitely learned more than anythign to let go of any feelings of certainty, one still has a tendency to worry being always in the middle of a mental tug of war, being pulled in one direction that makes you the happiest to the other direction where all of that can be taken away instantaneously.
I had 2 and a half hours to kill before getting that passport back.
I came back at noon. She hadn’t called me to tell me that I was to be called in, in person to be questioned or anything, so in my mind, I thought, wait either that’s really good or really bad? it’s a complete rejection or a complete approval? here goes
At 12i went in, and I went up the narrow set of stairs to her office and she was sitting at her desk, a bunch of papers and 2 X 2 passport photos of Catholic nuns of all colors and their applications spraweled all over her desk, probably applying for the same visa i had applied for.
She handed me my passport, and taking up two entire pages was a typed up printed piece of document that said that I am legal in Israel until October 3rd, 2011 with multiple entry, a big “M” stamped on the second page.

She told me that BECAUSE i lost my passport, they had to apply for the visa agian today and then renew it today, so in a weird way BECAUSE i lost my passport, I have an additional 3 months in Palestine, until October 3rd 2011 instead of July 2011.

Mutliple entry. I can leave and come back without any questions, from country to country, if i want to go to jordan, i can go and come back without worrying that i will be sent back. A year. I can move around from city to city within the West Bank. I dont have to worry about leaving the Israeli borders every 3 months, and stressing if I am coming back or not. I can be here LEGALLY. I am LEGAL.
I still havent processed this, and to many of my friends this may sound like not a big deal. but I can not begin to tell you HOW BIG OF A DEAL THIS IS. what i had in my hands was like holding diamonds. this kind of documentation, this kind of permission, JUST DOESNT HAPPEN. I didnt know what to do, i was in shock. So i went out, and because it was noon, church bells were ringing loud and clear and ringing through the entire city and with the visa in my hand i couldnt help but think “JESUS CHRIST!!! ..eff you Israel you messd up so bad! THANK YOU!”.

I dont knwo what to think. I’m not sure who to express this to, but to be here for a year legally in Palestine is almost unheard of (I’m sure it happens, but very very very veryyyy few in numbers)
this has put a completely new twist on my frame of mind. Firstly I still can’t let go of my 10 months of lifestyle : constantly and always bieng on pins and needles thinking about the uncertainty of living here, 3 months at a time. 10 months just to do the calculation for you is roughly 300 days lol, which is a long time. and to suddenly think that wait...i can actually move around from city to city. i can leave the country and come back. is ..too much to process it feels like.
This certainly doesnt mean that i HAVE to stay until October, but it gives me option. To pass up on a 3 month legal stay here doesnt only seem silly but almost stupid.
Wakling out, without even thinking I looked up to think “God you really DO want me to stay in the Holy Land!” what are the chances? that my passport being lost would result in THIS? Everything happens for a reason.

With a year at hand, I feel like there are countless things I can get my hands into. First and foremost: research. I’ve been talking to a lot of people about my teachign expereince here, and me wondering about research regarding conflict zone psychology. these kids that i deal with, do things and act in ways that will shock you. and there is absolutely no data or documentation of these behaviors, or causes, or implications of these things.

This was just to update you. If you know of any department or any professor that needs or requires or wants field work in Palestine, I am here, and would love to connect with academics.
Until I process more and find more things, this is it for me. I”m sure i’ll be getting in touch with you to bounc around some ideas.

Excerpts from "Palestine Walks" by Raja Shahadeh

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:06:00 +0000

"I like to think of my relationship to this land so immediate, and not intertwined through the veil of words written about it, often replete with distortions"
damn i feel you raja shahdeh!! i feel this way too!!
"In 1925, a Palestinian historian, Darweesh Mikdadi took his students at a Jerusalem government high school on a walking trip through the rocky landscapes of Palestine, all the way to the more lush plains and fertile villages of Syria and Lebanon with their streams, rivers and caves.
It has been impossible since 1948 to repeat this journey"
"A merchant from Ramallah finds it easier to travel to China to import cane garden chairs than to reach Gaza, a mere 40 minute drive away, where cane chairs, once a flourishing industry, now sit in dusty stacks"
"My days in Palestine are numbered"
"A man going on SARHA, wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself.
But not any excursion would qualify as a SARHA. Going on Sarha implies letting go. It is a drug free high, Palestinian style"
"This landscape, we are told, was formed by the tremendous pressures exerted by tectonic forces pushing towards the East. It is as though the land has been scooped in a mighty hand and scrunched"
-------------------
November 3rd, 2010. I think I"ll always remember the date, the way one always remembers monumental days. why? because today was a monumental day. more to come on that later.

i was in jerusalem today and i had 2 hours waiting for something to be taken care of. from jaffa gate i took a nice stroll down to Salah-Adin street to go to, in my opinion, one of East Jerusalem's best kept secrets : The Educational Bookshop.
The. Best. Bookshop. in. probably. the. WORLD.
It's got everything you need to know about Palestine, books that you will probably never find anywhere else,
in my opinion. and the people are so nice and the shop is small (because big things ALWAYS come in small packages) so nice that the people actually let my roommate use THEIR p.o. box so that she can get packages from the States. that might just be the definition of "really nice". when you know of ppl who live and work in occupied land with no address and you let these customers use your own personal business p.o.box for their personal mail from back home thousands of miles away = really nice.

After a lovely interaction and small talk with the shopkeeper, I picked up a book called "Palestine Walks" which trails the story of a man who walks the hills of Palestine and talks both about their beauty and their deletion and it intertwines personal sentiments with modern politics. When I read personally, i MUST have a pen, because i underline things that catch my attention. at this bookshop i couldnt do that , so i took some notes. and these were some excerpts that i wanted to share with you :)

Sugar Apple

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:16:00 +0000

So this fruit has a name in English and supposedly it is also prominent in South Asia. It's called Sugar Apple or Apple Custard. Didn't taste all that apple-y to me

Sugar Apple wiki will tell you all about it

i cut open a lime and found an orange orange inside

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:57:00 +0000

i felt silly buying a lemon from the vegetable market because i kept on thinking about my old apartment and how we never had to buy lemons, we’d just pick them from the trees. the garden is filled with a handful of lemon trees, planted by Georgette, so actually paying money to buy a lemon wasn’t an idea we entertained
so, instead, i bought a lime at the market. i always need a bit of sour in my food.
i came home. sliced open the lime. and it was an orange! whaaaaa!
i tasted it, and it tasted like an orange too. it felt like i had cut open an apple and found a strawberry inside.
this was perhaps my ignorance about different types of oranges. the only types of oranges i’ve ever had were alywas...orange.

but THIS fruit the one I’m about to talk about next, was an experience! I’ve never seen it, never had heard of it, never tasted it before. It’s green with spikes and you have to wait till the tip of the spikes turn black which is how you know its ripe enough to eat.
Cutting it open, it’s white and juicy inside. the flesh of it is white, and hidden inside are small black seeds. you eat the white fruit.

i made a huge mess cutting this thing open and trying to get the skin off, and the seeds out and turningthe white inside into mush as the two things were being done.

i ate the fruit. and it’s such a strange thing when you eat something you’ve never before tasted. its like your brain goes crazy trying to categorize the taste, the smell with something you DO know. it like freaks out at the foreigness, not in a bad way, but in a way where you just wait until you ‘figure’ it out.

so my brain did the calculation : this fruit, in arabic called Ishta, tastes like a pineapple and a mango with a hint of jackfruit. and it's in season!

Teaching in Palestine : Article for the Latin Patriarchate

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:25:00 +0000

The Latin Patriarchate is who I work for. They have schools in countries across the Middle East, mostly in Jordan. I actually visited one of their schools in a village in Jordan, and it was about a thousand times better than the Latin Patriarchate school I work for in Ramallah.

Upon request of writing a reflection as an international teacher teaching English in the West Bank as a part of the Latin Patriarchate, this is a short reflection that I wrote that I'm going to share :

Teaching in Palestine: A Personal Reflection

By: Fahmida Azad

English Instructor, Grades 4 & 5, Al-Ahliyyah College

I was taking a giant risk, as I was packing up my bags during the first days of January at the beginning of this year, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, USA. I was taking a blind leap to start life in another part of the world, a part of the world where I knew only one person and I knew that I had a job that I was passionately driving towards: teaching. I wanted to teach in Palestine. And so, I came here.

Looking back on the evening before my flight, at what I knew about Palestine, about teaching in Palestine and living in Palestine, and looking into my heart about what I know now, 10 months after that point in time, now having worked in Ramallah for almost year, I realize the gravity of how this experience has impacted my growth as a human being. Teaching has taught me more than I could have ever imagined. And my greatest teachers in these life alternating 10 months, have been my students.

I remember my first day of teaching, walking into a classroom of 27 hyperactive students who had no idea who I was, who could not grasp my foreign accent and who struggled to respond to my requests. I didn’t speak Arabic and they did not communicate in English. But we were both in the classroom for 40 minutes together and we had to make it work. When I think back, I still grimace at the level of frustration and struggle that challenged my students and I, to our core. For both of us, it was as if we were being dunked head first into a tub of ice cold water. We didn’t understand each other. The daily struggles included things such as me reciting simple sentences, which I wanted them to write, to gage the level of their listening comprehension and to see how they write. They didn’t understand why in the world I would ask them such a ludicrous thing, to write sentences that didn’t come from the book. Our styles simply didn’t mix. I was asking them to tell me all about their weekend in English, correcting them every time they used the wrong tense or said something absolutely incoherent in English. Their ears, their learning styles, their classroom expectation of a teacher, were all being molded into something they did not know.

I was simultaneously learning from them. I was studying each student to see what makes them feel encouraged and what makes them tick. I was trying to understand what they knew, and what they didn’t know. What I discovered, with each passing month, was that albeit me feeling at times that there were no results coming from their end, that they were trying their hardest as well to learn, as I was to teach. What I discovered at the end of my first four months, was that students were now able to make small talk with me outside of the classroom, and were trying their hardest to speak to me in English , not because they were curious about the lesson, but because they were curious about me and who I was, and where I came from. I discovered very quickly, that the endearing affection that I received from my students cam e straight from their hearts, emotions which were absolutely raw and pure. And that is what grounded a relationship between me and them, together in the classroom. A feeling of mutual understanding and affection. This became the fuel in both of our learning experiences.

Ten months later, since that first day of teaching, I now feel that it’s difficult to imagine the time when I didn’t know so many little things about each of my students. After having been invited to countless homes, for lunches and dinners, garnished with incredible hospitality and kindness, I realize how my role as a teacher goes way beyond the classroom. Families and students have taken me beyond just an English instructor, many of them have embraced me into their lives.

Teaching in Palestine has taught me the value of teaching and being a teacher. It is not a one dimensional role, nor does it start when I enter the classroom and end when I leave the school. It is a valuable relationship that certainly starts in the classroom, with a common goal of learning together, but it only goes forward from that point. The relationship doesn’t end, it simply progresses and changes with time. I’ve learned resilience, patience and curiosity from the eyes of my students. And I’ve let them carry me into their world full of both pain and wonder, which has taught me more than I could have ever imagined about my own world.

Pickled Eggplants

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:01:00 +0000

pickled eggplants, pickled turnips, pickled peppers, pickled olives and pickled pickles

they’re tiny, and squishy and intensely purple and pink, like really really purple and pink and the sour acidic vinegary juice that they bounce around in, fills up every single pore and space of the tiny eggplants. when your teeth pierce into the smooth skin of the eggplant, the pickled juice squirts in different directions inside of your mouth. it’s kind of sour, and like most pickled things (in my humble opinion) strangely addicting. i love pickles. but i never thought of the idea of pickling eggplants. which is why the texture of it still surprises me when i eat it. eggplanty and pickly.

and all of these tiny little intensely purple and pink bobble up and down in a big clear serving bowl in the assembly line of different varieties of garnishing items, at this local sanwich shop in the old city of Ramallah. every day after school i stop by this place and ask for a ‘sanwish jaj” and they whip out a skewer of fresh chicken pieces seasoned and sprinkled with spices, each piece separated by a small unpeeld onion, ready to be placed sloppily by this sweaty fat arab man wearing a dirty apron on top of burning coals. the smell is to die for. in the States all of this smoke would definitely be a fire hazard. but not here. Things are fresh, they are cooked right in front of you, and your nostrils are happy getting a delicious whiff of the slightly charrred and smoky sizzling chicken.

i had stopped by this shop on my new route back home from school after moving to a new apartment, and i was definitely pulled into this restaurant because of how good it smelled from the streets. it’s one of those really low key ‘messy’ eateries where people are sloppily running around, sweating and shouting and laughing and smiling at each other taking orders. I had walked in , and I saw a large Arab woman, sweating under her hijab,wearing a black hoodie. We exchanged a “marhapa” and “ahlain” and I told her what I wanted. I had to patiently wait for a good 15 minutes for the sandwich making process to be completed, beginning from the skewer of raw meat and ending with the meat being stuffed inside a soft pita bread neatly slobbered with hummus, turkish salad, pickled eggplants, salad with tahini and purple cabbage. This woman was definitely running the place, ordering a bunch of young guys running around, slapping down a bowl of hummus, making a circular and smooth dent in the hummus bowl with the back of a spoon and then sprinkiling olive oil on top of it with a powdered dash of this tart, dark purple spice called Summak (which I had never known before) on top, and carrying 3 of those bowls to a small shanty table and chair set occupied by a group of men chowing down on restaurant regulars: falafel, muttabbal, bread, fresh, onions and tomatoes and skewers of meat.

i tried small talk with the lady the very first day i had gone in there and that only entertained her and made her laugh. the next day i came back and i told her how much i loved her sandwiches, and her ear to ear grin complemented with a sweet “habibty” was followed by a big kiss planted on my cheeks.

Phone Calls and Pencil Shavings

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 18:17:00 +0000

i had a student cry for 25 minutes straight in class today as his friends tried to console him. the level of his disrespect was absolutely unbearable and dealing with him makes me feel like i am inside of a mental asylum dealing with complete and utter insanity, where the only solution might be like some tranquilizing injection or something (for either me or them, I don’t know). It makes me think of those weird reality tv shows in the States where unbelievably ill disciplined kids who are impossible to handle are sent to some army bootcamp. and are made to cry with some big macho butch army man screaming at their faces. so this kid, who shall remain unnamed, would burst out in songs, singling all the words on all ofl the posters around him (mostly French verb conjugation charts), talking to him would be useless because he would refuse to look at you and keep on making faces and go under his chair, come back up, kick the kid next to him, throw his sharpener, play with all of his supplies and of course not have any of his books or notebooks out on his desk, and asking him nicely at least four or five times meant absolutely nothing to him and he would just continue doing whatever it is he wanted to do. threatening to take off his class points meant nothing to him. being sent to the principal’s office meant nothing to him. so i told him that i would call his mom from my phone in class. he didnt believe me. i called his mom and told her that her son would like to speak to him. he couldnt believe that i did it, so he sat rocking in his chair with both of his index fingers stuck in his ear, because he didnt want the phone reciever anywhere near him and he didnt want to talk to her. so he started screaming. too bad his mom heard that on the phone.

and so for the next 25 minutes he cried with his head down as his friend next to him rubbed his head and consoled him.

i saw one of my student’s mom after school today who is convinced that there is nothing wrong with her son. and really really convinced that he is a perfect student and that the only problem with him is this OTHER kid who doesnt leave her son alone. she’s met me before and I’ve told her each time “no your son isn’t doing well. he spends all of his time playing in class” “it’s Mohammad Habib!” (this infamously ‘bad’ kid in class who in all seriousness should be kicked out of school) and I would have to tell her, well no it’s not always the other kids thats the problem, your son doesnt do any of the work and his grades reflect that. She would always have this awful look on her face when I would say that, as if I just slapped her.

Today she came to see me, and came in storming saying “Mohammad Habib doesnt let my son study! he sits behind him, pokes him, and then dumps all his pencil shavings on my son’s head! I dont know what to do!”
That’s funny...I would think to myself. I dont think these two kids ever even fight in class. her son is always poking this other kid and talking and walking around all over the classroom. She wanted to see her son’s final mid term grade. he had 70, and she gasped. and kept on insisting that it’s such a shame because at home he knows English so well. Even his dad says so. What could possibly be the problem, for him to get a 11/25 on his test? or a 2/5, or a 1/10? It’s the OTHER kid’s fault!
After 10 minutes of fumbling around, she started crying. And there I was. standing in front of a crying mother who was so severly upset at this mark staring at her face which seemed to shatter her world. she left with her eyeliner mark traced down the side of her nose. her son wasnt even in the room while all of this was happening, he had long gone after the bell had rung to go play outside.

O let me tell you about this month

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:34:00 +0000

September 24, 2010
In the last 20 days or so, I went to pray at the Dome of the Rock for the last Jummah in Ramadan, lost my passport, saw an outrageous festive Ramallah and East Jerusalem on the last nights of the Holy Month, had delicious iftaars with students’ families, prayed Lailat-al-Qadr prayer at Al-Aqsa Mosque, moved out of my lovely stone housed apartment (yes the infamous Georgette’s apartment), moved into a new contemporary middle class residential area, spent a maddening amount of time running back and forth from the Cairo/Amman bank to the Ramallah Police Station (about five or six times at least) after discovering that my entire bank account with all of my accumulated earned teaching money from June was wiped out ( i had lost my wallet with my American passport, my bank card, and money), spent Eid ul Fitr in Jerusalem after praying Eid Prayer at 7am at the Dome of the Rock, met the kind hospitality inside the home of a lovely family from Halhul, a village outside of Hebron, and had a mind twisting day in Tel Aviv with a French Algerian friend, a friend from Nablus who was being toyed with by the Tel Aviv University and a new friend from San Francisco, who happens to be an American Jew, a fresh graduate from Law School currently staying in Ramallah. I’ve also been teaching, of course, and have picked up 3 or 4 families to tutor, ranging from age 7 to 16, doing hourly lessons on intensive writing for some, creative writing for others, conversation, reading and grammar for the rest. Private arabic lessons that I started taking should hopefully drill my brain with enough Palestinian colloquial arabic to reach conversational level soon. I also discovered a fabulous chicken/kebab restaurant place where all the meat is skewed outside of course, the smoke bellowing a burnt smell of authentic street food goodness seasoned with perfection, selling mouth watering sandiwches for only 5 shekels (roughly $1.35).

Did I mention I lost my passport?

Life has been moving lightning speed, and when I'm not writing, it often means that I'm not giving myself a chance to reflect or swallow the things that are happening to or around me. Time permitting, more to come soon.

Peace Talks

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:45:00 +0000

a truck load of B.S.

coming soon

mistranslation

noreply@blogger.com (urmy) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:12:00 +0000

I was sitting next to the new French teacher and the Geography teacher while the principal of the school was going over the packet of information that all the teachers received that morning : a black plastic bag with a yellow “planning” book, all in Arabic, a stapled packet of information which was titled something something , the word that I knew for “homework” in Arabic (turns out it said the “teacher’s duties”) and a list of tasks, and responsibilities all in Arabic, so I couldn’t do much with it, and a calendar that had the holiday dates for this school year. Except the sheet of paper in my bag was dated 2009. So I couldn’t do much with that either.

The meeting started about a half hour late and began in Arabic. I had done this before, not just in meeting format, but through parent teacher meetings as well, when things would ocmpletley be in Arabic, I’d try my very very best to understand (it’s funny how much a lack of the right vocab can really throw you off when you’re trying to understand things, and you won't even know what you misunderstand) I always actually enjoy full on Arabic real life scenarios, because believe it or not, in Ramallah I always find myself in half Arabic immersion at best, so it’s always a nice challenge for my ears to try to pick up mannerisms, the language and understand my linguistic limitations. The new French teacher I met made me think of the turnover of teachers, with several old faces missing, and also the fresh start that this year is supposed to bring. Her enthusiasm and sweetness made me feel so at ease that I started a conversation with her that lasted about an hour and a half. She’d be talking to the other new French teacher, and I’d catch a few phrases here and there now and then (flashback to the 4 years of high school French that I had totally blocked out).

Interestingly enough, as I was sitting there, with my ears perked and alert ready to pounce on any familiar Arabic phrases from the meeting, (from which I caught many many times that students should never wear jeans, their shirts should always be white, their pants always ‘kohli’, no hair gel, and no chocolates or junk food either (when I would translate my limited understanding to the French teacher, she’d look at me confused as well asking “does that mean that we can’t eat chocolates either??” I had no idea. Also there are new rules that some of the teachers were irritated with) The mannerisms of anger is so interesting when you don’t know the language. Hard to explain, but anyone who has been in this position definitely understands what I’m talking about. So this is what ended up happening. The French teacher started talking to the other French teacher who was sitting two chairs over. And as the Arabic was coming from the principal’s mouth, the two French teachers would lean in as I would have to lean back, since they weren’t sitting next to each other and they’d translate the Arabic to French. My brain was doing sommersaults. I don’t even know at that point which language I was registering in, Bengali or English? I’d start thinking in spasms. “oo! Travailer is ’to work’” “ooo mamnuya! Forbidden! All that stuff she just said is not allowed! What smoking isn’t allowed?? That can’t be right. This palce is a chimney..all the time, that’s not gonna go over well with the teachers lemme tellya" is what I was thinking (then I understood that there was a separate non smoking teachers room (missed that part!)

The list of the students wasn’t ready. There was no schedule. Each day we find out our schedule on a whim. Back to Palestine :) Back to work :) where the bell doesn't ring and it's my fault for not being in a class that I didn't know I was supposed to be in, and when you do show up on time sometimes, the kids or another teacher tells you that you are not supposed to be there. Patience is a virtue :)

It’s absolutely wonderful to see the same students again. It’s strange to think of the little 3^rd grader munchkins in 4^th grade, and the 4^th graders in 5 grade now. I somehow feel maternalistic about it thinking “aww they’re growing up!”….and then several years from now I wonder who’s going to be where and if they’ll remember me. I did get attacked by hugs by one of the sections, to the point where one of my students had to scream out “khallas!” to the rest of the kids and peel them off of me.

The schedule looks like a morse code written out lab report with boxes and scribbles in indecipherable writing with gray charts with white printed out arabic print that makes my brain hurt when I look at it, and I have to wait until I catch one of the teachers writing their schedules so that I can quietly stand next to them, wait for them to be done, and meekly ask them if they can help me out in trying to figure out my schedule.

After the first day of work, yesterday, I was exhilarated, completely in love with what I do here, and after today, I was absolutely exhausted, thinking about how the teaching clock never stops, where I'm always thinking about making posters or more rules or thinking about what to do in class, realizing that there's no structure or framework that I was ever given, so I have to continuously come up with things as needed and just figure it out. Trying to get feedback is always more frustrating than just having to deal with things, without the proper resources, so often times it feels like a one man (woman) game.

Sidenotes :

-I forgot about that one student who always dances and runs up to class, takes my cell phone and turns on the radio.

-I also forgot about the kid that rips the papers you give him.

-I also forgot about the trio best friend, in grade four now, who always greet me with a giant hug and a kiss when I come to class.

-and that kid that literally understands no direction, no word that comes out of my mouth, and draws every single thing that I put on the board

-and that other kid who does nothing but draw on every piece of paper he can find.

- and most importantly : The copy machine. Which can make or break a teacher's day. When that machine is malfunctioning, you can bet that I am malfunctioning as well.