Mound of Olives

The Nightmare Before Christmas

2007-03-19T13:01:00.001+02:00

Part of my job is to organize the distribution of humanitarian supplies: quilts, health kits, clothing, etc. The lucky children of Aboud village were recipients this past December, and the village council sent us a CD of photos to show all the joy and cheer that was spread at the Christmas party.

Fortunately for these kiddies, Father Christmas comes but once a year.

Gas Gets in Your Eyes

2007-03-16T15:59:00.001+02:00

Remember a few blogs back, when I mentioned a change in Israeli policy, which would ban West Bankers from riding in yellow-plated Israeli cars? On our street this week, a taxi driver from the neighborhood was pulled over and arrested by the Israeli police when it was found that his passengers were West Bankers. He was beaten to death in police custody that night. Groups have gathered in mourning and in anger since then, and the Israeli Defense Forces have responded by firing more stun grenades and tear gas canisters, the noises of which have become as frequent and familiar as the call to prayer in this part of the city.

This photo is from two weeks ago, when there was unrest in the city over the excavations near the Temple Mount. For those of you in the know, the yellow awning on the left is the fruit and veg stand.

Prague Spring

2007-03-16T15:51:00.000+02:00

My volunteer visa has expired which meant that 1) I had to go on vacation, and 2) I’ve reached my one-year mark in Jerusalem. It’s been a quick-moving one, this past year, and I’m not quite ready to leave, end of contract or no, so I’ll be staying on as a local hire for the next couple months, doing everything I haven’t fit into the past twelve.

Back to my vacation: Karin, Krista and I, in an effort to align our three-month tourist visas, went to Prague for a scant week. The decision was made based on a complex mathematical formula which included the price of airline tickets, the price of hostel rooms, and the quantity of goulash available for consumption. Prague won hands down.
I get bored regaling travel stories, so this blog (or shall I say blague?) will be mainly photos.

Chocolate! Beer! Communists! The best that Prague has to offer.

Krista and I got haircuts at a swanky salon. For 18 hours I looked like a French hair model, and then I just looked scruffy again.

And one of my favorite parts of the city: the multilayered billboards:

We took a day trip to Terezin, a concentration camp a 90-minute drive out of the city. Terezin was a holding camp, rather than an extermination camp, during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and Czech resisters were held here before being moved on to Auschwitz and other death camps. Thousands still died in the fortress-turned-camp, though, and the walk through the bunk rooms can make you stomach-sick. Perhaps the most disturbing part was that in 1944, two Red Cross delegates and a third friend came to tour the camp to check on the conditions. Why it was okay to have a concentration camp, as long as the conditions were humane, is baffling and sick, but this was the case. Terezin is infamous for the hoax pulled off by the Nazis on this visit. Having advanced notice, they sent the large majority of prisoners off to extermination camps in order to hide the fact that there was over-crowding. Bathrooms were installed at the last minute, long lines of sinks and mirrors were ordered for the “barbershop”, children sat in a very temporary school room, being taught by a teacher for the few hours the Red Cross representatives were in the camp.

These short-lived “humane” conditions and a flowerbed here and there was enough for the Red Cross to give a favorable report of the camp.

Boys Will Be Boys

2007-02-12T20:30:00.000+02:00

The soldiers stopping our shared taxi at West Bank checkpoints this weekend were barely past puberty, it seemed. Dwarfed by their huge guns and still acne-prone, these eighteen- and nineteen-year-old “men” leafed through our stack of Palestinian IDs and international passports and determined whether to wave us past the roadblocks or to order everyone out of the van for a round of questioning.

“They’re so young!” exclaimed Christian, a German man working as an accompanier in the Territories, as we stopped at our third checkpoint of the trip, one manned by what looked like a junior varsity basketball team.

A few weeks back, when my sister Karin was visiting, we spent an afternoon in Bethlehem’s Ayda Refugee Camp, where a friend was staying with her charming host family. We drank tea in the living room, taking pictures of and feeding snacks to Rueida, their rambunctious and oh-so-cute three-year-old.

The living room’s wall of windows looked out on what used to be a stunning view of Rachel’s Tomb. Now it faces the snaking cement of the Separation Wall and a watchtower with slit windows.

It was from the small windows of this watchtower that the family’s nephew was shot a few months back. Twelve-years-old and playing on the balcony with a toy gun, this boy was apparently perceived as a security threat by a soldier sitting 100 yards away in this tower. This soldier had a few things to think about before firing the shot: are handguns readily accessible to Palestinians? No. If this is a real handgun, would this twelve-year-old have the aim to get a bullet through one of these Pez-dispenser windows? Probably not. Is he surrounded by several young children? Yes. Sitting in a well-protected tower you would think a soldier would take the time to ask these questions before firing a shot to a crowded balcony of children. But the shot was fired, the nephew got a bullet in his leg (but survived), and the children of the camp now stay off their balconies and duck as they pass by windows in their homes.

“They’re so young” is so true. True of both the Palestinian kids who are traumatized by this Occupation and the soldiers who are given the job of carrying it out.

The boys of Ayda Camp.

JERU!!!! Karin style. Holler.

2007-02-02T15:10:00.000+02:00

Karin will be your guest blogger for the day.

Through my travels around the Holy Land, I have pretty much done it all. In 15 days. So here are some things that you should make sure you get around to in your trip to the Holy Land. The order is the recommended sequence of events.
1. Meet a Timbuk2-toting, liberal-bashing, myspace.com-commenting boy on the sherut on your ride from the airport.
2. Visit Neve Shalom Peace Village. This place is the largest source of hope I saw in all of Israel/Palestine.
3. Do some yoga at the Y. No yoga pants? No problem! Pair some painting capris with leg warmers!
4. Go on a day trip with a van-full of kids from one of your prospective colleges. And make sure they sing you all of the songs that one simply must know before attending.
5. Scrabble in the Judean Desert. Just make it happen.
6. Go to the Turkish Baths in Ramallah (Yallah, yallah, lets go to Ramallah!). Make sure you drink water, because it is possible to blackout in the sauna. Apparently.
7. Visit Vered Haglil, a bit north of Tiberias. Try the hot chocolate cake. I kind of liked it.
8. Aroma Café (supposedly branching out to NYC, so watch out!) and hook yourself up with some of the almond croissants while chilling with a health code-breaking cat.
Fat cat lookin’ at the camera.
9. Bike the circumference of the Sea of Galilee in its entirety. It’s even better if you do it on a Lil’Honey kiddie bike, like my bike pro sister, Margit.
10. Visit Ayda refugee camp in Bethlehem, and let yourself be shown around by some teenage boys. I highly recommend the recently released convicts as tour guides; they will move parked cars, if not mountains, to make sure you enjoy your stay.
Two thumbs up for convicted tour guides.

To see what Karin thought about the rest of Israel/Palestine, check out the Karin Rates the Holy Land photo set. Thumbs up and down, she rates it like it is.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/margit/sets/72157594487958372/

Christmas Comes But Thrice a Year

2007-01-09T12:01:00.000+02:00

This past weekend was Eastern Orthodox Christmas, about two weeks after the Christmas of the Western Church and about two weeks prior to the Christmas of the Armenian Orthodox Church. People don’t agree on much over here. Having already celebrated “real” Christmas, I and the Browns and their out-of-town friends went down to Bethlehem to participate in the spectacle of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch coming to town. Vying with aggressive news cameramen and the religiously zealous who actually deserved to be there, I threw elbows, ran along with the mob and got pressed flat against the walls of Nativity Church trying to get photos of the Patriarch who I wouldn’t have been able to pick out of a lineup. (Unless he was in the lineup wearing his Greek Orthodox Patriarch garb. That would tip me off.)

Karin and I, caught in the mob. (That’s me and my camera reflected in her lens.)

The one with the scepter? He’s kind of a big deal.

Sebi jostling with the media. He took the above photo of the Patriarch.

“I want to say hi to my mom…” Interview with Al Jazeerah.

Inside Nativity Church, waiting for the Patriarch’s message. (He’s on the far right under the gilt canopy.)

Christmas 2006-07: Two down,

one to go.

On time for the first Christmas, I got a free tree, courtesy of the Israeli government. I still don't understand why, but it turned out real cute.

Also, it snowed. This happens rarely, and snow like this hasn't been seen in Jerusalem in six years, they say.

Our friend Ian, the most charming Scottish minister you could hope to meet, is in town for a few weeks, and we took advantage of his head full of poems to have a Poetry and Noodle Night at my apartment. Sixteen people crammed in for Japanese-inspired sesame noodles and a few hours of recitations and readings. You know you’ve crossed from collegehood into adulthood when you apartment, the morning after a party, is littered with pages of poetry and candles burnt down to the tin husks.

Road Rage

2006-12-14T10:44:00.000+02:00

My friend Bassem works down the hall from me, and shows up to work every day in his slick Bassem style: bicep-hugging t-shirts and a black leather jacket. Today Bassem was running around in a dowdy winter parka, looking quite unlike his polished self. Why? Because his leather jacket was a smoldering pile of ashes in the gutted skeleton of his organization’s van.

Daaaaaaang is right. The van was having problems yesterday, so Bassem pulled over, opened the hood, and then watched as the van transformed into a fireball within minutes. Of course he hadn’t bothered to bring his wallet, his cell phone, his passport or his leather jacket for a quick peek under the hood, so all his stuff melted into the pile of ashy rubble that now sits seven inches deep on the floor of the van.

In other traffic reports of recent days, Khaled and Richard, two of my co-workers, have been caught in the quagmire of checkpoints lately. It being the tail end of olive harvest, Richard and Khaled were heading back from the olive press with several gallons of olive oil in the back of the truck. At the checkpoint, though, the Israeli soldiers on duty wouldn’t let them through. This hadn’t been a problem on the previous trip to the press, when I (a white girl) was sitting shotgun. But with the absence of an international face, things are rarely so easy. Richard is from Jerusalem and Khaled from Bethany, a distance of about four miles between the two. But because Khaled is a West Banker, he was told to go through the checkpoint for West Bankers, while Richard could go through the checkpoint for Jerusalemites. If, for some random and likely reason, one of them was denied entry back into Jerusalem, they wouldn’t be able to get in touch with the other, as the two checkpoints are several miles apart. Richard ended up borrowing a car from a friend in the neighborhood, and Khaled took the truck and the oil home for the night, driving it to the office the next morning.

A week after that nuisance, Richard was once again returning (alone this time) from the press with the last crop of oil. Because he’s a Jerusalemite he shouldn’t have any problems accessing Jerusalem from the West Bank, but seeing the olive oil in the back of the truck, the soldiers this time demanded import forms. Here’s one of the infuriating things about living here: The line between Jerusalem and the West Bank is not an international border. If it were, the West Bank might be an independent Palestinian state. Israel treats the Green Line (the West Bank-Israel boundary) as a border when it comes to Palestinians trying to get to get to Jerusalem. But Israel doesn't treat it as a border when the governement builds settlements in the West Bank and underhandedly offers Israeli citizens cheap housing, omitting the fact that the homes are built on Palestinian land. Now they're asking for import forms, but if Israel were to acknowledge that this boundary is indeed an international border, they would no longer have a defense to their occupation of the West Bank. As the rhetoric goes, there is no occupation because the West Bank and Israel are all Israel. How can you occupy your own country? It makes me crazy.

The gears are starting to turn for the latest squeeze in Israel’s stranglehold on the Palestinian’s right to movement. Starting in January, West Bankers are not allowed to travel in yellow-plated cars, which is any car registered in Jerusalem or Israel. This means my boss cannot drive his West Bank employees to a meeting. This means my friend’s co-worker, a Jerusalemite married to a man from Ramallah, cannot travel with her husband in their Jerusalem-registered car. If they are caught riding together they will both be fined, and the car will be confiscated. A 30-minute wait at a checkpoint or having to carry your ID card everywhere or having to apply for travel permits to enter Jerusalem may seem like just a nuisance when viewed as a single event. But when you add together all of these blockades and papers and stupid stupid rules, you end up with the most depressing commute you can imagine, not to mention a lot of humiliation. And if your husband is from the next town over or your checkpoint guard decides to ask for ridiculous documents, or your car spontaneously combusts and your ID card goes up in a fuel-fed blaze, you’re just that much more screwed.

For Christmas this year, consider asking your loved ones for a copy of Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

A brief excerpt:

“The overriding problem is that, for more than a quarter century, the actions of some Israeli leaders have been in direct conflict with the official policies of the United States, the international community, and their own negotiated agreements. Regardless of whether Palestinians had no formalized government, one headed by Yasir Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, or one with Abbas as president and Hamas controlling the parliament and cabinet, Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land. In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights. No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements.”

Preach it, Jimmy! This website (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6543594) has a longer excerpt and a good interview with President Carter.

Palestine, Unionized

2006-11-14T14:38:00.000+02:00

The shops of East Jerusalem have been closed the past week, a sign of solidarity with the Gazans who have been under the fire of Israeli shelling. These downtown strikes have been a regular trend since Israel rolled its tanks into Gaza over the summer. An attack on civilians, and East Jerusalemites close down their felafel stands and coffee grinderies. The U.S. election results last week sent the big story over here to the inside pages of the papers: nineteen Gazans, mostly women and children, were killed when an Israeli missile hit an apartment building. That was the event that spurred this most recent strike of East Jerusalem shopkeepers.

Initially, and to some extent still, I feel frustration when these strikes take place. While it’s all well and good to show solidarity and passive resistance, on a practical level these strikes just hurt the Palestinians more. Families still need to buy bread and milk and baby formula, and with the Arab shops shut tight, the business simply crosses to the affluent Israeli half of town. Why not keep the small trickle of money in the Palestinian economy, which needs as much help as it can get?

Two weekends ago I attended a flamenco concert in Bethlehem. It was a full house when I arrived ten minutes late, and I and some friends I saw on the way in sifted throughout the audience into the few empty chairs. About an hour into the show a Palestinian man ran onto the stage and began shouting in Arabic at the audience. When he broke the microphone stand in half and the Spanish dance troupe ran off the stage I figured it wasn’t a planned intermission. When a swarm of men carrying semi-automatic rifles stormed into the hall I figured it was time to find a translator.

“Three men were killed by the Israelis in Bethlehem yesterday,” explained a man next to me. “He says it is a shame we are here celebrating when people are dead. If we don’t all leave there will be violence.” The audience was already up and pushing towards the exit while armed and unarmed men shoved and fought and babies cried among the chaos. I found my friends and we snaked our way through the panicked crowd and made it outside where we headed towards the checkpoint that would let us out of Bethlehem.

In some ways admirable and in some ways incredibly sad and useless, there is something in the society that will not allow for people to forget their fellow Palestinians. In a place where the killing, arrest or harassment of family, friends and neighbors is so frequent an occurrence, any measure of escapism seems like it could only help such a traumatized population. But some part of the culture insists that if others are suffering, one cannot forget that. Solidarity is a strong part of the resistance movement. As an American, I see money not going into a devastated economy and people not allowed to forget tragedy for an evening. To the Palestinians, this is a way to unify their people. Solidarity transcends the checkpoints, travel restrictions, and the Separation Wall that are breaking Palestine into an archipelago of unconnected and starving islands.

The Muslims and Jews are fighting, the Muslims and Muslims are fighting, so of course the Jews need to fight each other as well. The ultra-Orthodox Jews living in the neighborhood of Mea’a Shearim were rioting all of last week in protest of a gay pride parade scheduled for last Friday. There weren’t any gay rights activists in the vicinity during the week, but in protest, trash was spewed across the streets, electrical power boxes were destroyed, and cars were upturned and set aflame by angry ultra-Orthodox. In the end, the parade converted to a rally on a locked-down college campus because of all the death threats from various Orthodox Jews. Twenty-two thousand Israeli police were on duty last Friday to control any outbreaks of violence. From our vantage point on the Mount, we could see smoke billowing from the direction of Mea’a Shearim nearly every night, another SUV set ablaze.

A photo of a calmer, but no less bizarre evening:

Last Supper on the Mount of Olives. Millennia late, two disciples short.

Olive is the New Black

2006-11-05T20:07:00.000+02:00

‘Tis the season, and between now and the end of November we have to harvest olives from the 800 trees on our property. I started my harvesting career Monday when 60-some teenage girls came with their school to help pick for the day. Karin and I were in charge, and for about two hours we had a hard working crew. It was around 10 a.m. when we wondered if we should hydrate the free labor.
“I don’t want to distract them,” said Karin.
“But they’re probably thirsty,” I said. So we brought out the juice and that was it. From that point on almost nothing got done. The girls started eating their lunch, wandered off through the grove, sat under trees and talked and chased each other with olive rakes through the rows of trees. The one thing they didn’t do much of was pick olives, but they were nice girls nonetheless, and big fans of the camera:

The hospital and office staff was out later in the week for a more thorough and labor-intensive day.

Clever trick: to filter the leaves and dirt from the olives, they throw platefuls of leaf/olive/dirt mix down a long net. The olives are the heaviest, so they end up at the end of the net, with the debris dropping earlier on.

And it wouldn’t be Palestine if it didn’t involve music, nargila, and massive amounts of meat. The afterparty:

Town and Country

2006-10-04T18:44:00.000+02:00

Monday was Yom Kippur, the day when West Jerusalem and the rest of Israel stops in its tracks in atonement. That means no cars are driven, except in cases of emergency. While this is supposed to be the case every Shabbat, they put out roadblocks on Yom Kippur to see that it’s actually followed. The big rocks in the road and the little rocks thrown by orthodox children keep the streets empty for 24 hours. So after work Karin and Phil and I walked down the Mount of Olives, up out of the Kidron Valley, past the Old City and Arab East Jerusalem and into Israeli West Jerusalem. We and a handful of others who were out to observe the emptiness played in the traffic-less streets and took pictures of what is normally the busiest part of town.

Ain’t nothin’ here.

Cute Israeli kids cruising down Jaffa Road.

Phil wanted a photo of himself lying in the middle of the street. As he was getting up a guy on roller blades skated over. “Hey, do that again! I’ll jump over you!”

Coooooool!!!

“Someone told me someone was doing cartwheels over here,” he said after multiple jumps over a supine Phil. That was me. The “worth mentioning” notch on the scale of interest is brought down a few pegs on Yom Kippur, I guess. He was a nice guy, Canadian, living in Jerusalem for a while and working at AOL. He had spent the whole day ‘blading round the empty streets of the city.

Karin, Phil and I then wandered to the Old City, hoping something would be open there. It wasn’t. (Everyone was inside breaking the fast.) Then we wandered back to West Jerusalem as a few of the shops started to unlock their doors. Then we wandered back to the Old City where people were emerging from iftar and filling the streets again.

Was it Burger King that had that mascot with a moon crescent for a head? He was always wearing a tux and playing a piano? Anyone?

Yesterday Karin and I got to go along with Sri, who works with the Mennonites here, to a village northwest of Hebron. There is a needlework co-op in the town that provides employment opportunities to the women of the village. This is Souad showing us the products made by the local women.

“Hayda isimha [this is called] eleven F!” she said, pulling a table runner out of the closet.
“Hayda isimha twenty-two D. Twenty-two D, see?” she said, pointing at a cross-stitched camel. She proceeded to tell us the names of each of the patterns. Fourteen C, seven B, we saw them all.

Here is Souad convincing Karin to marry her son, a successful (and handsome!) lawyer in Ramallah. Go for it, girl!

The Palestinian hills on the way back:

The checkpoint hold-up on the way back:

Chances are I’ll have a 2.5-week blogging hiatus after this entry. When I post again I will likely have
a) exited and re-entered Israel,
b) re-entered and exited the United States,
c) been strip-searched (again) by the friendly employees at Ben Gurion Airport, and
d) a second brother in law.

CAN. NOT. WAIT.

Ramadan Mubarak!

2006-10-01T21:37:00.000+02:00

Ramadan, I’ve found, is a party. My exposure to the month was always classmates who couldn’t eat during the day and had a food-free room to escape to during lunch hour at school. I’d always equated Ramadan with Lent, a period of fasting and sacrifice. But while it is that, it’s also a festive time. Family comes in from out of town, and once the cannon is shot off at sundown each day, people don’t just break the fast, they celebrate. After iftar, their evening meal, the streets of East Jerusalem come alive, starting around 10 p.m. and lasting well into the night. This from a city that usually shuts down at six. Special breads and stuffed pancakes I’ve never seen in bakeries are blooming out of every street stall in East Jerusalem. You’re normally an ice cream shop? Now you sell bread. You’re normally vending shoes on the sidewalk? Now you’ve got bread alongside your glittered high-heels. The streets are filled with flat breads and crispy crusted challah loaves and sesame-d lemon-shaped breads that everyone buys but no one can eat until dusk. Except me, that is.

Here are the pancake men working overtime an hour or so before the start of Ramadan. You eat these like a Hot Pocket, stuffed with sweet cheese or spiced nuts.

The boy on the left said Karin and I could take his picture, then chased after us, saying we couldn’t tell his dad and making a throat-cutting motion with his hand. You’re nine years old, you’re smoking, and it’s Ramadan. Yeah, you would get in trouble.

The pediatric department at the hospital is being renovated. The staff is calling the ward Bint al Jabal, after the town in southern Lebanon that the Israeli air force destroyed.

This here is Naji, one of the guards who works the main gate below my apartment:

Along with being a nice guy, Naji was also the person holding my name on a piece of cardboard outside customs when I first arrived in Israel. I tried talking to him in Arabic on that first car ride from the airport to Jerusalem. When I drove with him to Jericho last week, the conversation went a little more easily. We were making a delivery of blankets and health kits to a boarding school in Jericho, and after arriving were invited in to the principal’s office for the requisite cup of Arabic coffee. We did the small talk, exchanged the delivery forms, and Naji checked his watch every couple of minutes.
“We should get back soon,” he said (twice), and we said our goodbyes.
Pulling out of the school’s parking lot, Naji turns onto the road in the opposite direction of Jerusalem. “Let’s go to my grandma’s!” he said.

Most of his family lives in Jericho, and Naji was practically out the door before he parked the van in the front yard. We were bustled inside and pushed onto the gold-velour slipcovered couches while his aunt fed us tea and water and fruit and honeyed dates. Naji’s grandfather counted prayer beads and spoke in simple Arabic to me, and Naji’s good-looking mulleted cousin sat with us when he wasn’t taking one of several cell phone calls in the other room. Naji translated the large portion of conversation I couldn’t follow.
“Now you can speak English, but in school when you studied you couldn’t speak any English!” his aunt teased.

Naji’s English is not bad and he’s fluent in Hebrew—both languages he taught himself while he was in prison during his teen years. Pretty much every Palestinian man you speak to over here has spent some amount of time in prison. A large portion were there for throwing a rock or being accused of throwing a rock at an Israeli tank or a soldier.
“Here it’s not a big thing to go to prison, because it’s everyone,” said Naji.

One last pic, waiting at the checkpoint to get out of Jericho. The vanful of cute kids ahead of us waved at me and then started making faces until Naji shook his finger at them.

Tripod

2006-09-20T09:56:00.000+03:00

I’m writing this morning with a dry and scratchy throat and a pressurized sinus cavity. A couple from the Lutheran Church here is on home leave for a month, and I’m watching their sweet apartment and their manic-depressive three-legged cat while they’re out of town. So I put up with some allergies and in exchange get to live in downtown East Jerusalem with a double bed and a DVD player to play with.

M&M, my charge for these few weeks, has mastered the amputee thing quite well. He needs to get a good burst of momentum at the start of a movement in order to keep himself going without the help of a fourth leg. So you open a door, and this fur bomb comes shooting towards you. The marble floors plus his fur makes it difficult for him to stop, though, so he just crashes into door jambs or his water bowl or my legs. He’s also a biter and a scratcher. In short, the sympathy wears off quickly, especially when you’re mopping up his food and water that he’s sent flying for the third time in a day. He gets lots of points for coping skills, but not many for likeability.

M&M in repose.

M&M in action. (Notice the stump.)

This past weekend was the Taybeh Octoberfest Beer Festival, something you don’t pass up on if you’re in the area. “It’s a fun thing to do,” said my boss a few weeks ago. “And fun things don’t happen much over here.” Yes, it’s not common to find a Palestinian village where everyone is happy and most are slightly drunk, but once a year Taybeh, the only 100% Christian village in the West Bank, steps up to the task.

On Saturday we packed a car full of people (with room for the many cases of Taybeh that we brought home) and drove into the beautiful West Bank countryside and the intense late-summer heat to a town known for its Christians and its beer. The community center was swarming with most every international in the Jerusalem area, along with tapped kegs of Taybeh and various Palestinian vendors from area, selling Palestinian needlepoint, peace dove oil lamps and home-grown honey. (You can’t actually eat the comb, I learned…) A few school groups of debka dancers performed on the outside stage, preceded by a less-choreographed performance by one of the drunker locals grooving to the Arabic pop karaoke taking place next to one of the beer stands.

Shake what your momma gave you.

Taybeh Beer Factory

“Load ‘er up!”

There was a recent picnic for the hospital staff. They’re serious about meat-eating here.

Roman Holiday

2006-09-11T14:10:00.000+03:00

Woah there.

That’s not the Middle East.

No, I left behind the desert and went to Italy for a week. Besides a lot of pasta, a lot of gelato and a lot of walking, there aren’t loads of details, just pictures. Here are some from Rome:

Romulus and Remus and their she-wolf Momma

This Bernini bust of Medusa is considered not his best work. But they’re fixing her up anyways.

I always thought this was in Greece. Turns out it’s not.

The Marcus Aurelius statue in the Capitoline Museum. That’s my travel pal, Phil, gawking.

Typical Rome.

Typical gelateria.

The Colloseum.

Trevi Fountain.

“What is that smell?”

The Appian Way was the road leading out of ancient Rome, along which wealthy Romans built their mausoleums.

Here’s me trying to recreate one of those 17th century paintings where aristocrats would dress up as peasants and pose in pastoral settings, reading, playing cards, or being awoken by rosy-cheeked shepherd boys. You know, how peasants lived.

Some from Vatican City, which sort of counts as its own country, seeing as they have their own postal service:

Cherubambino.

Nothing wrong with a little holy wine. Me, with the wine-in-a-box you can buy at the Vatican cafeteria, and Bacchus, in the Vatican Museum.

The popes have been hoarding art for centuries now, and just pack the halls full.

Catholic kitsch? You’re in the right place.

Vatican City by night, over the Tiber River.

A Moroccan man was running the hostel where we stayed in Florence. When I heard him counting out my change in Arabic I started talking to him a bit. (I'm relieved to find I can communicate with dialects other than Jerusalem's.) “I knew you were Arab!” he said triumphantly. “I could tell from your eyes!” Here are a couple from Florence:

Here's a security guard locking up Lorenzo Ghiberti's doors to the Florence Baptistry.

The Arno River, which flows through E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View. A recommended read.

And finally:

Weird, right? The uncanny resemblance between this Velasquez portrait in the Vatican Museum and former Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson.

The Road to El Dorado

2006-08-12T18:31:00.000+03:00

Like its name, the El Dorado Café doesn’t seem to belong in East Jerusalem. While most of the shops along Sala’h Diin Street have racks of glittery hair barrettes or plastic alien masks flanking the doorway, ElDo has a mantel of polished pink marble around its windowed façade. Inside, the walls are all mirrored, with gleaming gold framing that reflects in the marble floor. Upstairs you watch yourself reflected infinitely between the walls as quiet couples and louder families eat enormous slices of cheesecake. Downstairs you sit at the bar while the barista brews up layered mugs of milk and espresso and foam. The mirrors disappear for one portion of the wall and are replaced with columns of multi-colored coffee beans and pastel-wrapped gourmet chocolates. The mirrors and the marble and the men slowly smoking cigarettes at the bar give a strange feeling of excess that doesn’t fit in with most of the neighborhood, and I just find the intriguing and a good spot for people watching. I’ve taken to spending a few hours there on Saturday mornings. I study Arabic verbs and I leave smelling of the espresso and tobacco of middle-aged men.

This morning a man was perched on the stool next to mine at the bar, drinking a cappuccino and looking regal with a pageboy hat and a gilded cane.
After a few minutes of neck craning he finally spoke. “Excuse me, can I see you handwriting?” he asked, pointing at my notebook where I had meticulously written out the curves and dots of Arabic. The script is beautiful, even if you’re just writing verb conjugations. “You have very nice handwriting,” he said. “You have the potential to learn calligraphy.”
“Oh, do you know how to do calligraphy?” I asked.
“I’m a calligrapher.”
Huh. Didn’t realize that was a profession. I have one month before he moves to France if I want to take lessons from him. It would be a fun thing to try, although I think eventually I need to start learning skills that are useful.

Who knew dates were so pretty? Here’s a fresh bunch at a stand outside of Hebron in the West Bank.

I.V. league

2006-08-09T10:48:00.000+03:00

The kids at the hospital’s kidney dialysis unit are terrific. Three times a week they ride the bus to the hospital to spend four hours of the afternoon hooked up to I.V.s and dialysis machines as their blood gets cleaned in an energy-sapping process. I had helped to arrange an art project with the kids—the higher-ups in Geneva want children’s drawings for Christmas cards. The theme was supposed to be Hope and Healing for the Future, but if you give a girl a box of colored pencils you’ll likely end up with pictures of flowers and ice cream, and not a dove of peace flying over a healed Jerusalem, which I think is more of what Geneva had in mind. Someone also broke out the gold glitter puffy paint at some point (it was used quite liberally), and one of the nurses wrote the kids’ ages at random spots in the middle of their drawings, so basically none of these will win the Christmas card competition. But we had fun anyways.

On arriving at the dialysis room, I was introduced to Alla, who I was told is a real ladies’ man. He’s somewhere in his mid-teens and was flipping through a British woman’s beauty magazine called SHE, looking for inspiration about futures of hope and healing. Basically, this involved giggling at all the underwear ads and then slamming shut the magazine in mock embarrassment before continuing to shuffle through the pages. The other kids got down to work, getting help on the outlines from the nurses who they know well after years of coming to the hospital for dialysis. Bashra drew herself in a fancy dress. Hassan drew a bridge over a creek and a little house with a garden. Huda drew a rose with a butterfly hovering nearby. Hiba, the artist of the group, drew an elaborate ice-cream sundae with cherries and a flower border around the paper. And Alla, having found his muse somewhere in the pages of SHE, drew a bra and underwear. The kids, who line the perimeter of the room in their puffy recliner chairs, their blood coursing through rubber tubing, cracked up when Alla proudly showed off his lingerie drawing. The nurses laughed and scolded him, very used to his antics, which normally set the room into fits of laughter. And Alla, always the charmer, turned to me with his hand on his chest and said solemnly “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” then crumpled up his drawing to prove his remorse for so uncouth an art project.

The talk and laughter between the kids dies down an hour or two into the dialysis session as they tire from the cleansing process. The recliners are here so they can sleep comfortably through the last half of the session before the tubes and needles are removed from their arms and they board the bus to go home.

A few years ago they would have ridden to the hospital with their parents, but since the construction of the Separation Wall and the increased number of checkpoints, the hospital has had to get creative to make sure patients can reach the medical services they need. Most of the kids come to the hospital without family because their parents or siblings can’t get travel permits. And even though they’re children and they would die without these bi- or tri-weekly treatments (our hospital is the only one offering pediatric dialysis to West Bankers), there is still the constant process of applying and reapplying for permits to make sure they can cross the checkpoints on the hospital bus and make it to the kidney dialysis center.

Drawing with mom.

Here are two photos from an anti-war vigil I went to outside of Damascus Gate last week:

My Proportionate Response

2006-07-27T22:33:00.002+03:00

It’s hard to know what to write these days, but I’ll try to draw a picture of the mood of Jerusalem as I’ve been experiencing it.

The general feeling is that Jerusalem is still a safe place to be, likely out of rocket range and ethnically mixed enough to deter anyone from bombing, should any stray missiles land a bit off target. But there’s a definite tension in the streets downtown, and a walk through East Jerusalem any day of the week attests to the fact that things aren’t as they were a few weeks ago. Increased military and police presence, rumors of suicide bombers and a greater lockdown on the Arab parts of town have put an uneasiness in the air. The international and local communities are frustrated and angry with the U.S. government for its refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza or Lebanon. In certain shops downtown I’m greeted with a coolness I’ve rarely experienced from the friendly Palestinian shopkeepers, although a larger number have told me how much they appreciate the presence of internationals here and just wish the rest of America would open its eyes to the realities in this region.

Last week I was twice caught in the heightened security when the Israeli police shut the gates of the Old City, something I’d never seen before and didn’t realize was possible. Damascus Gate, the huge archway and main entrance into the Old City from East Jerusalem, was shut tight with massive doors that are normally hidden against the walls. Leaving the Old City on Friday night I was caught inside for about ten minutes, and Monay afternoon I was stuck outside for twenty as the size and impatience of the Palestinian crowd grew. A few Orthodox Jews would push their way through the crowd and the doors would part slightly, the soldiers allowing Israelis to pass through, while pushing back the Arab men, women and children who also tried to slip through and go about their business.

Stuck inside.

Stuck outside.

“All this racial discrimination is exhausting. I need a cigarette!”

The doors part.

This evening I took a bus downtown, normally a five-minute trip. It was closer to twenty due to the closure of the main road leading from the Mount of Olives to the Old City. Security forces were lining the streets, barricades set up at every major intersection. All traffic was diverted to circuitous routes through neighborhoods, clogging the narrow streets and filling the air with futile honking. I eventually made it down to the main road near the bus station, and the police and soldiers were even thicker down there. I arrived just in time to see soldiers grab three young Palestinian men in headlocks, then drag them along the sidewalk to the post office where they pushed them up a staircase and into a hallway not visible from the street. The soldiers who followed them were pulling out their battery sticks as they entered the hallway, and the female soldiers who had been in the hall were sent out to the street. The observing crowd was milling and huddling and watching the drama and being pushed and told to move on by the soldiers and police.

I managed to get one hurried, blurred photo as the last of the men was pushed up the stairs. After a few minutes a couple of the soldiers came out of the hallway and exchanged high-fives with their comrades, laughing and jostling each other. One of the female soldiers was wiping away a few tears.

I received an email this week showing a photo of young Israeli girls, about twelve years old, writing “To Lebanon with Love” on the side of rockets that the air force would later fire on targets in the south of Lebanon. I thought of this as I watched these soldiers high-five-ing each other after (presumably) beating the crap out of some unarmed Palestinian men. In this militarized society, the people inflicting the violence are being just as damaged as those receiving the violence, I feel. No one over here should have to live as they do.

Despite the tension and unrest in the city, people go about their business as best they can. It’s a survival mechanism, and a good one. I don’t want to give a disproportionate (word of the week) account of the good and the bad, so on a lighter note, here’s what else I’ve been doing besides playing photojournalist.

Going to concerts at the pretty Mormon Center for Jerusalem Studies (this is Julie in the gardens)

Celebrating Julie’s birthday with a trip to the Dead Sea for an evening picnic and a salty float

Chillin’ in Ramallah with the lovely Lina

Photo-stalking the unsuspecting devout in the Holy Sepulcher

Wandering Jerusalem in search of the totally random, which is never difficult to find

Thank you all for your concern, thoughts and prayers. The UN security chief in Jerusalem has been out playing volleyball with us these past few weeks. He’s a smart man with a strong serve, and I figure as long as he’s out scoring aces every Wednesday night things can’t be too dangerous here.

Hum-drums of War

2006-07-12T19:17:00.000+03:00

A political rant, if I may, concerning the recent violence in Gaza and at the Israel-Lebanon border:

I was in the office this afternoon, furtively Xeroxing page after page of a massive Arabic textbook, when Alex the accountant walked in and stated, rather matter-of-factly, “We’re at war.” Normally I would try to hide the fact that I was a) not working, and b) blatantly breaking the law, but this was big news. Copyright be damned—we’re at war!

The sick thrill of disaster wore off quickly once I read the online news updates, though. Technically, we’re not at war, at least not yet. An Israeli minister of something was quoted as saying (roughly) “Their actions are an aggressive act of war.” He was talking about Hezbollah militants kidnapping two soldiers at the Israel-Lebanon border, and he followed up his statement with the always-popular promise of escalated violence and a refusal to be diplomatic or rational in response.

The drama of violence and terror doesn’t seem so dramatic after a while when it’s a daily occurrence here. My high school psychology teacher taught me about the reticular activating system, the brain’s mechanism that tells you “Stop paying attention to the feeling of your Birkenstocks on your feet.” When there is a constant continuation of the same stimulus, the brain learns to focus on other things, things that change, things that vary.

So to hear that an Arab militant group has committed a violent act and the Israeli Defense Forces are responding without restrain doesn’t surprise me anymore. Let me rifle through my bag for a minute (and get a glass of orange juice while I’m near the kitchen) and pull out this report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It discusses the firing of Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. I know it’s been on the news and I know it’s a terrible thing, but so are the numbers in this report, which haven’t been as highly publicized. Between January 1 and June 20 of this year, 896 “homemade Palestinian rockets” have been fired into Israel. In retaliation, Israeli Defense Forces have fired 8,380 artillery shells into Gaza, and the Israeli Air Force has conducted 142 missile strikes. This is a ten-to-one ratio, and these are expensive, engineered rockets compared to the shop class Frankensteins that the Gazans are Duct taping together. (The fatality numbers also reflect the disparity.)

I still consider myself a pacifist and I still support all the organizations working over here that conduct non-violence trainings for Palestinian youth and adults. But the stories in the newspaper don’t ever seem to change, and I can’t figure out why no one makes the Israeli policy-makers take part in non-violence trainings. Palestinians aren’t allowed to form an army and they’re not allowed to own guns, yet Palestinian civilians are killed on a daily basis with none of the publicity that Israel receives when its citizens are the victims of a suicide bomber. Civilian killings seem to be okay if they’re committed by someone in a government-issued uniform.

The longer I’m over here the more convinced I am that it will decades if not centuries before an actual peace will be brokered. One side attacks and makes a demand. And rather than conceding, even when the lives of civilians and hostages are at stake, the other side just ups the ante and kills more people or arrests the government or does whatever they feel they need to do in order to look like the stronger side. We all know which is the stronger side—the death counts and the national economies attest to that. What this conflict needs is a side that gets bored after a while and tries something new, like trying.

One of the two trade school’s that our organization runs had their graduation ceremony last week. Twenty-four of the 88 graduates weren’t able to get through the Separation Wall and checkpoints to attend the ceremony. Their robes were laid on their chairs to symbolize their absence.

This is the valedictorian of sorts, a telecommunications graduate, who made the student speech. The girl peeking from behind the flag had a smattering of bruises around her eyes and nose. I feel like this photo is deeply layered with symbolism.

Contest Winner No. 14

2006-07-12T19:08:00.000+03:00

One of my more fun purchases of the past year was this book

Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler, an art-historical romp delving into uncanny similarities that pop up among works of art, pop culture, advertising, etc. The book was published by the (often humorous) creative writing publishing house McSweeney's Press, which also hosted a fun little online convergences contest for the masses, of which I was chosen as “Contest Winner No. 14” for my own little riff on a found triptych. Here’s the link to my entry, followed by a spiraling cobweb of connections by Weschler himself. (With a dollop of art world blasphemy to top it off.) For an explanation of the contest you can read this.

EasyEasy

2006-07-06T09:23:00.000+03:00

Anton, the head maintenance guy, had a big task ahead of him: painting the entirety of the guesthouse’s common kitchen/living room in just one day. He was in the office that morning, talking to our receptionist Suad about how it couldn’t be done. Eager, as always, for something away from my desk, I offered my services to Anton, who looked me up and down, then whispered to Suad in Arabic “How do I know if she’s any good?”

I spent the summer following high school graduation painting faux stone onto the walls of foyers in northern Virginia mini mansions, and I promised Anton I wouldn’t mess up the project. I even know how to spackle! So I changed into some ratty clothes and a bandana and showed up at the guesthouse at our appointed meeting time. Anton showed up 30 minutes later and we got to work scraping off peeling and mildewed paint, then moving along the walls, me painting what I could reach from the floor and Anton scooting the ladder around to top off between my work and the ceiling. We got about 30 minutes into the job before Anton called for a coffee break. I said I’d keep going, which Anton thought was an awful idea. “Easy easy, Margit. You work too much, get tired.” So I let him pour me a cup of juice before he headed outside for a slow cig and a mug of Nescafe. Another 30 minutes of work, and it was time for another break. “Shwai shwai, slowly slowly. Tomorrow, your arm it hurts. Must rest.” After every return from every break Anton would marvel at my progress, my strength, my precision, and the fact that I was a much better worker than his assistant. “Anything need paint? I call you. Big boss,” he said. (I’m also the Big Boss on toilet repairs, another project I tagged along on a while ago.) The third coffee break was followed, about 15 minutes later, by lunch break. We agreed at that point that I would do the rest of the first coat and he would come back for the second.

Such skill! Such speed! Anton was amazed to find my part done when he returned an hour or two later. “You? Ly grambo,” he said. “Grambo? I don’t know that word.” “Not Arabic, English,” said Anton. “Rambo. You. Like Rambo.” Now he flexes a bicep every time I pass him on the campus.

There’s been a fantastic free concert series around Jerusalem, two weeks of chamber music by top-notch musicians in locations all around the city. Lots of fledgling musicians are doing camps with the musicians and then their own little recital at the end. This concert was at the Austrian Hospice. The boy at the window I think is one of the young cellists, watching a Canadian grandmaster on the piano.

Nablus

2006-06-27T09:41:00.000+03:00

Nablus, the biggest city in the West Bank, is normally sealed off by checkpoints and Israeli settler roads. But word on the street was that Nablus was open, so Grete and Andy, who were visiting for two weeks, and Julie, who’s here for the summer, and I decided to beat the system and see if we could get in for a daytrip. Nablus is supposed to have the best knaffe in Palestine, and for some, large trays of mozzarella cheese covered in sugar and syrup is worth hours of travel.
I feel that everyone should travel through the West Bank to get an idea of what it’s like to live in Palestine under the occupation. We got up to Nablus easily, which means a bus, a passport check by an armed soldier, a second bus, a wait to get onto a settler road, a walk through a checkpoint and a taxi to the city center. Getting back to Jerusalem, however, took a bit more time. First there was the taxi to the walk-through checkpoint where soldiers train their guns at your knees as you walk through the gate and shove you against the fence to get your line into single-file. Then a taxi van with no AC, which waited nearly an hour and a half at a second drive-through checkpoint. The mother with her baby in the backseat weren’t doing well in the suffocating heat, and Julie chatted with them and shared her water while Grete, Andy and I dozed in a stuporous sleep. Once through the wait at the checkpoint, we drove through the settlement-dotted Palestinian countryside to Ramallah where we hopped off at Qalandiya checkpoint, and went through the round of turnstiles and got the nod from an 18-year-old soldier who chomped her gum and sported a ‘tude like only 18-year-olds can do. Then a bus which took us back to Jerusalem, with a random stop on a street corner when yet another soldier got on the bus and checked the passports of everyone onboard. About a three-hour trip for a 30-mile distance. And we were just returning from a day trip. Not in labor or trying to get to a city to sell vegetables, like the some of the locals who have to contend with these hassles all the time.

Grete at the checkpoint

Nablus is set in the beautiful rocky hills north of Jerusalem and Ramallah. “Lawless” was how the town was once described to me, but besides a crazed apricot vender wielding a huge knife, the people of Nablus were friendly in the typical Palestinian fashion. My favorites were two brothers, about fifteen and sixteen years old, who stopped to talk to us while were buying kiffyas at a shop. Once they established that we weren’t Israeli soldiers they talked about Nablus, about the soldiers blowing something up on the outskirts of town the day before, and how one of the boys had been shot in the knee by a soldier in downtown Nablus during one of the not infrequent bouts of gunfire. We ran into them a second time and they told us about their dog Mushi and led us to the sweet shop for the knaffe we had come for.

There’s only so much to see in a town that’s lost all possibility of a tourist industry, so after a stroll through the Old City, a stop at a shop selling Palestinian pride paraphenelia, and a grease-laden sugar shock of knaffe, we took a cab to one of the few sites in town: Jacob’s Well in the basement of a Greek Orthodox church. The gate was answered by a pony-tailed priest who was out watering the courtyard gardens. He did his thing while we went in the church and met the local man who gives the one-stop tour of the well in the church’s basement.

Scholars doubt the well’s authenticity as the site mentioned in the Old Testament, but nonetheless it is sacred to both Christians and Jews, and thus has an ugly history surrounding it. In 1979, the Greek Orthodox priest at the church was killed by axe-wielding Israeli settlers, right next to the well in the basement of the church he was protecting. And in 1980 the current priest came to Nablus, filling in for a predecessor who was violently murdered and arriving at a church with bare stone walls. The priest is an amazing artist, and living more or less alone in this compound for the past 26 years, he’s painted the apses and ceilings and domes of the church, wonderful iconic images with draping robes and golden halos that cover the walls and ceilings. And when he’s not turning the once barren sanctuary into a beautiful light-filled one, he’s protecting the church and himself, fending off fifteen attacks on his life since he arrived. The settlers apparently don’t tire of it, and neither has he. He keeps on painting and watering the garden and living alone in this little compound in the middle of Nablus. An amazing man.

The floor tiles for the sanctuary have been ordered from Greece, but the Israeli government is demanding USD$17,000 in taxes before they’ll let the church receive the shipment. So until it’s waived or dropped to something reasonable, gravel and dirt cover the church floor.

Mabruk!

2006-06-13T16:13:00.000+03:00

Grete and Andy are getting married! Here's the happy couple, engaged (pun intended) in a wicked-intense battle of Name That Tune, with an authentic Israeli soldier asleep in the background.

Farm Fed

2006-06-06T07:52:00.000+03:00

A bout of food poisoning or stomach virus followed closely by visits from sisters has made me a negligent blogger, but I’m back. Since I last reported, I graduated from Arabic I! Here’s me with ustaaz (teacher) Ayman. I’m so proud.

I went to Jericho a few weeks ago with friends Jennifer and Andrea who are both working with NGOs over here. We’d heard a rumor of cheap bikes-for-rent, and found the shop in Jericho’s main square—they charge about a dollar an hour. The owner took us to the back shed and started pulling out bikes wrapped in bubble wrap. New? we asked. Yes, very new. So new that they haven’t totally assembled them completely. I had to steer with my handlebars at a 30 degree angle in order to ride straight. Andrea’s back brake broke on the first downhill and her chain fell off when we turned around to get a less decrepit bike. And the appearance of newness wore off when the owner told us not to take off the bubble wrap. “No problem,” he said as I tried to wrench the plastic out of my jammed gears. So we cruised around Jericho, bubble wrap flapping in the wind, drinking fresh juice at this place:

and then cruising into the farm fields surrounding the town. A family working in a field waved at us as we cruised by, and we pulled over and were, of course, invited in for tea. The whole family (6 of the 7 kids were there) stopped working for tea time, then the kids took us around the farm, showing us their bunny hutch and their fields full of cucumbers and herbs and watermelons. We’re invited back and I can’t wait to go.

There was a not-well-reported news story back in March, when the Israeli military raided a Palestinian prison in Jericho, eventually demolishing the building before the prisoner they were after surrendered. You pass the ruined prison on the main road into town.

writer, photographer

2006-05-18T10:59:00.000+03:00

I’m in charge of sifting through the organization’s email account, filtering the requests for olive oil and lodging from the daily dump of spam. Of course I get the usual letters from the widows of African politicians and businessmen, asking that I loan $10,000 so she can access his billions being held in an Ivory Coastal bank. I’m totally baffled by a new spam style I’ve been getting on a daily basis. I get a few lines of literature, followed by advertisements for bargain-priced pharmaceuticals. For example:

“Langdon looked again at the fax an ancient myth confirmed in black and white.
The implications were frightening. He gazed absently through the bay window.
The first hint of dawn was sifting through the birch trees in his backyard,
but the view looked somehow different this morning. As an odd combination of fear and
exhilaration settled over him, Langdon knew he had no choice
The man led Langdon the length of the hangar. They rounded the corner onto the runway.”

And then a big picture ad for Viagra. I’m lost.

I got a photo published! No money from this of course, but some guy came upon my photo site and asked permission to use a picture I took of an olive tree on his website. So my photo is helping out a Danish NGO of some sort. I’m not sure exactly what they do, but from the looks of the website it seems globally responsible. Check it out and notice the byline.

Checkpoint Shuffle

2006-05-17T13:51:00.000+03:00

A three-hour language class sounded like hell on slow wheels when I first signed up for my Arabic course at Al Quds University. But a few weeks into the classes now, and the three hours pass surprisingly quickly, helped along by hourly breaks where my two Swedish friends and I stand outside the room and gorge on the free chocolate wafers and Nescafe. Our teacher is Ayman, a bombastic man from Taybeh, the town known for the Taybeh Brewery, which brews “The West Bank’s Finest,” possibly only, beer. He’s openly smitten with two Italian girls in the class, and divides his attention unevenly between the two Italian beauties and the rest of us. I found, however, when I was all cuted up one day, that I was getting called on a lot more in class, so now I play along with Ayman’s style in order to better practice my Arabic. Mondays and Wednesdays I leave work a little early and go home to get my Arabic book, finish my homework and put on eyeliner, and then I head downtown to Hind Husseini College to my slightly sleazy Arabic class. Whatever it takes. No one said it was an easy language to learn.

The system of borders and checkpoints and the Separation Wall has been changing on a weekly basis in the neighborhoods around Jerusalem, and no one is quite sure exactly where things are heading. About two weeks ago on a bus trip back from Ramallah we were stopped at a checkpoint, as usual, and flashed our passports or IDs to the soldier who boarded. On the same bus, same route yesterday, we had to go through Qalandiya chekpoint, as the previously traversable road had been shut down or something. Qalandiya is this prison-like complex which is basically an international border set up by the Israeli government in the middle of Palestinian Territory, controlling and limiting movement within the West Bank and into East Jerusalem.

The bus drops everyone off here.

And then we head through the on-foot checkpoint.

Waiting for the light to turn green. We go through three of these turnstiles.

Back outside, waiting for the bus again.

Crazy Cat Lady

2006-05-11T15:24:00.000+03:00

I’ve had this sense that my boss wants me to get a cat. I’m assuming this is just because he’s a cat person and not because he thinks I’m maladjusted here in Jerusalem and that I need a friend. It’s come up a few times in conversation.

Me: That guy who lives in the house behind the hospital? He’s complaining that his house vibrates. I don’t know what to do about this.
Mark: Hey, I hear there’s some kittens up for adoption at the church.

or

Me: Mark? Someone brought their herd of sheep onto the grounds, and they’re storming the eastern olive orchard.
Mark: You know, maybe you should get a cat.

So last night I was on my way back from Arabic classes and got a call from Mark who needed to give me a key before he left for his month-long vacation in the States.
“Yeah, just come by so I can give you this key before I leave,” he said. “There are these kittens--” I heard, before my cell phone cut out. So I got the key and Mark walked over to the road to show me this dumb little kitten who seemed to be living in the rusting shed across the street and kept darting into the road, then scurrying back when cars zoomed by. He was mewing and skittish and hadn’t quite figured out that cars can kill. So for 30 minutes Mark and I tried to corner and catch the little guy. And then his brother came out of the shed across the street, so we tried to get him too. Mark ran to his car to grab a laundry basket that was in there and I held this at the base of the fence that the kittens were darting in and out of while Mark tried goading them into the basket. Finally we got them in there, one hissing, the other trembling at the bottom of this basket. So there I am, holding a basketful of feral kittens, and Mark says “Now when you give them milk, water it down a little bit. And they probably can eat some real food at this point too. See you in a month!” And all the sudden I seem to be a cat owner.

Cats aren’t really my thing, and I have this theory that a lot of women who go abroad by themselves end up going kind of crazy and start collecting animals as a result. I’ve seen it happen and it’s not pretty. There was, of course, Maddie Cat, who belonged to a roommate of mine last year. Maddie Cat is ugly as sin:

but we had a special little bond and she’s one of the few cats I’ve actually liked. So maybe with two attractive cats that look like this:

and like this:

I’ll find that they grow on me.
I got them set up on my porch last night with a bowl of watery milk and a flannel sheet in their basket. The one in the basket, above, has a limp of some sort in his back legs, so he’s stayed on the porch lapping milk, chomping canned tuna, laying in the shade and cuddling in the basket. His brother is the feistier of the two and keeps running away, but I figure if I keep food out consistently he’ll keep coming back. He still hisses at me when I get close.
The guards are already more won over by the little guys than I am, putting out their own bowl of milk and helping me chase after feisty cat as I was trying to force a loving home environment on him last night. The little ingrate.
I figured that the first step in being a legit cat owner is to have photos of your little darlings, so I took the two above this morning. The gardener on the grounds here is a friendly little man who I’ve only communicated with in Arabic. The most complex thing I’ve said to him is “Your garden is very beautiful.” So as I was snapping a picture of feisty cat under a truck this morning, he came over and said in English, which I didn’t know he spoke, “You like pictures of small cats? I have CD with 800 pictures of small cats. I will bring for you.” I’m gonna develop a reputation here.
I’m waiting to see if my ownership sticks before I give names to them. I’m considering naming them after amateur rap artists.

Boys, Girls, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

2006-05-10T12:21:00.000+03:00

Two months in such a small country, and I was ready to cross borders, which I did this weekend when my friend Will and I took a little excursion eastward to Jordan, one of Israel’s few neighbors that allow travel across the border.

My friend Rebecca had given me a heads up about Jordan, saying that she’d seen almost no women during her time there, and I was watching for this as I left Israel’s tourist playground of Eilat and crossed into the neighboring Jordanian town of Aqaba. Rebecca was very right: there was probably a six-to-one ratio of men to women out on the streets of Aqaba, a touristed and Safeway-studded beach city.

Sand and stalls selling bikinis, circa 1986, were not on the itinerary for this trip, so Will and I quickly headed northward to Wadi Rum, a stunning desert wilderness where we went “trekking,” if that’s the correct term for being driven around in a pick-up truck by a Bedouin guide. Known for their hospitality, Bedouins will invite passers-by into their homes for sugary mint tea, a tradition that stemmed from practicality: if a nomad wanders by your tent you offer him tea and food, knowing that when you’re traveling through the arid desert another Bedouin will invite you in, and potentially save you from dehydration and starvation. The Bedouins we ran into in our four days in Jordan live in immobile cinderblock homes, and the nomads passing by are mostly well-fed and slightly hungover French backpackers. But the tradition has continued, and I grew a cavity or two from the multiple glasses of saccharine tea that I was fed throughout the weekend. But even in the living rooms and courtyards of homes, the women of Jordan were still conspicuously hidden.

Our first cup of tea was in the home of Madullah, whose cousin Abdullah ended up being our desert guide. (More on that story later.) Madullah disappeared to the back of the house to “prepare” the tea, which meant telling his wife to start brewing. A while later, when his young daughter wobbled into the room on a busted tricycle I went to help her readjust the wheel, and from my new vantage point got to see his wife, who was hovering behind the door jamb, staying out of sight and waiting for Madullah to take the tray of tea and serve the guests.

Their living room is covered in painted paneling.

I encountered this throughout the weekend. Bedouin wives (often a couple per husband—polygamy is widespread) would emerge when the guests were just us foreigners. But when local men showed up, the wives disappeared, turning into invisible tea brewers in the back rooms of the house.

So this was my impression of marriage in Jordan when we headed into the desert with a pair of French sisters and our too-cool-his-kifya guide, Abdullah.

Abdullah was filling us in on his life and Bedouin culture. He is married and has two children, but he’s looking for a second wife right now, preferably a foreign woman. As it turns out, I’m what he seems to be looking for. Before heading to the campsite, Abdullah pulled me aside. “I want to talk to you with secret.” He’s already worked it out. I can finish up my year in Jerusalem. Then I’ll head to Jordan, become his second wife, and help him run his business, liasing with the foreigners. “I have a very big house. I will treat you very nice. I will pay for everything. My wife? It’s no problem.” I informed him that actually, yes, it still was a problem, at least for me. “No, it’s not.” Uh, yeah, it is. He offered a trial period where I could just be his girlfriend, starting that evening at the campsite. No thanks, Abdullah.

The friendly guide schtick quickly turned into the surly guide of wounded pride schtick, and that lasted for the rest of the trek. The following morning, returning to Rum Village, our sandy entourage was of course brought in for tea at Abdullah’s home, where we met his tea-brewing wife and their two kids. Compared to the wives I had met so far, Mrs. Abdullah seemed a bit feistier than most. She had painted toenails, she chilled in the living room with us, and she didn’t cover her head until she went outside to fetch her husband’s cigarettes from the truck. This could be my life. Mom? Dad? Do you want to weigh in here? You might get a herd of goats out of the deal.
Wadi Rum is spectacular, by the way:

These are pretty old.

This is the Bedouin-style campsite where we spent the night in the desert.

To counter this culture that was such a shock to me, I had a great experience when Will and I hiked up to a spring set back in a sandstone canyon on the edge of Rum Village.

First, these boys sitting on the trail offered me a piece of baloney.

As we got deeper into the canyon, we started to hear the sounds of drumming and singing echoing off the rock walls until we saw a group of people gathered up ahead at the spring. Pretty soon we could make out hijab-covered heads, so Will stayed back while I hiked ahead to this group of young women gathered in the middle of a lonely canyon. It was a fieldtrip from the local girls' school, and the students and teachers had hiked up here where they were singing, dancing and beating out hot rhythms on a drum that the teachers passed from one to another. They invited me over as I approached, fed me tea, and one of the girls pulled me into the circle to dance with her as all her classmates let out these great tongue-wagging trills and laughed at the atrocity of me trying to dance like a Bedouin and her trying to groove like an American college student on MTV's "Spring Break: Cancun.” I let Will wait back on the trail for a good 30 minutes as I hung out with these women who were having such a great time with each other and not just shuffling around kitchens with teapots chained to their ankles.
Here are some of the teachers. Most of the students were in their late-teens and didn’t want to be photographed.

We spent two days in Wadi Rum. Day Two Will and I hiked a few miles into the desert and spent the day sitting under this rock, orbiting around with the shade and watching camel trains plod across the desert.

Then we went to Petra, which might be a world wonder, where there are massive facades carved out of cliff faces and more than lots of in-your-face Bedouins selling Petra kitsch. I got scammed and paid four times too much for a necklace made out of camel teeth. Serves me right.

Lots of colorful stone in Petra:

This is a German film crew that stuck a Bedouin family inside a little cave to interview them for a documentary. The girls in the foreground demanded one dinar for taking their picture. I pretended I didn’t speak English.

Here’s Will playing geologist in Wadi Rum. He leaves tomorrow for Azerbaijan, Georgia, and a few other countries you might have trouble finding on a map. Then he goes home to Maine.

death defying

2006-04-25T22:13:00.000+03:00

I woke up parched the other night and felt my way down from my loft to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Passing through the dark hallway, I felt something trailing against the floor and saw in the dark a short black strip hanging from the side of my foot. I gave a kick to dislodge whatever it was I had stepped on, and then felt a bite from what I had assumed was inanimate and watched in horror as the thing started writhing. I did a nice little kick-scream-run combination and then spent the next five minutes in my dark kitchen, sitting on the couch with my legs pulled safely from the floor, imagining that a deadly asp was lurking around the corner, ready to slither toward my foot the moment it touched the floor.

Relating this story the next morning, my boss and his son deducted that it was probably a forty-legger that I encountered. A second cousin once removed to the centipede, forty-leggers (not its scientific name) have a bite about as poisonous as a scorpion’s. What I got was most likely a prick from a pair of pinscers. I’ve been spending a lot of time on my tip-toes the past few days.

The annual report has been finalized and sent to the printer’s shop. The layout and design work was done by Majdi who works at a design company in Ramallah. On Friday my boss and I drove up to this thriving Palestinian metropolis and spent a good eight hours working with Majdi on the report. And we all ended up working on Saturday too, me calling Majdi and making the final corrections remotely. It was a long phone call with numerous interruptions, as I listed each minute word change or photo alignment. First Majdi got a call from his buddy. Then he had to call his mom. Then, after a few more minutes: “Margit, you’re going to hate me. But wait just a minute again. There is so much shooting outside.” After a minute he was back, explaining that lots of men with guns were shooting outside the office building. Within two minutes they had drawn nearer and I could hear the gunfire over the phone. These weren’t handguns going off--bullets were flying. “Majdi,” I said, “if you need to go to the hallway and get away from windows and crossfire, that’s okay.” “No,” says Majdi. “I have to finish the annual report.” Employee of the Week.

The Economist did its cover story on Jerusalem this past week, and the article is one of the most accurate I’ve read since I’ve been over here. Click here if you’d like to read it. It’s quite short.

Holy Week, Day by Day

2006-04-16T13:44:00.000+03:00

It’s been an unquiet week here in Jerusalem. Holy Week for the Christians, Pesach for the Jews, and the Days of Some Serious Income for the sellers of souvenir crowns of thorns in the Old City. Richard, a driver and errand-runner at the office, was explaining the impact of Pesach on the post office schedule for the week: “Today closed. Tomorrow half day. Friday half day. Saturday half day. Sunday half day. Monday half day. Tuesday half day. Wednesday half day. And then they eat bread.” This is not entirely accurate, in regards to Passover or to the hours of the post office, but nonetheless, I’m inspired to do provide my own day-by-day account of Holy Week in the Holy Land. There’s a lot to keep track of.

Palm Sunday
The first of many processions, and one of the largest, with Palestinian Christians and non-Palestinian Christians gathering to walk the route from the Mount of Olives through Lion’s Gate of the Old City, following the route Jesus traveled on the donkey. The procession starts with a collection of youth groups in militaristic uniforms marching through the streets with flags. They’re then followed by local nuns and priests and visiting pilgrims heavy-laden with palm fronds, olive branches and cameras.

Monday
Lenten reflection

Tuesday
Lenten reflection. Augusta Victoria kindergarten egg hunt.

Wednesday
Lenten reflection. Post office closed.

Maundy Thursday
As Mark said during the evening procession, “Maundy Thursday is the one day in Jerusalem when the Protestants rule.” Not just rule, but stop traffic, which we did as we processed to the Garden of Gethsemane with the Arabic, English, German and Danish-speaking congregations of the Lutheran church. As we processed, people stuck with their language group in order to sing, each group led by someone carrying a sign reading “Arabic,” “English,” etc. Carrying a large sign reading “Danish” while marching through the Muslim Quarter can’t have been a job people were fighting over. I’m guessing their congregation drew straws.

The Garden of Gethsemane is beautiful and serene, and I plan on going back, with the required headscarf next time, to sit in the Russian Orthodox church there and hear the nuns chant in the shadowy sanctuary.

Good Friday
Another service, one which Will promised was multi-lingual but turned out to be entirely in German. Then on to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to observe the mayhem. They had police working in the church for the day to do some crowd control, holding back struggling and weeping pilgrims trying desperately to be the fourteenth person crammed into Jesus’ tomb. I saw a young priest sprint over to a small shrine to blow out a flaming mass of candles that were wilting toward the ground and threatening to singe the hair or habits of passers-by.

Fire extinguisher

The saints and journalists above

Every hour or so a different group would clog the narrow streets along the Via Dolorosa, following the 12 Stations of the Cross on their way to Holy Sepulcher. Getting through the Old City on Good Friday requires much patience and no concern for one’s personal space.

Saturday
Pick up trash around site of Easter sunrise service. Attend pre-Easter picnic. Win third place in three-legged race. Gorge on well-deserved prize of chocolate eggs.

Easter Sunday
Wake at 4:45 a.m. for the sunrise service at the new amphitheater on the LWF grounds. My first day of work here in Jerusalem I helped move rocks around in planning for the rock ring amphitheater which debuted for this service. I took the quintessential sunrise service picture:

Then was Easter brunch and then I headed down to the Old City where I caught my second service of the day, this one at the lovely Garden Tomb and preached by my godmother’s pastor from her church in London. Jerusalem tends to be a crossroads of people who know people and a prime place to play Six Degrees of Separation.

Easter Monday
Half day at the post office.

triptych

2006-04-07T20:53:00.000+03:00

Three things I took photos of today:

Pin-up.

I dunno. I just wouldn't use this to wash my dishes.

"I brake for speedbumps."

rainy days

2006-04-05T21:07:00.000+03:00

“It never ends, Mah-gee,” said the gate guard Moosa last night, standing outside in the spitting drizzle when I walked by. The rain or the wind, I asked him. “The weather, the life, everything—it’s too much!”
I’m feeling in agreement this week. The winds that whip the hilltop we live on blow at a strange ferocity and howl around my tower, making me want to stay between my stone walls. The unseasonably heavy and frequent rains are still going on, flooding under my front door and keeping me typing in the office rather than at a picnic bench outside.

This Monday and last Wednesday I visited two village health clinics, medical outposts in tiny towns in the West Bank. When the program was set up in the 1950s, the towns were just small and isolated. Now they’re more or less sequestered, their farm land confiscated and their roads blocked by checkpoints. To enter Beit Liqya, the medical team and I were dropped off on the side of an abandoned road where we waited for a taxi from the town to pick us up and drive us the remaining two miles to the clinic. Our East Jerusalem van can’t drive into the West Bank Village and the West Bank taxi can’t drive out of the town limits. We loitered on the dusty roadside and the Palestinian doctor and nurses dutifully pulled out their id papers when a jeep pulled up and three Israeli soldiers sauntered over, slinging their very large guns from their backs to their fronts to their backs again, shuffling through the passports and permits. How blatant, in a situation like this, that I and the Danish podiatrist—the clear foreigners—got to stand there with our white faces, ignored by the soldiers, while the older and much more educated medical team was required to prove their right to be in their own territory. The soldiers left, the taxi arrived, and I spent the day taking photographs of chubby-cheeked children and wrinkled grandmothers getting eye exams.
Ahmed, the doctor and director in charge of the village health program has set on my shoulders a job for when I visit these villages: front seat smiler. “Margit, go to your position. Practice your smile,” he tells me as we fill up the van for the trip back to Jerusalem. The checkpoint that is unpassable with a van full of Palestinian doctors becomes a bit more soluble with an international face in the front seat. So I sit shotgun, I smile my American smile at the Israeli guards, and on all but one occasion it’s worked. That was on Monday afternoon, and rather than passing through and driving the ten minutes back to the hospital, we were told to make a U-turn and then had to drive another 40 minutes in a circuitous path through once quiet neighborhoods that have grown noisy and muddy with diverted highway traffic. Moosa is right. It’s too much and it never ends, like the ugly weather blowing around.

Something ugly: a checkpoint.

Something pretty: grandma’s needlepoint.

Have you heard? Bird flu has arrived.

Soup & Trash

2006-03-31T23:50:00.000+03:00

First off, a hearty congratulations to my sister, the fabulous and employed Karin, who has just acquired her first real job. The newest addition to America’s workforce called me over the past weekend, and we discussed her new dress code, which requires a collared shirt.

Karin: “But we’re allowed to wear turtlenecks.”
Margit: “A turtleneck is a collar.”
Karin: “Nah-aaah.”
Margit: “It goes around your neck. It’s a collar.”
Karin: “Whatever.”

Today was the start of “summertime,” meaning that the clocks sprang ahead an hour. In Israel. And Jerusalem. But not in the West Bank. Or in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Or in the homes of anyone whose political loyalties move them hold out another two weeks until the Palestinian Daylight Savings. You would think, with so many issues to disagree upon here, that when to change the clocks would be a battle someone would be willing to forfeit. But no. For the next two weeks I predict mayhem in concentrate form as meetings and conferences and concerts and bus schedules attempt to carry on for a population divided by one politicized hour.

To get out on the town before the clocks or minds of Jerusalemites exploded in confusion, I went out last night in the hours before the time change to what seems to be the hippie/hipster hangout of West Jerusalem. The restaurant is called Soup & Jazz, and to this marriage I say Mazel Tov. I haven’t heard of a better pairing since Soup & Taco. Smoky describes the voices and the air at this dive joint near the Old City. The soup was homemade, the décor was Chinese propaganda art and the scat held a dim candle to Ella Fitzgerald’s, so I was well impressed.

My boss is good at recognizing when I’ve reached my limit of desk time, and I was at that point by 11 a.m. today. So Mark said I could go outside and pick up trash along the fence that circles our property. I joined Khaled and Mohammed, two men who work on the grounds here, and a teenaged boy from the vocational training center that LWF runs. Picking up trash is probably one of my favorite activities, and for two hours I got to tromp around on the hillside bagging broken bottles, empty cigarette cartons and crumpled cups with Nescafe grounds stuck to the bottom.

Litter is an issue, to say the least, in Palestine, and the sight of someone picking up garbage is a rare and puzzling one. What I’d call puzzling is a bunch of boys riding down a well-trafficked road on donkeys, which happened as I was picking up garbage. They stopped and laughed at me and I laughed at them and we had a little conversation that lasted as long as my Arabic vocabulary did, or about two minutes. And then the donkeys and the boys trotted off, but apparently only as far as a point in the fence where they could hop over, because out of no where I have ten-year-olds surrounding me and shaking my hand. And then they started picking up trash with me! So it was for all of five minutes before the donkeys got revved up again, but nonetheless. I inspired children. Mark says that from now on he’ll send young women out to do the groundskeeping and we’ll eventually recruit the neighborhood. Pretty soon East Jerusalem will be overrun by adolescent donkey-riding environmentalists. I can’t wait.

West Bank cornered

2006-03-29T00:29:00.000+02:00

Originally uploaded by margit margit.

Since I arrived a month ago, the majority of my time at work has been dedicated to the annual report, a magazine-like coverage of all that goes on under the auspices of the LWF’s Jerusalem branch. The publication should be, as Mark likes to put it, “upbeat,” but still express the current situation. The articles filling these 36 pages are coming from four different sources, and as they’ve accumulated, common themes have emerged and none of them are upbeat or even close. In nearly every article on every project is a mention of The Wall, a two-year-old ongoing construction that casts a long and dark shadow over the people of the West Bank. This wall that Israel is building in a twisting path through Palestinian land is sealing people into their towns and restricting travel on roads. It blocks Palestinians’ access to the hospitals, the schools, the jobs and the families they had once been able to reach easily. Every Palestinian living in the West Bank or Jerusalem is affected by the Separation Wall, and every program we run has to stretch to provide not only health care or education, but also travel permits for people to travel within their own land.

The hospital we run here, Augusta Victoria Hospital, recently opened the only radiation oncology department in Palestine, meaning that if a West Bank Palestinian develops cancer, he or she has one option for radiation treatment: traveling to Jerusalem. And that’s if they’re able to make it through the restrictive and time-consuming permit application process. I was at the cancer center yesterday, taking photos for the annual report and learning the inner workings of a linear accelerator machine. I was introduced to Buthaina when she was sitting on the edge of her bed, a rattling cough shaking her body as she spit pellets of phlegm into tissues, an effect of what is likely laryngeal cancer but has yet to be diagnosed. She speaks lovely English and let me photograph her while her mother-in-law sat nearby and smiled at us. Buthaina is from Nablus, a West Bank city about 35 miles north of Jerusalem, and she worked as a nurse there until she became sick. While the drive between the hospital and her home doesn’t take long, the time involving the checking of her permit and the stops at checkpoints makes a daily commute out of the question. Thus, she’ll be an in-patient at the hospital until her radiation treatment is completed. Her mother-in-law was able to acquire a permit as well, but the rest of her family—her husband, her children, her own mother—have not been granted permits and are unable to visit her.

Since the start of the Wall, the hospital has taken on the task of working with the Israeli government to get the necessary permits for patients who need to reach the hospital for radiation treatment or ear surgery or kidney dialysis. A busing system was set up to help staff and patients in nearby towns reach the hospital without having to spend three hours waiting at a checkpoint for a fifteen-mile journey. It’s astounding to see all the effort that goes into simply getting a person to a hospital for very necessary health care, but still, upbeat is hard to achieve during an unjust time in an unjust situation.

Rapture Ready

2006-03-20T22:14:00.000+02:00

Jerusalem lies along a fault line, a fact that I’m sure has been analyzed and symbolicized far too many times. I’m pretty sure I experienced my first earthquake last week during an excruciating staff meeting, one that stretched out for well over three hours. Our office is a single-level stone structure reminiscent of the Barney Rubble’s house, and what I at first thought was wind causing the building to creak and settle was actually the earth shaking; it takes a lot to move this mother.

Earthquakes are on the mind these days, as the Jordan Valley seems to experience a 7 pointer Richter score every thousand years or so, and apparently we’re about due. The nonchalant architect is freaking out, and therefore so is my boss. As I was informed, the astrologers are predicting March 28 as The Next Big One and the scientists have dibs on the 29th. Although what kind of scientist predicts specific dates for an earthquake, I want to know. My money’s on the astrologers. And I dreamt last night that the quake happened on a Tuesday, which, as I checked out this morning, is the day the 28th falls on this year. Hmmm.

Like I said to my boss, I suggest linking directly to http://www.raptureready.com,/rap2.html a thoroughly helpful website that has set up the Rapture Index, a numerical scale that will tell you just how close we are to the end of time, an event marked by an earthquake or two, the return of Christ, and bodies rising from their graves. Even just one of these three could throw off your daily routine, so be prepared. And for the record, we are currently well beyond the “High Prophetic Activity” range. Yes my friends, we’ve entered the “Fasten Your Safety Belts” zone, and I suggest you do just that.

water drop

2006-03-17T13:25:00.000+02:00

A week ago I went to the Dead Sea with my boss’ wife and son. Once you drop down from the crest of hills that Jerusalem lies on, and into the Jordan Valley, water all the sudden becomes an issue. In Jerusalem you have a rainy season, but within 20 minutes of driving, the landscape transforms into a desert with clay-colored canyons and sagebrush and sand, rather than the leafy olive trees and grassy hills that color winter in Jerusalem. My friend Will here is in Israel/Palestine for three months studying water—how it’s distributed, who needs it, and who gets it. The Jordan River, then, is the sole source of water for West Bank residents and also for the Dead Sea. And in the middle of a desert, there’s not always enough to go around. Driving along the western shore of the Sea, you pass ageing spas that tout the healing qualities of Dead Sea minerals and are patronized by Danes in need of dermatological goodness. (The government of Denmark will pay for cirrhosis patients to fly to Israel and spend a month at a Dead Sea spa soaking in mud—it costs them less than paying for chemical treatments back at home. Let’s here it for socialist healthcare!) So these spas are here, lined up along the lakeshore, except the shoreline is a good 50 yards from where it once was. Beach umbrellas stand lonely in the middle of mudflats that used to be the Dead Sea; the water of the Jordan has been rerouted and dammed and siphoned up until barely a trickle reaches the Dead Sea, and the water level has been dropping consistently and quickly for years now, and is not projected to stop. Tragic, but hard to remedy as the water is actually being used for drinking water and not, say, supplying large amounts of hydropower to a chemical plant.

Trundling along the roadside in a region where water is so precious, a truck driver took a curve at a few too many kilometers an hour and, whoops, lost his entire load of water bottles on the side of the Dead Sea. So you’ve got a desert, you’ve got the most saline body of water on Earth, and this dude with a truckful of filtered, distilled, drinkable water drops it all on the side of the road where the bottles burst and water the sandy shoulder. Can you say “My bad?” People were pulling over on the side of the road and running out to try to grab a few undamaged bottles, pouring the water from leaking bottles into containers they had in their car. I stopped to get pictures, but someone handed me a full bottle anyway, which I’ve been using in my iron. Here are some pictures of water in the desert:

Here’s a picture I love, of a girl at the diabetes clinic. She had just gotten a shot and was quite proud of herself, showing off her arm to every woman at the nutrition seminar.

This is my new friend Will with a copy of Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, which just goes to show that you don’t read any of the good stuff when you’re an English major.

We found a used English bookshop this weekend and I bought a somewhat sticky but very engaging copy of Sir Vidia’s Shadow by Paul Theroux, whom I love. The memoir tells about his decades-long friendship with V.S. Naipaul. They met in Uganda in the 1970s and, both being rather disagreeable fellows, took an instant liking to each other. As of page 60, I highly recommend.

Holy Land Tours

2006-03-08T14:10:00.000+02:00

Having spent the fall absorbed with resume writing, I’m already dreading having to construct a concise description of what exactly I do at this job. I’m basically assistant to the Big Guy, which means that I pick up what Mark doesn’t have time for. In the first week that included taking notes at a meeting; helping plan the layout of an amphitheater; directing a bulldozer in its digging pattern; editing articles; pruning olive trees; organizing guesthouse reservations; taking photos of students in a metal-working shop; taking photos of an arrest that took place on the grounds; and accompanying groups on tours of the hospital.

Lutheran World Federation, the organization I’m volunteering with for the year, owns the land here on a small hill between the Mount of Olives and Mount Scopus. (www.lwfjerusalem.org will tell you about the organization. www.lwf.org, or "Love Worth Finding" will help you "Discover the Love of Jesus.") Augusta Victoria Hospital is our primary project and has been operating since 1951, serving the impoverished and refugee communities of Palestine. We emphasize social services and humanitarian outreach rather than proselytizing, and as a result get a fair share of liberally-minded church groups on Holy Land tours who drop by the grounds to hear about the work LWF is doing over here. I’m going to wager a guess that these groups will be one of the most amusing aspects of the job.

Yesterday, Pastor John and his 37 congregants from Freeland, Washington arrived on their charter bus accompanied by a frenzied tour guide and eager to see the hospital, the chapel, and, most severely, the ladies’ restroom. With a bunch of liberal Lutherans from Washington state, I was in my element. About nine people from the group had been to Holden Village, the isolated wilderness community where I spent a summer two years ago. The fact that I had met one of their pastors from back home while he was preaching at Holden added further to their awe. They were, in short, enamored.

As we followed William, the head nurse around the hospital, Pastor John made small talk here and there, asking how I got this job, what I had studied, and whether I was considering seminary, which he assumed was the next logical step after an English degree. I assured him I was not. Ascending the steps from the basement cancer center, William explained that the space had previously been a well that was dried out and then transformed into the radiation treatment room it is today. “A well to a cancer center. Huh,” said Pastor John. I remarked that it sounded like a sermon waiting to happen.

With their guide reaching a new level of panic (“We have to get to Dormition Abbey by three o’clock!!!”) Pastor John and his friendly flock were herded back onto their bus, waving goodbye and wishing me luck as they disappeared behind the tinted windows.

“And Margit,” Pastor John said, before climbing aboard. “Seriously. Consider seminary.”

Sir, you don't know me at all.

What is this thing you call 'blog'?

2006-03-05T20:27:00.000+02:00

I learned how to prune an olive tree yesterday, and now I'll try to learn how to blog. Patience, please.

Tomorrow afternoon will mark my one week mark in Jerusalem, and should this little experiment work out, I'll give details of my time here. For now, a report on my flights over.

Transatlantic flights have a way of making economy class travelers feel not quite so inferior. Of course we still file past the first classers in their double-wide leather seats on our way to the back of the plane, but the hot towels before dinner and the complimentary booze helps in softening the edges of a seven hour flight. I'd like to raise my few glasses of red wine to the man in first class who, as the majority of the plane was trudging slowly by for boarding, had no qualms about pulling out his magazine of soft porn and giving everyone passing on the starboard side a good look as he opened the centerfolds, gazed in admiration for a while, then flipped to the next soft-focused ample-breasted teenage girl.

On this Washington-Dulles to Frankfurt flight, a weird smell filled the cabin and became progressively more potent once we reached cruising altitude. Thank God for Lufthansa and their very blunt German head flight attendant who came up to the Italian-looking man 2 rows ahead of me and told him quite loudly to put his shoes back on and wrap the airline blanket around himself.
"Sir, you stink. Yes. Smell. You smell. The whole cabin."
A little while later, his compassionate Germanic nature shining through, he came back by to tell him that the cabin smelled considerably better now that his shoes were back on and he should not take them off, or remove the blanket.

My flight from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv I sat at the window and the two seats next to me were filled by a brother and sister, 12 and 9 y.o. Their dad was at first sitting rows behind at the back of the cabin, but the flight attendant told him he had to move close to them, so he ended up sitting a row behind. Before take-off the little krauts were really well behaved and playing together, but once we were in the air, holy crap. They were throwing elbows, pulling hair, scratching, biting, full-out hand-to-hand combat. I spoke to the girl twice, "Bless you" when she sneezed and offering to help her take the tin foil off the top of her curry lamb meal, a task that was kicking her butt. She was really shy and would just look at me in fear and give a one word response. But she wasn't shy when, as I was trying to read and ignore their little battle, she leaned backward across my lap so she could kick her brother in the face. Later on she grabbed his arm and shook it as he was trying to drink hot tea so he spilled scalidng water all over himself. He responded by yanking her hair. Dad was oblivious.

I live in the top of a tower here. It's only two stories high, but nonetheless I feel like Rapunzel surrounded by my stone walls and peeking out my tiny windows to the street below. Of course it's large utility trucks and charterbusfuls of American tourists rumbling by rather than a prince on a white horse, but I don't complain. I also have a wide terrace outside my door that has a panoramic view of the Old City of Jerusalem and the gleaming gold dome of Dome of the Rock. (If you see a postcard of Jerusalem, that's prob'ly what you'll be looking at.) Okay. Let's try a photo.

Here's my tower! It's connected to the main gate of the Augusta Victoria Hospital grounds. I believe that's one of the guards, Mohammed, sitting outside. I live on the top half and a Quaker couple lives below me, but I have yet to meet them. More photos can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/margit.