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.
