Etla, Etla

We have been busy, which is one of the benefits of working and living within the same group of people.  As I wrote before, one of the organizations with which we are working is Paidia International Development.  They are also the people who are renting us an apartment in their building.  We have been forming close relationships with the people of Paidia, spending our evenings with them over a grill or in front of a movie or in the cool Palestinian evening air talking of life and peace and stuff.  I find so many similarities here to the South where I'm from.  Having spent essentially my entire life in Tennessee, Palestine feels like home in a sense because the cultures are quite similar.

Beit Sahour feels much like a small town in rural Appalachia to me.  For one, everyone knows everyone else.  Three major families (and they are BIG families) live here and then, of course, many other smaller ones.  But chances are everyday, a Palestinian from Beit Sahour will see a relative across the street or run into someone dear.  They are such a loving and affectionate people.  The common greeting here is "salaam aleykum" - peace be with you.  They embrace one another with multiple kisses on the cheek and hands strongly grasped to the other's.  Love is prevalent in Beit Sahour.  Community is everything.

In the South, most every house has a front porch.  The front porches of the South are the places of community.  They are where stories are told, friendships are begun, cemented, and nurtured.  Theologian Walter Brueggeman once said that for centuries, the weapons of the poor have been "meals, stories, and songs."  Well, in both Palestine and the American South, the front porch is the factory for this peaceful weapons manufacturing, if you will.  Palestinian homes are built differently than American homes, though.  Palestinians, for the most part, do not move far from the home of their youth.  In fact, traditionally, when children begin to start their own families, they simply build a new flat on top of their parents', making houses here grow up instead of out.  Many of the ground-floor apartments do not have front porches, but the people act like they do.  Everyday when I walk down the streets of this town, I see men, young and old, sitting in plastic white chairs in a circle engaged in conversation while either playing cards, drinking tea or coffee, or watching the passersby.  I do not understand their Arabic, but I imagine they are just discussing life, like everyone else in the world.  I suppose they are just trying to learn what it means to be who they are, to be Palestinian.

I have been finding such peace living here.  Whenever Jon and I were preparing to leave to come here, everyone kept telling us, "Will you be safe over there in the West Bank?" I even got the occasional but expected, "Isn't that where the terrorists are?"  How do I answer that?  Those people we call "terrorists" (a term, I believe, far overused within a certain stereotype and hardly ever deconstructed) have existed in most every civilization.  People who use terror to accomplish a goal are not unique to the Middle East, and are actually extremely rare here in Palestine.  I walk through these streets, seeing the old men talking over tea, see the women carrying their babies and cooking meals for their families, and see the children playing soccer or riding bikes in the street or walking down the road arm in arm, and I wonder where those "terrorists" are.  All I see are people who love each other and want to live in peace and justice.  I see a people who are committed in their service to God, whether Christian or Muslim.  I just see living beings, humans with names, families, and histories.  I see faces that smile and cry.  I see hands that make bread and friendship and not weapons and war.  I see eyes full of emotion, confusion, but yet understanding.  I see people.  Just a beautiful, tired, peacefully broken people.  

This week we established our schedule.  Mondays and Wednesdays we will give our time to the Al-Basma Center.  Tuesdays and Thursdays we work with Paidia, and Thursday and Friday evenings we help with Paidia's climbing wall.  Our time with Al-Basma this week was encouraging and productive.  Jon and I helped the students make olive wood ornaments; he and I did some wood work for Basma, the director; and I helped Basma with some administrative tasks, mostly dealing with writing in English and helping her work through some financial things.  Whereas they insist our help is so beneficial to the Center and we are invaluable, I think Jon and I are receiving and will continue to receive far more from the Center than we can ever give.  The students are wonderful! Jon and I are learning Arabic phrases everyday and can now ask "What's your name?" which I think is a central question in acknowledging someone's humanity.  We must learn to put names with faces.  So Jon and I doing our best to learn the names of the students there.

One student, Khalil, brightens my day every time I see him.  Khalil is quiet.  He usually sits peacefully in his chair, working on whatever craft his small group has been assigned that day.  Though he is developmentally disabled, Khalil always looks to me as if he is somewhere deep in thought, and I am sure he is.  I wonder where his thoughts go.  Like with most of the students there, we can't verbally communicate with each other due to the language barrier, but his eyes and smiles... Every time Jon and I walk in, Khalil looks up, and when our eyes meet, his whole face lights up.  A smile wider than an ocean appears and his eyes shine.  I can't help but smile back and laugh out of sheer joy.  I have been amazed to find that I can feel such tremendous love from someone with whom I have never spoken and with whom the "progressing" world has rejected.  I came here hoping to give love to the loveless and hope to the hopeless.  But with Khalil and others, I have found love from the loveless.  I have received hope from the hopeless.  I have been accepted by the marginalized of the marginalized.  And I am happy.

Our time with Paidia has been rejuvenating as well. Our work with them is essentially construction.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Jon and I go to their Center to help them build.  The Center is a plot of land that they have renovated and are developing into the place where students will come to do high ropes courses and other activities in order to learn conflict resolution, team building, and leadership skills.  The Center is also very eco-friendly and sustainable.  As of now, we are working on building a compost bathroom, with walls made from old car tires, rocks, dirt, bottles, and other "unusable" items.  Our days of work there are full of laughter and conversation...as well as sweat due to the 100 degree sunny days!

Also with Paidia, we spend Thursday and Friday evenings at the climbing wall.  Last night was Jon and my first night of many to help with this.  The climbing wall is located at a beautiful park on the outside of Beit Sahour.  The park has a central building with a cafe, pavilions with benches and tables and grills, a basketball court, fenced-in soccer area, and, thanks to Paidia's creativeness, a climbing wall.  Recently, the park has been graced with an illegal military outpost by the IDF (the Israeli Defense Forces) at the top of the park's hill.  Last night's experience at the climbing wall was tremendous fun.  Hundreds of kids were running around the park and probably between 30-40 came to climb.  I was saddened as I looked into the faces of these beautiful children, knowing that these are the faces of those who the world says will grow up to be terrorists. For the record, I don't believe it.

Most of the evening, though, I was quite happy.  Jon and I belayed the kids. (For those not familiar with climbing, belaying is where you stand on the ground holding the rope to help the climber scale the wall and then giving them the slack they need to repel down.  When you climb, you are putting your life in the hands of those belaying you.)  Some young girls would get their harnesses on, have the rope secured to them, and then would scamper up the wall like they were Spiderman or something! Others would make it 20 feet up, freeze, and start crying.  In fact, the worst case was with a boy who was probably the oldest person to climb the whole night.  He made it up ten feet, looked down, and then stopped. He would not let go of the wall grips to repel down to save his life! For ten minutes at least, we tried to coax him down.  Finally, Andrew, our boss, had to climb up and help him.

At one point during the evening, Jon was belaying a young girl who had almost reached the top but had now found herself at a stalemate with the wall.  For ten minutes or more, she tried many different approaches to scale the final five feet to the top, but all to no avail.  We kept yelling up, "Khalas? Bedak tinzil? Finished? Do you want down?" And every time the answer was the same, "La! La! No! No!"  After one such call and response, Jon turned to me and said, "Well, she has had a tough time but she sure isn't giving up!"  Immediately I thought, "That sums up the Palestinian people."  We are standing in the midst of a people who have been living under occupation and oppression from Israel for over 60 years.  The youngest children are a growing generation that has never known life outside of the 700+ kilometer wall that illegally surrounds the West Bank.  They have faced military violence at peaceful protests, humiliation and harassment at the scores of checkpoints throughout the West Bank, forced evacuation from their homes, water shortages due to illegal confiscation of their water supplies, and racial and ethnic segregation, very similar to that of the United States pre-1960s.  They have endured this occupation and watched as the world sits back and does nothing.  And, moreover, they have welcomed us, citizens of the United States, into their towns and lives, when it is our government that has been funding this occupation from the beginning with $4,000,000,000 per year.  Even so, the Palestinian people persist.  They do not give up.  In the midst of occupation, they find time to climb.  Their faith remains ever strong, continuing to use common phrases like "hamdillah, thanks be to God" and "inshallah, if God wills it."  Even when they see no way to reach the top, they keep on climbing. Etla, etla, up, up.

Grace and peace,
Salaam aleykum,
Michael

The pictures from left to right are: The climbing wall, the high ropes course at the Paidia's Center, the plaque that hangs on the wall at the entrance to Al-Basma, and a picture of my brother and Khalil (this picture was taken in March when I was here, but I do not have a more recent picture of Khalil).