It’s been a little while since I got time to write anything for this blog; work is busy, we’ve been away, and frankly when I get the chance to sit down and rest I don’t often feel like going back to staring at a computer screen and tap-tap-tapping away. Still, I think it needs to be done, so now I have a break for a few hours, I’ll regale you all with an account of the last whenever over here at Project Hope.
For the holy festival of Eid the volunteers made a trek down to Egypt: to Sinai, the mountains and the Dead Sea. Even after only three weeks of working at Project Hope, I felt like I needed a break. Not so much to rest, but to get a chance to reassess and revaluate what I was doing here in Palestine. Being thrown straight into the teaching work left me with little chance to get my thoughts together, and with the constant struggle to deal with the situation on the ground and the need to face up to the facts of life here, it was easy to let time run away with you, and to live at the end of a fraying thread. The work itself is not overwhelming, but it leaves you with little chance for thought, which is something I got to catch up on down by the sea.
Passing through the border was easy; the crossing at Taba is one of the busiest (and laxest) crossings you can make to get in or out of Israel. No words from the guards, just queues, waiting and passing. You still get the feeling of being treated like cattle, but you get that everywhere; it didn’t have a look of an abattoir that the foot-crossing at Jerusalem has. To be there in the open desert away from Nablus was an amazingly liberating feeling: I hadn’t realised it before, but on top of the constraints of living in a city under occupation, the city is in a valley between two mountains, which gives Nablus an even more claustrophobic feel. You rarely see great distances, just blocked walls of concrete flats; occasionally, from the right kind of viewpoint, you can stare down the long valley stretching out toward the horizon. I don’t think I’d ever been so pleased to see the ocean, but this only sharpened the blow of knowing that I was doing something many of my friends back in Nablus would never have the chance to do. But you make of time what you can, and so I spent the week under the sea, amongst the coral, and trying to clean my mind of thoughts of Israel, Palestine, and this never ending conflict.
The trip back I made alone, as I had stayed on an extra few days in Dahab to dive. It was a great time, but like a fool I tried to make it back to Jerusalem on the Friday morning, and missed the bus so was stuck in Eilat on Shabbat. Eilat, I hear, was once a beautiful, deserted fishing village at the northern tip of the Red Sea; now, it is a bloated, vulgar tourist spot that made me think of Benidorm, but with the drunken Brits replaced by fat Israelis. I was forced to spend 50 shekels on a dorm in a hostel and had to listen to a German-Israeli whine on about how everything was so expensive here and so much better in Tel Aviv. He did have some good vodka, which took the edge off the conversation, but by 9.30 I had to force myself to sleep so that I didn’t have to listen to any more of his bullshit. I longed to get back to Nablus and the West Bank, or at least to get back to the Arab quarter of Jerusalem.
Back at the project, things carried on much as before. Classes were cancelled, classes continued, you learn more about the conflict and your hope is tested again. For one of the lectures we watched a documentary called Arna's Children about a theatre project in the camp at Jenin, and about the children who participated in the project, before the recent intifada and after. It is available on YouTube, and I highly recommend it. It’s the most honest portrayal I’ve seen about the life in the camps, and if you want an idea of what it’s like to work in Balata or Askar in Nablus, you only have to watch the film of the camps there in Jenin. They all saw heavy fighting – the worst in the West Bank – and all are full of kids whose childhoods have been peppered with bullets.
Last weekend we travelled north to see what had happened to that theatre project, and the work was inspiring. The old stone theatre featured in the film was destroyed several years ago, but a new building had been put together – I think largely funded by the UN – and they were working on their 3rd or 4th production. Their first, Orwell’s Animal Farm, got them into a great deal of trouble for casting the pigs as the Palestinian Authority – although I suspect none of the locals would disagree with this choice – and their second, Fragments of Palestine, won them a sell-out tour of Germany and Austria. They were asked to tour the UK, but were refused visas on the grounds that “they couldn’t provide sufficient proof that the actors would return to Palestine.” What sufficient proof would consist of I can’t imagine, and I suspect that the real reason for the denial had more to do with maintaining relations with Israel than with British immigration laws. Whatever the reason, it is Britain's loss. Their next production is a remake of Alice in Wonderland, and will run from January: it may be less controversial than the first or less poignant than the second, but after seeing clips of the others, I can’t wait.
More to follow...
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