A moment to reflect

Staring into the glowing screen of my phone at 1am and writing my first blog post of the trip, and indeed first ever blog post, I pause, repeatedly struggling to find the words. 

It's partially exhaustion from a busy schedule in the last three days: the meeting of so many incredible people who overwhelm with their generosity and open-hearted conversation, the climbing around and over Roman ruins for an hour too long, the exploring of the British-turned-Israeli-prison-turned-residency building for the CADFA team and the learning about its complex and disturbing histories, the three hour long lessons on the intricacies of life in Palestine over the last one hundred and fifty years, the sharing of dorms with brilliant new people and wanting to know them better but also needing to sleep, the hurried eating of yogurt with breads, rice dishes, hummus and the plethora of sugary treats before returning to presentations simultaneously in English and Arabic on our variable school lives, and those long drawn out and very nerdy teacher themed games on the bus. . .

But actually I think it's the mental exhaustion of trying to digest and fathom the lives of the Palestinian adults and children that I have met that gives me pause. I know that somewhere the stories I have heard might be reflected in print and that I could look up the historical facts of the growing Israeli dominance over Palestine and decipher just how the population of Palestinians in the West Bank has forcibly dwindled into patchy blots of green, annexed and broken by red boils across the map. But I could not recreate the experience of seeing the passion in people's eyes for a country they once fully occupied and called their home.

A place they determine to still call home, even when they are generations apart from touching soil in the township or village their ancestors lived in.

I could not fathom a life without freedom and one with enforced borders. That is, until the 3 metre, miles long wall stretched out in front of me, rude in its disruption of an otherwise seamless landscape and insensitive of the peoples it divides. 

Tomorrow we are visiting the schools in the local area of Abu Dis and I hope to see how, as with their general positivity and powerful rhetoric of hope, the teachers and students here continue to battle with and overcome the many problems and injustices they are facing.