Playground at the Arab Institute

Sweet boys (said the teachers who gave them flowers) and a tear gas cannister (a new type we were told) that the Israeli army shot into ye playground a few days before.

Sebastia...

A long day today but that didn't stop us accepting the invitation by Abu Yasser to breakfast in Sebastia... and so glad we did. A memorable breakfast with everything tasty and good, and then a look at the Roman ruins.

Tom was the most excited! Or maybe I thought that he must be as he's a classicist.  But all of us loved being there and in the dreamy Palestinian hills in the autumn sunshine.

And then confronted with the current occupation reality: settlements. GROWING. EVERYWHERE.

PALESTINE DAY 3 CONTEXT

The days are melting into each other in the levantine sun. As we roll through another valley of olive trees and past another armed checkpoint to another town covered in posters of murdered youths - some with guns, some without - the normalisation of violence begins to sink in.

For us this is a shock. For our guides this is their life. We meet a man working for the Educational Authority in the Jalasa refugee camp whose son was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in Nablis whilst working two years ago. Every day a new story of violence and death. Yet the men in the refugee camp do not call for blood, but understanding and peace. They want their voices heard, voices frustrated by consecutive United Nations resolutions which have been ignored (181 - the partition of the two states in 1948 - and 302 - that UNRWA was to continue to help the Palestinian people until they had returned home or their issues had been settled - to name the two stuck in my mind).

We arrived in Anata late. Today was also the first time we have seen the wall. It's shocking. A 20 foot high wall pressed right up against Palestinian towns villages and refugee camps whilst on the other side spacious, green settlements flourish. The sheer display of inequality would be enough to shock most but the fact that these settlements flagrantly contravene the Oslo agreement and international law is baffling. Here is a barrier put up to allow the Israeli government divide the Palestinian people and to cut up the land which they are allowed to live on. It makes it more difficult to visit relatives who live in the different areas (A, B and C) and even more so Palestinians with their different coloured IDs (blue - Jerusalem: you can travel anywhere in Israel or the West Bank; green - West Bank only; orange - Gaza Strip only) who can be cut off from travelling to see friends and families.

And this is where children are brought up. Inside a cage where you are a second class citizen from birth. No opportunity to contact or even meet with your neighbouring counterparts. As we go to sleep after a long day of meetings, tours and discussions and we hear what may have been a few bullets in the background you can't help but feel helpless. What can you do when a wall stands so firm against any positive building of relationships? What happens if that's our guide's son?

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.

مدير المدرسه عدنان حسين نرحب بالمعلمين من المملكه المتحده .طلاب فرحون بمدرسه تم تجديدها بالقريب من الساويه

تط

Waiting waiting

When we eventually got through the airport at Tel Aviv, three hours had passed and our electronic slips wouldn't open the exit gates. "Why were you so long? " asked the man at the gate. "You'd better ask them that," we said, referring to the security. We don't know what they had in their mind. During the three hours, we'd seen some people denied entry and others had waited 6 hours; we'd seen one young woman really stressed by being on her own, interviewed for ages; we'd been shouted at in an unnecessary way by security; and we'd been asked to promise we wouldn't be going to any demonstrations (as we aren't,  that bit's easy).  Then suddenly the passports came back - just after we took this picture - and we met our bus and set off into the dark and into Palestine.

Amazing work going on

Today teachers from the UK and Palestine are comparing their work in their countries (after lots of presentations over 2 days). Amazing stuff going on, so interesting... How do you manage without many computers... Talking to the kids about meeting soldiers in the street... How do we plan our lessons? ... How do children cope with the arrests of their classmates? ... Real excitement in the air... What a brilliant group of people, sure they're all great teachers (lucky students). Looking forward to the work on school twinning.