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.

PALESTINE DAY 1

I'm writing this to you from a bent road in the back of a van taking us to Nablis. The man in the front is our leader and self proclaimed captain of Palestinian Football - but we're still to get to the bottom of that one and I'm sure my pigeon Arabic is to blame. 

It's been a long 48 hours. Buses, taxis, planes and shoes. (oh and detention benches but more on that later). Turbulence turns to motorway to unmanaged road, road which reinvigorated a bug inside one if us who is still investigating the intricacies of British mandate plumbing. (or maybe Israeli - we haven't been given the full history of our current residence). As we wind through the shaky hills out of Far'a green and yellow number plates flash past, some with kids hanging out of the windows, staring  out of thick glasses, others dodging curbside smokers outside glowing minarets. Despite the long start to our trip the car is buzzing. There is a definite relief in the air. Fourteen teachers, blowing out the double ended candles of a long half term and setting off to the occupied territories of Palestine,  intent on exchanging experiences and resources, remembering their initial meeting at the airport, green and clueless as to what the following days would have in store.

It sounds foolish, but like many of my generation I'm ignorant when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Apart from an old professor with a map showing the transition from the region in 1917 to 1993 my knowledge has been through reports and sporadic bouts with Wikipedia. And what does that really bring anyway. Facts can often be so dehumanising, reducing human loss to statistics, which we initially gasp at but quickly forget.  No,  today we had the hard hitting,  knife turning reality of life as a teacher in Palestine. In the UK we talk so much about the safety and welfare of students. We talk about how traumatic home lives can hinder a student's education. How would we act if our students were imprisoned for three months? Or had to miss school because they'd been shot in the legs for approaching a wall built through the middle of their town?

The stories become more and more traumatic as the day continues and the three hours spent held in a detention room whilst some of our group's passports were taken started to make more sense. We were here by the authority of the British council but today that means very little. Our leader can be aggressively harassed and our Muslim colleagues can be intimidated and interrogated whilst other people all around us  because of their ethnic or cultural backgrounds are deported through fear. Fear of a variety of things, but fear none the less. It is so sad to see.  Even more so because as soon as we enter Tel Asia airport a kindly enployee comes to help us find our bags. Probably unaware of our detention and uncaring about out race,  nationality or intentions but a true ray of hope.

Below us Nablis spreads out, fairylit in orange and blue. Tobacco smoke flows back and the night loses the formality of the day.

Tomorrow we will present our schools, exchanging ideas about pedagogy, behaviour and special needs teaching as well as being shown around our accommodation, a former detention centre used by British and then Israeli troops for interrogation and torture. 

But tonight we exchange stories about families, students and practise our various languages with a cup or shai or an ice cream cocktail as the fairy lights below us glow.

Travelling east

Talking, sleeping, drinking tea, listening to music, reading... and wondering what this exciting visit is going to be like.