Office Tour!

A little tour we did of the office :)

Aya

Aya is a 22-year old Palestinian university grad who took advantage of an entrepreneurship opportunity offered at Tomorrow's Youth Organization in Nablus in the West Bank. Her organic sheep farm is considered to be a great success and example for the program, called FWEN (Fostering Women's Entrepreneurship), founded by both TYO and Cherie Blair's international women's org.

The "Truth" About the West Bank

So I've been offline for a bit, but this really got me fired up today:

I've never heard/seen such bullshit in my life. This guy says nothing about the fact that, even if there wasn't a nation called "Palestine" legally recognized before 1948, there were still PEOPLE LIVING THERE who in no way deserved to have their homes destroyed because some foreign government decided the Jewish people needed that land more than those already living there. For hundreds of years. Oh, and even if "the presence and construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank should not be considered illegal," the insistence by the Israeli government that all Israeli settlers should carry guns so they can harass and shoot Palestinians whenever they feel like it should be.

I Have No Profound Words

I have no profound words. Just sadness. Sadness that I'm leaving this place before the work (in my mind, at least) is finished. But we could stay here another year and still be finding new stories to tell every day; I'm still learning new things every minute; I still don't understand the culture here--why the people are so generous and welcoming and why everything is so different from what I know.

So many of the people we've met would give you the shirt off their backs--even if you were already wearing one--even if it was the only thing they owned. And this is different from American culture, as much as we'd like to deny it. But that's not to say I've enjoyed everything about the culture here--there's still definitely a very patriarchal slant (almost machismo-like) that is very frustrating for someone with feminist leanings such as myself. But for other things, like generosity towards strangers and the value of a very close-knit family, I admire these viewpoints and wish I had more time to explore them.

It has been so interesting and so enriching to interact with people whose view of the world so differs from my own. It's important, as a student of the world, I think, to see and hear out as many view points as you can; if we didn't all see the world from so many different viewpoints--so many different angles--the world wouldn't be round, it'd be flat.

So I'm taking in views of the world as I can get them, one at a time, and saving the profound words for someone who's seen far more viewpoints than I.

Nablus After Curfew

Leaving tomorrow has us all nostalgic-like, thinking back to our first few days in Nablus. Remember when that crazy thing happened? No? Oh, yeah, that's right, you weren't there. Allow me--er, Andrea (and her guest, Amy)--to clue you in.

Music in Balata

A simple video I took yesterday when our translator, Kate and I took a trip to Balata camp--the largest camp in the city of Nablus, home to both the largest number of people (20,000 in one square kilometer) and the worst conditions. We met up with a friend of our translator's who helped show us around the camp. We met an art instructor from the local university and he offered to play us some traditional Arabic music. Our translator told us his friend was a very good singer and we begged him to sing along. He obliged and the result, I think, is quite magical ;)

Unlikely Medicine

I'm a bit of a klutz. It's a fact. It doesn't matter where in the world I am or the length of the trip--you can always count on me to need some sort of medical attention: in Kenya it was a sprained wrist; in Costa Rica it was intestinal parasites. And while those specific instances have rather dramatic stories to go along with serious diagnoses, it appears my laughable Palestinian incident--tripping over a street curb--will also have an incredible story.

On our way to the bank on Thursday, I stepped off the curb and rolled my ankle and fell hard onto the pavement, ripping a hole in my knee about the size of an egg. Luckily, this all happened in front of the juice shop so I was able to sit down. Our friend Iman was working and he was so sweet--he brought me ice for my knee and gave us strawberry banana smoothies (I think it's safe to say that if this same event had occurred in front of a Starbucks in the US, I would have been lucky to even get a band aid). Normally, it's haram (culturally unacceptable) for a woman to show anything above mid-calf in public, but it seemed more important at the time to get my knee cleaned and banadaged there on the street corner in the open than respect cultural norms. We fixed it up and I hobbled back to the Center.

We left that night to go to Ramallah and Jerusalem for the weekend and travel didn't go so well for my knee--it was oozing and swelling a lot and band aids either stuck too well as to be painful or fell off quickly. I had trouble sleeping the first night because of the stinging. But when we go to Jerusalem, we stopped to have tea in a market stall with a six-fingered Beduoin farmer named Zayid. While telling us about his father who had owned the stall before him and his vegetable farm, Zayid noticed my poorly-treated knee.

"What is your problem?" he asked me.

I told him I had fallen the day before and he ushered me over to his desk, where he procured a tupperware of homemade antibiotic cream and a white bandage. He carefully peeled the band aids off my knee and spread the new ointment on there* and then wrapped my knee in the bandage. For the first time since the day before, it wasn't throbbing or stinging.

I thanked him extensively and promised to return the next day (I hoped to find something to buy from his shop). Myself and the team walked up, down, and around the Mount of Olives and Jerusalem that night and I slept like a baby on the roof of the hostel, all without being bothered by my knee. The next day though, Zayid did not return to his stall in time for us to visit him again so I hope I get another chance to visit Jerusalem before we leave to attempt to repay yet another generosity bestowed on me in this amazing place.

-Jackie

66% of photos by Andrea Patiño

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*Students of the World in no way encourages students to seek unlicensed medical attention. Accepting this guy's help was my own decision.