Alright, so, it comes again that I finally post a blog. First of all, I apologize to all of you for being MIA in the blog world lately. I know, through talking to my mom and some of my friends, that you’re all excited to hear about my adventures and worry when I don’t blog often enough. I really, REALLY want to blog more often. It’s hard though, because I’ve really gotten into “life.”
My roommates and I typically get home at our respective times and process our days. It’s a really nice way to highlight the positives of our days and unpack the negatives. Over the last several weeks, I’ve found myself saying that my day was good, a lot. I feel like there are still successes and positives in each day, but I’ve finally evened out in a way. Each day is no longer a challenge. Granted, it’s still a challenge getting up early enough to get on the school bus at 7:05am (in all fairness, I actually set my alarm for 6:20am, but don’t get out of bed until 6:45, and then I walk out the door at 7:00, so I snooze longer than it takes me to get ready). I’m telling you this, in my normal, rambling form, to say that life here is good. I don’t come home every day totally stoked about every single thing that happened, but I feel really comfortable. I’m in a routine (mostly), and I live in Bethlehem. I’m not a tourist. I get really irritated by tourists actually. I’ve become one of the snooty long-term volunteers here.
In saying all of this, I’m going to give you more general thoughts, reflections, experiences, etc. Global Mission in Chicago wants to know what my “ministry” is like, so I think I’m going to do more of a recap, then reflect on it. I’ll try to add more specific stories and little things in it near the end. That’s my plan for this post. Alright, here we go.
I am serving at Dar Al-Kalima School, where I spend two days a week assisting the middle school English teacher. I basically help where I can, whether it’s through giving dictations, leading group discussions, or circling the room during individual or partner work. I spend two days a week helping the 5-year-old kindergarten class. I serve as a teacher’s aide, and I usually lead a “station” during their morning rotation. This was painting for awhile, but I’ve gotten to help with worksheets lately, which means I haven’t had to rinse paint out of my clothes or off my shoes for a few weeks. I help teach swimming lessons every day. This has been one of the most difficult things to do, as far as lacking Arabic, so I focus more on playing with the kids in the pool during their free time. I help where I can, as far as assisting them float, streamline, etc. I also help with the after-school “storytelling” club, which is more like an English enrichment program for 4th and 5th graders. There are no consistent tasks during that club, so it’s really random. We played musical chairs (with me singing…?) two weeks ago and I read Jack and the Beanstalk to them last week.
Alright, so, my ministry? I don’t know, to be perfectly honest. I get up and go to school each day with no intention of being a Christian or in teaching people what it means to be in community. I’m serious. I do go to school every day though and I hope I give some positive one-on-one interaction to kids. I’ve found that I PLAY with kids a lot more than most of the teachers do. Now, this is for plenty of reasons. Most of these teachers have several of their own children at home, so they’re tired. It is probably also an authority thing. If a teacher expects absolute authority in the classroom, which, to be honest, never happens in a Palestinian classroom, then he or she probably shouldn’t play hide-and-seek at recess. I think it also comes from my personality. I’m 22 years old, but I’m not ready to “grow up” and be serious. I’m the class clown. I’m the fidgety person. I like playing games and I like playing with kids. I try to make myself available to just “be” with the kids. Side story: I stand in the courtyard every morning near the main door. I station myself here, so I don’t infringe on the teachers’ conversations, but I am also open and available to talk or to play. Usually kids from the classes I observe or from swimming lessons stop and say hello. I feel like I’m still a novelty sometimes though. I’ve been here almost three months, and I’m still stared at by a lot of kids. It’s really peculiar. It’s also amusing, because I’ve had several kids, and people in the community for that matter, ask me if I’m German. While I’m 5’11”, blonde, blue-eyed, and clearly not Palestinian, it always amuses me when people say, “Gutenmorgen” to me. Yes, it does happen. Another side story within this side story: the one morning, we had a substitute bus driver and he said “Gutenmorgen” and I said, “Saba’il her,” which is “Good morning” in Arabic. He looked confused and all the teachers in the front chuckled. I then heard them explaining to him that I was actually American and not German. Good times. Initial side story: I had two kids come up today and ask me to play hide and seek with them this morning. I’ve never met them before and I don’t have any formal interaction in classes with them. The question actually came after the boy showed me that he had stolen bread dough from a bakery near his home and was eating raw bread dough. It was amusing. I also actually washed my hair Sunday night of last week (I don’t shower that often here with being in the pool every day and with the water shortage in the West Bank…and because I’m lazy). This meant that when I got on the bus in the morning, one of the three-year-old kindergarteners, named Lydia, smiled brightly and said, “Chara hilu!”, which means “Pretty hair!” She actually wandered back to where I was sitting (the kids walk all over when the bus is movie…it’s scary). She repeated “pretty hair” and was just looking at me with fascination. I finally leaned over the aisle (she was in the seat across from me), and she reached up her tiny hands and started petting my hair. She played with it for the twenty minutes it took to get to school.
Now, this is where I repeat that I don’t necessarily feel like I’m doing “ministry.” I do feel like perhaps ministry could be a much further point from this initial interaction. Meaning, letting a three-year-old pet my hair is not serving God; however, letting a three-year-old pet my hair will, hopefully, encourage her to see me, as an American, Christian woman, as someone who is nice and gentle and fun. I don’t know that this itself is being Christlike, but I think it’s about planting these seeds. It’s about allowing children to touch hair or ask questions or just be curious about what it means for me to be an American, or for me to be Christian, or what it’s like to play in the snow, or why I’m not married (still remains to be a question asked at LEAST once a week).
The hardest part of feeling this distant ministry, as perhaps I should call it, is feeling the obvious connection to God. I walk home from school every day, partially for fresh air and exercise and partially to just FEEL the community around me. I love eating pita here, but sometimes I stop in this one bakery on my way home to buy bread or whatever chocolate cookies or sweets I see, simply to talk to the Muslim, non-English speaking man, in my broken Arabic. It usually means we smile at each other a lot and he offers me Arabic coffee at the end of my purchase. I love it here. I really do!
I’m realizing how disconnected all of this is and I apologize. I know it’s all over, but I figure I’ve been harassed for the near month since I blogged last, so this should appease everyone. As far as more work stuff, I spent the morning today writing a Christmas play. Writing a Christmas play, yes. Am I qualified to write a play, you might ask? Well, no, I don’t think so. It’s part of the life here. The English teacher I work with was asked to come up with a five-minute Christmas “sketch.” She immediately turned to me and asked me to write it. I gave her my deer-in-the-headlights look, which is pretty typical for all of the crazy things they ask me to do, and asked what was meant by a sketch, what the play was for, and who would act in it…all appropriate questions to ask someone that wants you to write a play. Well, a sketch is a brief Christmas play, I guess. I still don’t know who’s acting in it—she’s going to assign parts once I’ve written it. I think it’s being presented…uh…around Christmas time. I came up with an idea to make it modern and she agreed, but then I realized I don’t really have the free time to write a play, so I suggested that we have the kids write it. It would improve their English skills and make the play something they actually wanted to do. I also suggested having the “storytelling” kids write it. We agreed on that. Then, she decided the storytelling kids weren’t strong enough for that, so we’d work with the older kids. Then, she came in on Monday and told me she had an idea for the play. It’s a reporter who’s asking random people what the “true” meaning of Christmas is. She suggested the idea and the characters and I wrote the lines. It wasn’t too bad to write, but I’m concerned that my tiny attempts at humor might not be understood. Then again, she insisted we have drunk man character, stumble through and not know anything about Christmas. It will be fun to work on a play though, with costumes and props. I really do love acting and such, so this is fun. Well, it’s fun in my hopeful vision of how a play written by an American will come across to Palestinian students with limited English. Yesss.
I’ve had a hard week and a half or so. There are six YAGMs in the Jerusalem/West Bank Program. I live with two other girls in Bethlehem, two girls live in Al Doha, near Beit Jala, and one guy lives in East Jerusalem. My roommates, Nikki and Marta, and Paul, the obvious guy of the group, and I went to Tiberias two weekends ago. It was a really good weekend. We were actually hoping to go to both Tiberias and Nazareth, but we had the unfortunate experience of spending three hours in the Gilo checkpoint. So, the Gilo checkpoint is the Bethlehem checkpoint and has the walking section—not all checkpoints have the walking option, just driving. My roommates and I usually walk through this, then catch the 124 bus into Jerusalem. The other girls, Chelsea and Kendra, take the 21 bus from their house, which actually goes through the checkpoint into Jerusalem. We, Marta, Nikki, and I, walked through the checkpoint that Friday morning to get on our bus and into Jerusalem, where we ended up catching an Israeli bus to Tiberias. We were stuck there three hours. It wasn’t that there were that many people to spend three hours in line, it was that it was a Friday, which means it’s the Muslim holy day, which means a lot of people want to go to Mosque in Jerusalem. So, the obvious response on the Israeli end, is to play games. Now, this is where my bias comes in. Yes, they play games. How? Well, let’s see…when when you only have one booth at a time accepting people through the line, but you have two soldiers on the catwalks above. There are catwalks or walkways above the booths and metal detectors. They’re really quite convenient. Soldiers are able to comfortably stand there, point their automatic weapons at Palestinians in an open space high above them, and scream in Hebrew. Yes, that’s how I spent my morning. Imagine standing in a room where men are holding machine guns and screaming in Hebrew like you’re some sort of disrespectful sheep. It’s absurd. They played games by closing one line and opening another, just to watch people scramble to and from the lines. The split men and women into separate lines, only to herd them back together. I say herd, because that’s what it is. It’s treating people like animals. In fact, I’ve heard of people standing in checkpoints, and starting to moo, just to irritate the soldiers. When we started our initial waiting period outside of the first passport/permit check booth, I really wanted to copy the stories I’ve heard before and start mooing. I figured that since Bishop Younan didn’t want us to do any sort of proactive advocacy work (to keep Israelis from trusting people from the church not to totally defy them), that mooing would not be appreciated. So, we were standing in the checkpoint, and this woman from Poland approached us. We had been talking to three French girls. The Polish woman used to be a tour guide here and was with her boyfriend and mother. She encouraged all of us to come with her and we’d share a cab or take the 21 bus (the one that goes through the checkpoint, but isn’t open to the majority of Palestinians—not totally sure why). We followed her, where she went and talked to the soldiers at the drive-through part of the checkpoint. I guess they told her that they were about to let everyone through and that we should just wait, so we went back. Nothing had changed. People were still being herded and nobody had really moved through the lines. When we came in, the soldiers were yelling more at the people waiting. The Polish woman started arguing with the one soldier on the catwalk in Hebrew. I don’t know what was said, but she walked away crying. Granted, I had only just met her, but she did not strike me as a weak or overly emotional type of person. Several Palestinians suggested we take the 21 bus after awhile. I got out of line and just stood and watched what was happening. I wish I could have taken pictures, but it probably would have gotten my camera taken away, personal harassment from the soldiers, or any other number of things. Plus, I was basically immobile. I started watching the soldiers. They were standing on the catwalk, screaming in Hebrew, at all of these Palestinian people, with a few internationals. The people were primarily above the age of 45 or 50 years old. Most were much older. There was a blind man in the group. A few small children. A few mothers with babies. The soldiers were screaming at them and holding machine guns. When I say machine guns, I mean machine guns. I leaned against a wall and started to cry. I was watching this scene like out of a war movie or a documentary. The soldiers were screaming and the Palestinians were screaming back. This wasn’t some sort of revolution…this was going to Jerusalem from Bethlehem…a trek probably rode in less than a day by Jesus on a donkey. Jerusalem is like, 8km from Bethlehem. I lost it. I watched human rights being defiled. I watched lives being invaded and hurt and so forth. I wish I could pass that emotion and pain onto each of you reading this to understand what that site was like. One of my roommates came over and asked if I wanted to leave to get the bus. Leave? To get the bus? So, I can use my golden-ticket passport to get out of here and go to Jerusalem, and onto Tiberias, which is in Israel, for a weekend vacation, while I know that there is this group of people standing at this checkpoint, and likely other groups standing or sitting at other checkpoints all over the West Bank? No. I didn’t. I refused. I think my roommates might have been irritated at first. I told them that I couldn’t go. They could go without me and that I’d skip Tiberias if that’s what it meant, but that I couldn’t walk away from this and from those people. I was crying at this point. I wasn’t crying for myself, because I had the option to go onto Jerusalem and Tiberias. I have those rights!!! I’m American and I can do anything I want with no questions. I was ushered through the checkpoint the other night. Yes, the soldiers called me and my roommates out of a line, and let us walk right through the special soldier door without even showing our passports. You’re going to ask me to walk away from beautiful people that are standing here, in pain, because they’re being occupied by a country that considers them dogs? No. I stayed. I was crying and leaning against the wall, giving the fiercest angry look at the soldiers I could muster. I didn’t want to give them a reason to shoot me, but I would have taken it. I wanted them to see the look of disgust that I had. The look of pure anger. A little, old, Muslim woman came over to me, and smiled. I apologized an Arabic and I told her that I thought the soldiers were wrong. She kept smiling and started digging around in her purse. She produced a hard candy with a wrapper. I couldn’t really identify it, and I usually remember checking our Halloween candy for needles when we were kids, at moments like this with candy from unknown sources. I didn’t though. I just unwrapped it and ate it. It was some sort of peppermint. It was soothing.
Here I was, the silly, golden-ticket American, crying, and the woman that probably goes through this on a daily or weekly basis gave ME the candy to comfort me. That’s absurd. That’s love. That’s where God is. God is not just through me, teaching children at the school to swim or speak English. God is here, in Palestine, present in the people, guiding them…and me…with hope for the future. It’s never about me. I’m not ministering, I’m getting ministered, and I don’t think that’s the word, but you know what I’m saying. It’s hope, faith, and love, and the greatest of these is love. It’s true. It really, really is.
On a slightly lighter note, we eventually got through, with everyone else, and made our way to Jerusalem. We got to the Israeli bus station later than we intended, and since it was a Friday, which is when Jewish Shabbat starts, we missed the last bus going to Nazareth. We had hostel reservations in Nazareth, but we cancelled them. We bought tickets to Tiberias and went. No plans. No reservations. Nothing. It ended up being a really, really good weekend though. It was Paul, Nikki, Marta, and I, and we were able to relax, since Shabbat meant it was basically a ghost town until Sunday morning. Tiberias is in Northern Israel, on the Sea of Galilee. We took a boat cruise on the Sea of Galilee, which is actually called a lake there, and is the size of a lake. We walked along the coast of the “lake” for awhile, stumbled upon some ancient Roman ruins of a marketplace and bathhouse, and went to the natural hot springs. My guidebook said the hot springs were supposed to be open until 8, so when we got there at 3:45pm, we thought we had plenty of time. The guy at the front desk told us that they actually closed at 4. We argued with him gently that our guidebook told us otherwise. He told us that he’d let us go in for the 15 minutes…for free. It normally cost 70 sheckels, I think, which is like, $20. Not super expensive, but we still got in for free. The hot springs are actually now a tourist-y thing, so they’re swimming pools with the natural hot spring water in them. It’s weird, because the water is greenish brown and hot, but in a nicely tiled swimming pool. It was the temperature of a hot tub and totally out of the ground. It was awesome. We had a good weekend in Tiberias. Lots of relaxing and some site-seeing.
We got back Sunday night, in time for our Arabic class, which we decided to have in Jerusalem that week. Paul checked his email and found out that his sister, Anne, was not doing well. Anne is 19 years old and has had cancer since she was 12. She has had several remission/recurrence periods, and went into her worse recurrence yet that weekend. Paul found out Sunday night and flew out early Wednesday morning. It was hard. Paul has been 1/6th of the team of YAGMs, that I agreed to come spend a year of my life with. As much as I will try to tell you all of the stories and experiences that I have had in Palestine when I come home, it won’t be the same as someone who has been here and experienced. So, it hurts that we lost Paul, our teammate and our friend. Please pray for Paul and Anne and their family!!
I think Paul’s leaving also brought a deeper issue with me. I realized not only how selfish I am for being halfway across the world, but how totally and utterly helpless. Yes, if something major happens, I can come home and be with my family. I would do it in a heartbeat. What happens with smaller stuff? Stuff that still is painful and stressful, but that I can’t justify flying halfway across the world for? Bad days? Break-ups? Fights? The list goes on and on and I can’t do anything about it. Not to mention that I also feel completely disconnected from the United States, my family, and my friends. Was there a tornado last week in the States? One of the Palestinian kids told me there was. Maybe they were kidding or it was lost in translation, but shouldn’t I know that? Shouldn’t I know that one of my friends was in the hospital sick and had to have her appendix out? Yes, I should know all these things, but it’s difficult. People at home don’t want to worry me and also forget I’m here. I’m super busy here and I don’t always make an effort to find out what’s going on. This is not to blame anyone, but it’s to say how difficult it was and is to see Paul experience the pain of his family, and to experience glimpses of that now. I am a control person, as any of you close to me know. I like being able to account for the exact dimensions of how things happen. I live in Palestine. I can’t hug you when you’re hurting and you can’t hug me when I’m hurting, and that stinks…a lot.
I think this is the majority of what is going on in my life here. I’ve appreciated the recent influx of mail, so thank you all! I LOVE mail and I LOVE packages, so feel free to write me or send me fun stuff. I miss good cheese a lot from home and I’m feeling like I’m fighting off the urge to be homesick for Thanksgiving tomorrow.
Holidays are hard here, because what I experience as a holiday is totally different than what they experience here. Granted, I’ve only “missed” Halloween thus far, but you know how Christmas decorations went up around Halloween? Well, we had no Halloween, there’s no significant recognition of Thanksgiving (side story in the next paragraph), and they’re just now putting out some Christmas garland. I do have to say though, that there were a couple of those blow-up Santas/Christmas paraphernalia yard decorations in front of the one shop. Half of the joy of those holidays in the past for me has come in the anticipation of what is to come. We don’t have snow here. I walked home from school yesterday and had to take my cardigan off, because I was too hot. I wore a t-shirt and pants and I was comfortable. As for Thanksgiving, one of the pastors here actually went to Southern Seminary in the States and he knows how important that holiday is for us. He’s making a turkey, Palestinian style, and having us each bring our favorite Thanksgiving Day dishes to share. I’m pumped. Granted, I still have school tomorrow, and it’s not Thanksgiving with the Harbers, but it will still be fun…in a different way. Believe me, I would love to have Thanksgiving at home right now. I can smell that warm oven smell in my house in Marion Center. I would love to make veggie pizza for my family, even though I don’t even like veggie pizza anymore. I’d love to sit around in our pajamas all day, eat around 4, only to pack it up, and pull it back out for leftovers a few hours later. I’d love to listen to the argument about how “Merry and Amanda helped me cook, so you can do the dishes, Chip!”…at which point my sister volunteers to clear the table, which she beautifully set, and ultimately ends up doing the “nice” dishes to help Chip out, which ends up being half the dishes. Chip and I would probably end up wrestling on the floor, since we haven’t seen each other in awhile and that’s what we do when we’re in the same house…and Lady would get excited and jump around…and I could go on and on, but I might cry. I guess it’s not really important for all of you reading to know what my family traditions are, but it’s important for me. It’s part of my ministry to understand who I am and where I come from, but to also know where I’ll go home to. When the days get rough, I picture hugging my mom and watching “America’s Next Top Model” with Amanda, and arguing over refried beans and cheese with Chip. That’s my family…and that’s me. I love you guys!
I wish you and all those you love an AMAZING Thanksgiving. Please, say a prayer for Paul and Anne, and please just love each other. I know I say that a lot, but it’s really important. You never know how much you’ll miss simple, seemingly unimportant things like refried beans or arguing over washing dishes, until you don’t have them.
**Pictures should be coming…someday…when I get time.
This post was 7 pages in Word. I hope you're all happy. :)
All of my love and blessings,
Meredith
Here are some lyrics for a song that I’d like to dedicate to my mommy:
I'm just too far from where you are, I wanna come home. And I feel just like I'm living someone else's life. It's like I just stepped outside, when everything was going right. And I know just why you could not come along with me. This was not your dream, but you always believed in me...So yeah, thanks for letting me go around the world not spend Thanksgiving Day with you, Mumsy, Amanda, and Chip. It wasn’t your dream, but you always, ALWAYS believed in me, and I thank each of you for that. :)
