HERE WE GO again nearly 4 hours of writing to you gone! I’m sure I’ve smoked the equivalent of a package of cigarettes with all the second hand smoke in here! I could almost cry, not sure if I’ll be able to remember all I wrote but I will try, so here we go with a wildly abridged version…
Where to start?
Well after all the worry the Ben Guiron airport, which is an absolutely beautiful airport, was an absolute breeze. As a matter of fact it was one of the easier entrances into a country I’ve ever had. I kept waiting for the Israeli police to pull me aside but it never happened. A few questions from a couple young Israeli security girls & that was about it.
I had to wait a couple hours for my ride. Leaving Tel Aviv I was struck with how much the landscape reminded me of the Okanagan. There were many more trees & a lot more forests than I was expecting. We were quite lucky going through the checkpoint here we were just waved through. I nearly blew our treat when I asked the driver if I could take a picture, ‘No no no’ he whispered he did not want to ruin our good fortune of being waved through. before we pulled up in his broken English he told me to get my story straight ‘You go to the church (of the Nativity)’. Upon entering the West Bank besides the massive apartheid wall & rows of barbed wire it is dirtier and there is a marked difference in the conditions of that in Israel
They have much more here as compared to Africa. They have electricity of course, Karama even has Internet however it was down so I came to this local Internet cafe, they have running water, A toilet, shower, no hot water but the cool shower was quite refreshing after my sweating stuffy sleep. They have propane bottles next to their stoves so they are not cooking over fire like in Thunderhill. They have pens, paper, food, small shops, clothes, the streets are paved etc. The problems here are generally of the severe repression that they suffer as opposed to at Rhema where it was much more about the basic necceseties
Karama is a loosely organized agency & is basically a boys & girls type club where the other volunteers create self started & self directed programs for the local youths ranging from arts & crafts to what would equate to Health classes, Eileen the Irish lady who volunteers here is getting her PHD in anthropology & has a psychology background. Inga is a Lithuanian girl who does arts & crafts with the kids. My contribution is… you guessed it funding. Don’t worry honey I explained that with Rhema we spent a year trying to organize funding mostly to no avail. Yasser wants to buy the building which Karama is housed as the lease is up soon. The primary purpose of Karama is to communicate to the rest of the world the extreme repression that the Palestenians face on a daily basis
They endure what we could not imagine. No Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza is allowed to leave those areas….ever. Yet Israelis can come & go as they please, in fact the have (& are) built houses (basically subdivisions which they call settlements) in the Palestinian areas. The Palestinian frustration is immense, it has the feel of a pressure cooker and one can sense the anger that could boil over with an incident. Besides being forced out of their homes by the Israelis, backed by the Americans & British, in 1948 & again in 1967 they have been walled in since 2002. You will be happy to know that getting into gaza is virtually an impossibility.
I have had positive experience with the Israelis. When asking the Palestenians about the Israelis the only contact they have with Israelis is at checkpoints when the soldiers turn them away & apparently can be quite viscous, so it is not good. They are literally prisoners caged in with the wall & never allowed to leave. The Israelis also control the water here & only allow turn the water on every three weeks or so & without notice so if you miss the water being turned on you do without.
There was also a student of Karama that was shot & killed a short time ago by an Israeli soldier, no charges, no investigation, after all it was just a ‘Palestenian’. He was walking down the street, not throwing rocks, not a ‘terrorist’ just a boy walking down the street when he was shot by an Israeli soldier. As you can imagine it is still quite a sensitive subject.
Although there is a UN presence here (they built a school & distribute goods) they are seen as a slave to the Israelis as they do nothing about the many human rights violations perpetrated by the Israeli’s. Obama is also not very popular here, he allows the continued repression of the palestenian people & tip toes around Israeli policy, with Obama in power nothing has changed in Palestine. Canada is not without its blame too, if people only knew that this wall was built with the help of Canadian taxpayer dollars. These people are treated today in a way that reminds one of slavery or the way our native population was treated earlier in the 1900’s yet the world (Iran & Venezuala aside) stays mute. Evil exists when good people stand by & do nothing
Well guess what I ask too many questions! Who knew?? he he! What to us seems like something out of a spy movie is reality here, the CIA & Mossad (the Israeli spy agency) have agents pose as humanitarians & infiltrate the various organizations. Since the questions I was asking were deep and intrusive Yasser warned me not to be so inquring amongst other people here as not to raise any suspicions.
I still don’t know my way around yet, it is a labyrinth of skinny streets & alleys & in the dark its even more of an adventure getting around.
People are incredibly warm, kind & helpful (think what Sammi was like). If there is anyone to be feared it’s the Israeli’s. Behind Eileen’s house last night there was an explosion the Mossad went in & took out a guy that lives there. If you tell that story back
home I’m sure people would think ‘well he must be a terrorist/deserve it’ however that is not the case here so many
have been arrested for no reason other than being Palestinian. Some have developed a hatred towards the Israeli’s, I have kept an open mind.
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