More from Palestine

That first night unfolded in slow motion, but since then the mornings have been blurring into evenings and the days into weeks. Erin and I are slowly becoming part of the family. Our host parents are Shifa and Basem, and they have three children living in Beit Sahour: Shems, who is in the last few weeks of her pregnancy, Shadi, the only son of unknown age who apparently lives here at home but rarely makes appearances, and Sherrihan, the youngest daughter who lives a short drive away with her husband and 2 year old daughter, Tulai.
We've established a daily pattern that goes something like this: Marimba alarm sounds at 7am. Erin and I stay in bed waiting for the other one to get up first. becca out waits Erin, and Erin goes into the bathroom to put her contacts in and do her hair. At 7:20 we ate breakfast, which is waiting for us on the table: four hardboiled eggs, hubez (or as we call it at home, pita bread), olive oil and zata for us to dip our bread in, something that resembles cream cheese, apricot jam, and a pipping hot pot of black tea with mint. At 7:45 we leave the house and walk up the hill (our cardio workout for the day) to The house where Lydia and Laura are staying. Laura has a couple more olives or finishes off her glass of tea and Lydia brushes her teeth, and then we're on our way. We sing our way to The ATG office where our group meets every morning at 8:30 for Arabic class. For the next 3 and a half hours, we practice bending our vocal chords in new and mysterious ways with our respective teachers. I am in a class with nine other students and one Nadia, our Arabic teacher. She's maybe 65 years old, a retired teacher, and she has no sympathy for our tongues, molded for 18, 19 years by the English language. She demands quick answers which usually means someone ends up responding in Spanish. One of her favorite remarks to make when we fail to pronounce well or remember the new vocabulary is, "It's easy." Another comment she likes to make is, "I don't know why you don't study." Most of us are going a little crazy or have completely shut down by the time class is over. We are on our own for lunch, so for convenience sake we buy lunch at the same place every day - a small falafel stand down the road from ATG. The second half of the day is usually free time and then a late afternoon lecture or a small day trip. We take longer day trips on the weekend when we don't have Arabic class. Then around 4 or 5, Laura, Lydia, Erin, and I walk home together. When Erin and I stumble back into the house from our walk down the hill, I open the gate, Erin opens the glass door to the porch and holds it for me as I walk through, and the. I open the door to the house. It happens this way every day. Shifa is usually right inside the door, in front of the TV. She always looks a little bit stunned when we walk in the door. she just sort of squints at us, warming her hands over the space heater until we say, "Hell-o" to which she replies, "Hell-o" and smiles. This greeting happens as we are walking past her on our way upstairs to our room. The rest of the family lives downstairs, so Erin and I have a nice secluded space to escape to. We change out of our hiking boots and into the house slippers that Shifa gave to us on one of our first nights, grab our journals and latest reading material (and I, my sketch book), and descend the flight of stairs to our favorite daily question "You want to eat?" From the moment that question is asked until we fumble into bed at night, we are eating. First the two of us are served a meal fit for six, helping size decided by our host. Then fruit: an orange, a couple of tangerines, and a banana for each of us. Then we have tea and biscuits, which are cookies from the bakery. After tea there are nuts and olives and glasses of wine and an Arab version of Fritos - deep fried chips covered in garlic powder. Everything is so sinfully delicious and so hospitably and forcefully offered that Erin and I have eaten absolutely everything that they have offered us at this point. I have never been so close to bursting for so many consecutive days in my life.
Most of our days are scheduled and for the most part predictable in this way - taking Arabic classes, eating 4 sheqel falafel sandwiches, visiting checkpoints, and touring refugee camps - but when we arrive back home in the evenings around 5, the real learning begins. One night, during the Feed Them Till They Burst game, Shifa brought out a bowl of baked and seasoned pumpkin seeds. Someone from our group had just been talking about eating pumpkin seeds, and recognizing them, I excitedly grabbed a big handful and put them all into my mouth. No no no! Shifa scolded as I crunched down into rock solid shells. "Like this", she said, and taking one seed in between her teeth, she bit down and cracked the shell to reveal a small flat seed. I chomped through the mouthful of shells and seeds already in my mouth and swallowed it down to try the new technique. The entertainment for the rest of the evening then was not the Turkish soap opera that we usually watch, but me attempting to pry the small seeds from their shells. When Sherihan walked in the door later that evening, Shifa retold the story of my first encounter with "bizzer". I could tell it was the story by the hand motions and the use of my name "Beeka" several times. As the week went on, I found myself being offered bizzer quite often, and each time Shifa enthusiastically pointed me out as I struggled to snack to everyone in the room. Normally I don't enjoy being the butt of a joke, but this joke was okay because it broke the language barrier and was a way for me to feel like a part of the conversation. Being talked about isn't talking, but it's better than sitting silently in a sea of language you can't decipher. For that reason, I've continued to eat bizzer whenever their offered.
More stories to come!
Becca

First Impressions: Palestine

Marhaba from the House of the people who stay up late at night; that's the literal translation for the name of the town where we are currently staying, Beit Sahour. And Marhaba is hello, one of the few Arabic words I know at this point. Hopefully by the time we leave Palestine, I will know a bit more. Last Tuesday night we arrived in Palestine after crossing the border from Jordan. Crossing into the West Bank with a group of thirty students was quite the ordeal. I think altogether it took us about 4 and a half hours and 6 different passport checks to get through security. After reuniting with our luggage, we took our first official steps on The Holy Land in a parking lot full of tour buses, which felt anticlimactic to say the least. The herd magically drifted toward the tour bus labeled EMU and we began the loading routine, which includes successfully storing all of our luggage under the bus, calculating the probability of carsickness based on the visible capacity for recklessness demonstrated by the driver, and then making a mad dash for a favorable bus seat companion. Sadly, I failed to complete any part of the loading routine. My suitcase, being rather large, prevented several other students from fitting their luggage into the belly of the bus. One of the stronger males in our group kindly removed my bag from where I had placed it and rearranged a few pieces so that in the end all of the bags, but one, did end up fitting. Feeling responsible for the packing problem my bag was causing I stayed outside the bus, standing on the sidelines in what I suppose I meant as solidarity. Well intentioned as it was, I missed the opportunity to take a good hard look at the bus driver and assess the risk of car sickness, not that my assessment would have mattered. By the time I got on the bus, the only seats open were in the back. I sat with a friend, which should have been a success, but after a long afternoon of waiting in a sterile white building with sweaty armpits, I wasn't in any condition to be chummy, which squelched our bus seat companionship.
Soon enough, we were crammed into a classroom at ATG (Alternative Tourism Group). A tall lanky Palestinian man with curly grey shoulder-length hair stood in front of us. He told us his name, but the unfamiliar sound washed over my ears as per-usual with Arabic names, and I was left only with an impression of curly hair. Then names were called and the room started to empty. "Beeka and Air-een!" the curly haired man announced. I stood and squeezed past the surrounding empty desks to follow a short stout man out the door of the classroom with Erin. We gathered our luggage and fit it into the back of the small mustached man's Volkswagen Polo. "You can both sit up front with me," he told us. So I climbed in, and Erin sat hunched over on my lap so that her head wouldn't hit the ceiling.
We made small talk on the short drive back to the house and during our dinner of eggplant, tomato sauce, a strange but delicious rice that I've begun referring to as noodle-rice.
After we ate, we were introduced to hot pink walls and cheetah print bedcovers, our room. I think Erin and I were both a little overwhelmed at the femininity of the room. After living in the blank walls of the EMU dorms for three semesters, hot pink was frightening. We returned to the ground floor, where we met a family friend and had evening tea. After an appropriate amount of polite conversation, we returned to our room to get better acquainted with the cheetah print bedcovers.
We slept and left the next morning for a tour of the city, where we saw the fields where the shepards are believed to have been watching their flocks by night when the angel of the Lord appeared to them in the Christmas story. Beit Sahour was named for these fields and the shepards who stayed up late to watch their flocks at night, as I said earlier, the house of those who stay up late at night. Ironically Erin and I have been going to bed around 8:30 or 9 every night.
At 8:00 on Wednesday night, we hiked up he stairs to our room, ready for the welcoming warmth of sleep and cheetah print covers, but we were surprised and slightly disappointed to find new covers on the beds. Rather than cheetah print, two tan teddy bears each sporting a blue bow and a fishing pole smiled up at us from our beds. We weren't entirely sure why're covers had been changed, but since our host had taken the liberty of cleaning up and unpacking our things for us, we figured it was just part of cleaning the room.
It has been a week and a half since the bed covers were changed, and though our things continue to end up in new places as the result of daily cleaning and our beds are made regularly, the teddy bear covers remain. I strongly suspect that after meeting us, our host mother, baffled by Erin's and my lack of femininity, decided that the cheetah print was so far past ironic that it was approaching inappropriate and changed it out for something that better represented us. Sleep hungry tomboys that we are, I think she did a pretty good job. And now, for another night in the teddy bear blankets. Until next time...