I'm back in Maine, having landed in Boston, Monday night, in a driving rainstorm with visibility of what seemed like a few feet. Sitting in Little Dog Coffee Shop in Brunswick, I think about how bizarre yet natural it is that three days ago I was thousands of miles away in a different culture with a different climate and terrain where people speak another language and write from right to left... I also think about the call I got this morning from my friend Khitam in Palestine who corrected the opening of my last blog: "Romani is not eggplant; it's pomegranate!" I told her I would correct it today. Done!
Saturday, my penultimate day in Palestine, Khitam and I drove from Nablus, where we had spent the night in our favourite third floor hotel, to Jenin where Khitam had a workshop scheduled with kindergarten teachers from the camp and surrounding villages. There were thirteen teachers and school principals, all women and all but one covered. The workshop was hosted by The Freedom Theatre, where we had been the previous week to see one of their shows.
Khitam is very good at what she does. Saturday's workshop was the first of six Khitam would be doing with the teachers. Her goal is to introduce them to ways of using the arts - movement, theater, drawing and painting, music - to work creatively and therapeutically with their students. As I have mentioned in blogs from earlier visits, some of what Khitam is teaching we might take for granted because of our opportunities to learn a variety of ways to work with children. In Palestine, such opportunities are limited by the occupation, a lack of funds, a tradition of top down teaching and a paucity of enlightened leadership. Khitam's workshops increase teachers' ability to work creatively under those conditions.
She begins by talking with them for half an hour. She introduces the goals of the workshops and asks the teachers to introduce themselves and say a little about their work and goals. By the end of the half hour, she has established a feeling of trust among the group and a curiosity to discover what they will do. She asked me to do a warm-up, after which she put on some music and did body and mind freeing movement that helped shake off inhibitions. Then, leaving the music on, she told me to come outside with her: "They need to move, to dance, and they won't do it with you in the room."
For four hours, with a couple of breaks for snacks and coffee, tea or water or all three, she guides them through theater exercises, drawing, two dimensional sculpting with coloured geometric shapes and talked about what they were creating and why they had drawn or sculpted what they had. She also had them collaborate to create together, then discussed what happened. They were learning new activities that they can use with their kids and they were coming up with their own reasons for doing these activities by talking about what they were creating and how that felt. She asked me to do a few exercises with them and, near the end, to tell a story.
The teachers were engaged for the entire workshop. Khitam paced it well so that they didn't get tired of any one exercise or discussion. There were times to move, times to sit around a table and draw, times to collaborate with the coloured shapes, times to discuss, to question, to compare ideas. The teachers worked hard and had fun. By doing the activities themselves, they could discover how the exercises worked, what fun they were and how to use them with children. I suspect this is not a typical workshop for them; more likely they are used to workshops that are more lecture than inter-active.
There is no good reason workshops like this one should be as rare as they are. Nor is there a good reason schools are run down, underfunded, often poorly led by principals whose idea of what a school should be are not only outdated but probably wrong in the first place! Conditions in Palestine are more difficult than in many countries and yet many countries have the same problems. Here in the States, we have some of these problems: poor leadership, lack of funds, lack of materials; however, we are more do have many good schools, better prepared teachers and more materials to work with.
When I visit Palestine, I am reminded how similar the people I work with and meet there are to the people I work with and meet here. They are friendly, most of them work hard, they complain about daily inconveniences, they love their children and they want a better life. Sound familiar? I'm also aware that in Palestine and here, there are people who are not so friendly, don't know what to do with their children, are unhappy because an abusive relationship and complain all the time. The big difference is the conditions we live in. We don't live under occupation, they do. We seldom confront roadblocks and when we do, it's usually because of an accident on the road. We don't start the day wondering if we can get to work in the half hour it should take us or if, because of Israeli checkpoints, it will take us an hour and a half. We don't live near or next to an enormous and faceless wall that cuts us off from direct access to villages and towns we used to walk or bike or drive directly to or to fields we used to farm or, as children, play in.
Oh, there are other differences. Olive trees, for one. They are a Palestinian farmer's heritage and, if they're not torn up or cut down by settlers for whom the tree is not special, they will be passed on to the next generation in the family. And in the fall, when it is time to harvest the olives, we don't turn out - fathers, mothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles and children - to harvest the olives. I just remembered that when we came to Maine in the early 70's, I learned that families in Aroostock County would turn out for potato harvest in September and schools would close for a week or two, so in Maine we are familiar a family approach to harvest. I assume that in all parts of the country where agriculture is important that was once the way: all hands turned out for harvest.
This makes for a cooperative and supportive community. That's what Palestinian villages have traditionally been. People help each other when they see the need or are asked. There is a familiarity that offers security if sometimes a lack of privacy. To lose this sense of community or be denied it diminishes one's humanity a little or a lot. This is true of the people who lose it and is true of those who would deny it to others. Many Palestinians I know are working hard to support a sense of community through their work, their relationships, their volunteering. In an occupied land much of which is riddled with the settlements of the occupier, their hard work gets harder, not easier. Yet they continue, and few of us notice. If we know anything of the area, most of us know only about Israel, as if no one else were there.
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