Conversations with Khitam and Nasser and a ride with Fathi

     I lose track of time here.  I didn't bring my calendar and I don't use my cell phone.  The weekend here is Friday and Saturday; Sunday is a work day for most.  I talk with Khitam or with Nasser on the phone and one or the other says, "Tomorrow we'll..," and I don't think of what day that "tomorrow" is.  So, I may write a couple of blogs talking about doing different things on the same day of the week.
     This afternoon, Cotton and I were having a coffee together in East Jerusalem and talking about our visit with our friend Abed earlier today.  I'll write about Abed in another blog.  He is a remarkable man, trilingual - Arabic, French and English - middle aged father of five and husband of wise and lovely Nahel.  We had taken a taxi from Jerusalem to the Bethlehem checkpoint and heard our driver Fathi's story of a difficult life, one of many such stories you hear here.  People don't boast of them; they talk about them if you ask.  After walking through the checkpoint, we waited for a ride and Cotton wondered where the hope is when you hear so many crushing stories.  Here are some thoughts.

Khitam talks with teachers

     Khitam and I were returning from Ramallah a couple of days ago, talking about what a Palestinian puts up with, living in his or her own land.  There are checkpoints which may delay for half an hour or more your drive to work or to your home.  There is the wall which is ugly and separates you from friends and your people on the other side; it may also separate you from your land.  There is the Israeli seizure of land under one pretext or another ("This land is restricted for military use.").  There is the restriction for people who lived on the West Bank that does not allow them to visit Jerusalem unless they have a special permit.  There is the demolition of "illegally constructed homes," illegal because they have not acquired a permit to build, a permit that is almost impossible for a Palestinian to acquire.
     And yet, Palestinians continue to struggle to exist and eventually prosper on their own land.  "I almost never pay attention to politics now," Khitam says.  The Israelis have occupied the land since 1967 and slowly but surely and craftily they have extended their control as settlement after settlement, all of them "illegal," are built on land that was Palestine.  If you look at a map of Israel-Palestine now, you will see that what remains of Palestine is a few islands afloat in a sea of Israeli controlled land.  There does not seem to be any strong Palestinian leadership; no one has emerged who can effectively lead Palestine.  So where is the hope?

Nasser tames the lion!

     For Khitam, it is in her work and that is what keeps her going.  When she works with the kids, she is happy.  When she works with the teachers, she knows they are going to touch a lot of kids, and some of them are going to be very good with those kids partly because of what they have learned from her.  It is they, the kids and their teachers, who give her hope.  She believes in the value of her work.  She knows that some of those kids will grow up in Palestine to be teachers, parents, artists, and she knows they will be valuable to Palestinian society and that they may have and give hope partly because of what they have learned with her or with their teachers who have worked with her.
     Nasser, my friend who is the counselor at the Husni al Ashab School which is in Khitam's neighborhood, also has hope.  He is a selfless man, father of four boys and, he told me proudly yesterday, a girl on the way.  He is the only counselor in a school of over 400 boys; it's a middle school that is adding a grade a year and will soon be a combination middle and high school.  Nasser works with kids from single parent homes, homes with alcohol or drug addiction, kids living with domestic violence.  Often these kids have taken out their anger and frustration and confusion on other students and on their teachers.  They have had poor attendance records and their grades have been low and lower.

Watching the play

     When these kids work with Nasser, they change, and one of his methods for changing them is theater.  He has received no training in theater, but he figured that if kids could act stories that are important to them, that might help them, so he began doing theater with them and they responded.  That was four years ago.  Three years ago, I met Nasser through Khitam and did some work with his kids and some work with Nasser and counselors from other schools who wanted to sample using theater in their work.  This year, Nasser's kids have produced two shows with Hussam, an experienced actor with Palestine's national theater, Hakawati.

Hussam makes a point with one of Nasser's students

     They are proud of their work and Nasser is proud of them.  They know he cares about them.  He treats them with respect and expects them to treat each other the same way.  When parents came to see the first show, some of them couldn't believe those were their sons on stage.  Some cried.  And Nasser?  He knows the kids can learn and grow if they are given opportunities, guidance, respect and a push.  They are his hope, they and his own children.  He wants them to learn to share with others what they have learned and to learn that they can try something they have never done and find success, sometimes through failure.  He also wants to affect education in Palestine, make it student centered, not teacher centered.
     Fathi's story seems less hopeful.  Remember, he is the taxi driver who took Cotton and me to the Bethlehem checkpoint.  I got a ride with him again this afternoon when I returned from East Jerusalem to Adahya, where Khitam lives.  Fathi is forty-eight.  He is married and has five kids.  They live in a two room apartment with a small bath and kitchen in Jerusalem's old city.  He and his father were born and raised in the old city and he loves it.  However, he can't find decent work.  He has been in prison and can't legally drive a cab; if he gets caught they take his car for three months and fine him 1,000 shekels so he drives his own car and hustles rides by asking people where they want to go.  That's how Cotton and I found him this morning: he found us.
     On a decent day, Fathi will make 200 or 300 shekels, $150 - $225.  His oldest child, a daughter, is a student at Bethlehem University.  He is proud of her, but the university is expensive for him.  Every day he gives her thirty shekels for the ride to and from the university and another ten for lunch.  He has to buy her clothes and also has the four younger ones to clothe and feed.  He has looked for other work but can't find it.  He lives in the old city so he is able to go in and out of Jerusalem, but if he went out and found work somewhere else and was gone for a year, he would lose the right to live in Jerusalem.  These are Israeli restrictions.  It is clear they would like to move Palestinians out of East Jerusalem, including the old city, and move Israeli Jews in.
     Fathi's daughter in college, surely the first in her family to go; Nasser's kids who find success doing theater that improves their overall performance in school; Khitam's work with teachers all over Palestine, enabling them to share what they've learned about using art creatively in school, these are examples of candles that light the darkness in Palestine.