Teaching with Khitam

   "It's just depressing.  It's just depressing!  That's why I have to go to the north every two weeks.  I can do this."  (she takes a deep breath)
   "You know what I heard?  The happiest people in the world are Palestinians.  You know why?  When the Israelis let us through the checkpoint, we are happy.  When the Israelis wave us through the checkpoint, we are happy.  And when the Israelis takes away the checkpoint, we are very happy, the happiest people in the world!"
   Khitam drives up on the sidewalk on the edge of downtown Jerusalem and turns off the car.  "I'll be right back!"  She grabs her purse and hurries across the street.  Cars honk and speed by.  Pedestrians cross the street and walk by the car.  A few minutes later, she is back with a plastic bag.  I can see the kaak, a popular Palestinian bread, long like a slender baguette and covered with sesame seeds.  She takes out a loaf, splits it open with her thumb, peels a hardboiled egg, breaks it up and stuffs it in the bread, opens a little envelop and sprinkles zatar (thyme, sesame and sumac) over the egg and hands it to me.  "Tfuddle." (common Arabic word meaning: Here or Take it or You're welcome).  Then she makes another for herself.  "We didn't have anything to eat!  How is it?"  It's delicious and a welcome instant snack from Khitam's traveling kitchen.
   We drive home from a visit to Nasser at his school in Azareya, where we surprised him with two lovely plants in a big pot for the hall outside his office.  He was upstairs in a large room with a group of his students who had done a workshop with me.  They were working with Odeh, a musician and half the team who run al Mada, a Palestinian NGO that does music projects with children.  The other half of the team is Reem al Madi, who has had to take another job because funding for the NGO has been so hard to come by.  They do very good work with kids.  We sat in on the rehearsal of an original song the kids had written and Odeh had set to music.  They were singing it and Odeh was having predictable problems getting twenty thirteen-year-olds to sing the same tune in the same key, but they were into it.  Nasser was surprised to see us and took a break so we could show him the plants and chat about future projects before saying good-bye again.
   After the visit with Nasser, we drove to the pool where Khitam swims whenever she can and follows her swim with a sauna.  She has problems with her back and the swim and sauna make a big difference.  She joined me in the cafe where I had been catching up with emails.  I asked her how she felt.  "Actually, I'm a little upset.  I put my clothes on a hook and left my towel and purse with them and when I got back from my swim and sauna, another woman was sitting there and her things were on top of mine.  I asked her to please move them so I could get my things that I had left there.  She said those were her things and didn't move them.  So I moved them and took mine to another place, and I said to her: "You know what?  This is exactly what you have done to us.  You took our place and make us move."  Then she had a coffee, we talked of other things and we left.  The next stop was the kaak and egg and zatar purchase, then a slow drive home because of holiday traffic but without checkpoints our way, though there were checkpoints for cars going into Jerusalem.  I reminded her of the joke about Palestinians being the happiest people in the world.
   Last Sunday, Khitam and I drove to an orphanage in Azareya.  Layali, one of Nasser's army, had told Khitam about it and had told people at the orphanage about Khitam.  They were interested in having her come to the orphanage to do art with the sixty-plus boys, six to twelve years old  That was our mission, Sunday.  I've already written about Layali and Humda's joining us at the orphanage.  Like Khitam, they were volunteering.  We got there, Khitam asked an assistant administrator of the orphanage how many boys there were and what ages, and after some discussion told him to divide them into two groups: six to eight year-olds and nine to twelve year-olds.  We took the older boys first.
   They poured in, the administrator doing his best to maintain some order, and Khitam took over.  She had them all sit in chairs against the wall around the room.  She talked about what they were going to do, the different activities that we had already set out for them.  Then she counted them off into five groups and told each group which activity to go to.  Meanwhile, she had discovered she had forgotten materials for one of the activities, so she had to improvise and come up with another one, which she did quickly and successfully.
   Soon the kids were all busy with their activities.  After ten minutes, she told them: "Five more minutes!"  When the five minutes were up, we helped the kids restore the activities to something like their original order, and then each group moved to another station, then another and another and another, until they had played at each station.  Khitam moved them around as if they had been doing this kind of activity for months, when, in fact, it was their first time.  When the older group had finished, they went back to school with their teachers and the younger kids came.  Khitam went through the same routine, adjusting her talk to the level of the kids, and then they were busy for the next hour.  There were fewer of them so we had four instead five groups and four stations.  Three and a half hours after we arrived, we were finished.  The kids were in the dining room, eating their lunch, and we were packing up the car.  An hour's drive there, three and a half hours working with the kids, half an hour to pack the car: five hours to volunteer at an orphanage on a sunny Sunday, and we were off to have lunch with Nasser and his family, another day in the life of Khitam.
   I had finished my workshops, Saturday, so I was free to tag along and help her.  Monday, we drove to the Amal School for young people (3 - 21) with disabilities to do her final workshop with teachers there.  She pulled up in front of the school,  We got materials she wanted to use out of the car - there are always materials to get out of the car for her work, always - and went in.  Teachers greeted her as kids clustered around waiting for rides.  Some of them were in wheelchairs, some were mentally challenged, some had walkers, all looked well cared for.
   We gathered with twenty-one teachers in a big room downstairs.  Khitam introduced me, asked how many spoke English - maybe half raised a hand, some half way or tentatively - and then said: "Go ahead."  I led them in a few exercises and talked about ways they might use them with their students. A couple asked questions, all did the exercises willingly.  Then Khitam said: "Tell them the story."  We had talked about this as a possibility.  So I told a story and she translated when necessary.  A few comments and then it was time for their final session with her.
   In four previous sessions, she had done movement, theater, storytelling (they make up stories) and art to illustrate the stories.  I may have skipped something.  The point is, they get a full and well rounded experience with Khitam, all of which they can use with their students.  Monday, she gave each a box and told them to decorate the boxes any way they wanted to.  She had paints, markers, glitter, glue, stars, colored paper and more.  They worked like Santa's elves to turn their cardboard boxes into works of art.  An hour later, they showed them and talked about why they had decorated them as they had, what it said about them.  Then they wrote evaluations of the workshops and when they were finished, Khitam asked them to share what they had written.  Their thoughts were personal and glowing, and Khitam was proud, proud of them and the work they had done and proud of what they had told her they had learned in her workshops.  Its was clear they had learned a lot they would use and they were grateful to this teacher for sharing so much with them.
   The next day, we drove to Khalil in the south.  Khalil is often known as Hebron.  It's an ancient city that has grown up around the place where God is supposed to have told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac and then, at the last minute, stopped him.  In Islam, Abraham is Ibrahim (ee-bra-heem) and also considered a prophet as he is in Judaism.  As a result, Khalil is now a contentions place and Israeli settlers have moved into the old city and made life difficult for Palestinians there.  In a separate blog about Khalil, I'll talk about Khitam's work there.
   Today, when we were leaving the health club where she swims, an older Israeli gestured to us.  Khitam stopped and he asked her for a ride to the bus.  She speaks Hebrew and I think he assumed she was an Israeli.  She told him to get in and asked him where he was going.  He told her and then she answered her phone, speaking with someone in Arabic.  When we got to the bus stop, she pulled over, and the man said, Shukran, Arabic for thank you.  He said it again when he got out and Khitam replied in Hebrew.  That, not the disagreement in the locker room, not the killing of Palestinians at a checkpoint or Israelis at a bus stop - that is the way Israelis and Palestinians can live together.
   Welcome to Palestine and Israel.