Dave, Mousa and I left Abu Dis with early. In the street waiting for a taxi to Ramallah we saw an army jeep pull up alongside a man on the university street. The jeep looked like a great armoured toad, better suited to ploughing No Man’s Land than the tarmac streets of Abu Dis. Through the windows they eyeballed us for a minute and left; the Star of David flag billowing.
It takes a long time to get to Beit Sourik and at Ramallah we changed onto a minibus. The bus waits until it’s filled and then leaves; Mousa brought us a cup of coffee the size of a thimble. Then watch the landscape morph from cosmopolitan to residential to agricultural hillsides. Beit Sourik is one of these towns, whose land is ribbed in green and sandy strips.
We saw the UNRWA centre that we visited the first time. We were taken to the UNRWA school where a mural in the playground reads “NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION”, and met the teachers. Unlike the Abu Dis UNRWA school, only girls are taught here. On the walls were many visual representations of the human rights convention; a map of Palestine illustrating the cities made inaccessible with ornaments and photographs; and drawings hanging from a dead olive tree in the corridor of famous Arab scientists. As Art is not taught as part of the national curriculum, it was exciting to see that there is still a place for it in this school.
Dave was working at the boy’s secondary school. The front of the school is shuttered off like a prison, and all the windows are barred. We would be teaching both mornings from nine until one, although due to the excessive and zacchi breakfasts we were given- homemade bread, houmous, falafel, thyme and olive oil and tea like syrup- the day began later than we’d planned.
We stayed in two homes, although our hosts were relatives. The families lived in buildings that were more like compounds, where each household occupies one floor which is used as an apartment. Cousins and siblings all intermingle, making it difficult to remember complex family trees.
In the evening a kilo bag of oranges was heaved into the front room and the family gathered around a fruit press whilst the oranges were halved and squeezed into fresh juice. Practising English with the two oldest boys, we watched videos of Dubka performances at the school, and I showed them videos of Morris dancing on Youtube for comparison.
Teaching at Beit Sourik UNRWA school was fairly similar to Abu Dis. Asma and Fadwa, the English teachers, both speak good English and helped me to plan classes for the students. In reality however, the classes were just as chaotic and I received fistfuls of love letters rather than the work I had asked the girls to do.
At one o’clock the girls amble home; via the man selling broad beans outside the school or stopping at the local store to buy sweets. Traffic stops to let the children pass on the main street and they called out ‘What is your father’s name?’ and ‘London is beautiful?’
With the family, we visited Ramallah Government Hospital. This is funded by the Palestinian Authority with contributions from abroad. It is hot and overcrowded, and not very clean. There is a heavy security presence and I was asked to show my photographs to a security guard. Dave was refused entry for carrying bags with chocolate in them, although we entered through a back door with no difficulty. In the back entrance the seats were ripped and there was graffiti sprayed on the walls; trays of congealed food were festering in the heat. Peeling stickers of Yassar Arafat were stuck to doors on the wards. There is very little space for the families to sit and many people were waiting anxiously in the corridors.
There are many private hospitals in Palestine where the specialists are poached by the Israeli government, and people seem to have little faith in the dedication of government hospitals in comparison to their private counterparts.
From the top of Beit Sourik mountain we saw the sprawling settlements beyond the hills. The landscape of olive groves and caves where prisoners were caught and arrested seems ageless; the skyscrapers and overpasses spring up like the ugliest Western imports. On the neighbouring hilltops are two watchtowers- one housed in what looks like an old monastery; one a hideous periscope which watches over the settlements to where Beit Sourik can be monitored at a distance.
A new road was constructed recently, super-sleek and snaking through the town so that villagers can no longer access their farmland on the other side. If anyone touches the road, we are told, they will be shot. And sad stories too, from an uncle who works in Ma’ale Adumim of an Israeli friend curious to visit his family, but too afraid to enter theWest Bank. It seems the settlers too are prisoners in the same way as Palestinians, but in a padded cell. The men talk ruefully of working for the Israelis in the construction industry- with the economic situation inPalestine, a job is a job, even if it means assisting in the development of an Israeli stronghold in theWest Bank. Families have to be fed. The boys throw stones towards the distant settlements, a futile gesture of discontent. The upstairs apartment is empty, waiting for another uncle to complete a twelve year jail sentence.
In the Towgihi textbook, Shorooq showed me the English texts- stories and poems that serve as an analogy of the Palestinian situation. There is Chekhov’s ‘The Prisoner’; ‘The Dove’ by Keats; Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, and King Lear. They demonstrate the centuries old habit of man conquering man, and the endless struggle for freedom. Water from washing is used and reused, caught by huge buckets beneath the bathroom sink and on the rooftop where the washing machine is wheeled out each morning. With a small baby in the house, the day begins at five and ends near eleven. One of the children was in pain from a grey tooth rotting in his gums- the nearest dentist is in the next village, as is the high school were Shorooq goes to school. In these villages, it is usual still for women to spend two months or six, embroidering one thob, the traditional dress. The chronic lack of resources inPalestine mean that even if people wanted them, the modernity of the settlements would take a long time to trickle down to the villages.
Notes from Palestine 