Nablus

Hello all! After thatl long update, I will now get down to what my blog is really about: living and working in Palestine. I came to Nablus (a city in the north of the West Bank with about 250,000 people) one and a half weeks ago. It seems like so much longer, but time always gets warped when I'm traveling. I live in an apartment reserved for the volunteers with Project Hope (check out their website if you're interested, www.projecthope.ps). It's really big to accomodate lots of volunteers, but right now we're just 5 including me, so I get my own room! It's almost like living in a luxury hotel! ...almost. My roommates are really fun and we get along really well. There's one guy from California who's 24 and he likes to study standard Arabic, so hopefully it will encourage me to keep studying too. There's a girl from Holland who's 21 and she's very upbeat and laughs a lot, so we get along really well. Then there's Ina who's in her twenties from Germany and she teaches art. All four of us hang out a lot at the apartment because we're not supposed to go out at night; Nablus isn't really the city for foreigners, especially women to be tromping around the streets after 9. The other woman is a French journalist, and she's not home very much, but she knows everyone in Nablus and always has funny stories.
For the first week I didn't have classes, so local volunteers showed me around Nablus and introduced me to everyone and I drank my body weight in tea. There aren't a lot of foreigners here, so I was glad that the local volunteers, most of whom go to the university here, some are English literature majors!, are so involved with getting us into the community here.
I started my classes two days ago (Thursday and Friday is our weekend here). My first class was at the Electricians Union, and it consisted of only men from ages 30-60 who didn't speak a word of English. They were really nice, but I think my challenge with them will be to get them to talk more because they haven't been in school in so many years, so they're not used to putting themselves out there and possibly making mistakes. I think I might make them get up and do the "head, shoulders, knees and toes" dance just to break the ice. My second class started yesterday at a girls school in one of the refugee camps on the outskirts of town, and then I had a class in the afternoon at a community center at the other camp with smaller kids. I also started a 2 week, daily class in the mornings at a center for 10th graders who are on winter vacation right now. So far they're all going pretty well. I forgot how exhausting teaching is, but it's a good kind of exhaustion. I think I'll end up teaching between 15 and 20 hours a week and maybe helping with the circus on the side or learning to play the oud (and instrument like a lute) from a friend of the director. Who knows.
So, to give you an idea about Nablus. It's spread out over two mountains/hills (mountains to Iowans, hills to Coloradians) and it's really beautiful. In between the two is the city center and the old city, which has narrow streets and lots of old mosques. It looks kind of like Damascus. We don't go there much because that's where the more radical section of Fatha spends their time, but I did make friends with the owner of a sweets shop who asked me to come and help him with english in exchange for coconut cookies! Not a bad trade I'd say. Our apartment is high up on the north hill and the Project Hope office is high up on the other, so it's a hefty walk a couple times a day, but it's nice to not have to take taxis everywhere like in Amman.
Hokay, so I've told you all about my life here and now I'll give you a little idea (I don't even have a full idea) about what a Palestinian's life is like in Nablus. There are two checkpoints that allow people to come and go from the city and the rest of the border is surrounded by Israeli outposts (I guess that's what you would call them), making it really hard to leave the city. One of the volunteers is 19 and hasn't left Nablus in 6 years because it's so difficult for a young man to cross through the checkpoints unless there's a specific reason, like work or a doctors appointment and sometimes that's not even enough. I can't even imgine staying in one city's limits for 6 years straight. Another woman teaches at a school 5 minutes outside of the checkpoint, but she has to leave 3 hours early just to stand in line at the checkpoint while 20 year old Israeli officers decide who gets to go through and who doesn't. So everyone's life is affected by the Israeli occupation, but within the city, everyone has to deal with the fighting between Hamas and Fatha that's almost as bad. Especially with the recent kidnappings on both sides, most of the people I talk to are really dissapointed. They say, how can we resist the Israelis if we've started a civil war amongst ourselves. It's too bad, but we'll see what happens in the next couple weeks. Well, my fingers are starting to cramp and I have to go prepare worksheets for my class (and I just spied Harold and the Purple Crayon in a stack of books!) So I'm going to finish up. In conclusion, please be grateful for what you have and send me some strenght and graciousness to refuse the 5th cup of tea I will without a doubt be offered by the men at the Electrical Union. I love you all so much and I would love emails about everyone's lives! I feed on them! Hokay, byeeeee
Love, Lisa