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

Welcome! Ahlan wa sahlan!

Hello Everyone! Welcome to my blog! So, I will bring you all up to where I am today. I left Chicago airport on August 28th and had a straight flight to Amman, Jordan where I lived for 3 and a half months going to the University of Jordan. I lived with a host family with six kids and another student. They were a fairly conservative Muslim family, but also very western. My oldest host sister, Farah (16 years old) lived for a year in Kentucky and had just gotten back a couple months before we came. She had a hard time with her host family there, but came out of it speaking really good, very American, English. The next oldest was Haroun, who was 15 or 14 years old. They never really gave us a straight answer on how old exactly they were, so I sometimes think that they didn’t even know. He was kind of quiet at the beginning, but got more lively as he got used to us and as we started speaking Arabic to him. Then there was Rahaf, who was 12 and I shared a room with. She was really annoying to me at first so that I wasn’t sure if I would last the semester in the same room, but of course, after a month or so she became my favorite and we got along really well. I guess it just took a while to get on the same page as a 12 year old. Then there was Adam who was about 9 or 10. He was really cute, and very smiley and active, but would cry instantly if he lost a game or someone made fun of him. He would get really frustrated that no one understood how earth shattering and horrible is was that he didn’t win at cards. Then there was Rayan who was about 6. She was also really cute and spoke really good English for being so young, but she lost it very quickly because when I came back to visit after having been gone for a month she didn’t speak as well. It was kind of amazing to see the difference in the kids after only a month. The last was Hoor who was 3 and a terror at the beginning and just as I got really fed up with her after a couple months, she started to be really cute all the time. My host mom ran a kindergarten down the street and had also just started to get her masters at the University in library technology. My host dad wasn’t around very much because of his job in the air force, but he was very nice although he liked to talk politics and religion a lot, which could get tiring. Morgan was the other American girl I lived with and she’s really awesome. We got along really well and it was nice to have someone to talk to about living there and everything else. I took a Standard Arabic class for 3 hours every morning and then had two afternoon classes; Prospects for Democracy in the Middle East (kind of pessimistic), and Arab Women Writers (kind of depressing) but both very good classes. Winter break consisted of me traveling with Morgan to Syria and Beirut, then Mom, Jerry, Grace, Rich and Alyce all came to visit me in Jordan over Christmas. Grace stayed on and we spent New Years Eve in Amman, and then headed to Jerusalem for two days, back to Amman and then to Egypt. We had a really good time, but it went so quickly. Two days at Mt. Siani, two in Luxor, two in Cairo and days in between traveling. After she left, I spent 2 days in Alexandria before taking a very long bus/ferry trip straight back to Amman where I spent a couple days before going to Nablus. Sorry that was so short, but I had written more and it got deleted and it's never as fun to write the same thing again. Also, my first entry about Nablus got deleted, so I'm going to end here for today and I'll have more for you all later! Hope all is well where you are, sending good sweets and tea from the Middle East! Love, Lisa