First Day in Nablus and Honeymoon Phase.

If I had enough energy, I would write a book just about today. My head is overloaded of information and my clothing damp with sweat. I will do my best before my first impression gets confused with my second one.

The day started early and the ride was smoother than we expected. We caught a cab to the central station of Tel Aviv and then hoped on a sherut taxi to Jerusalem. We spent little time in Jerusalem and my observations are probably very superficial. I missed the wind that made my hat fly away from my head in Tel Aviv; without it, the sun feels hotter and heavier. Jerusalem is crowded and I lost all my minerals during the little walk we did with our big backpacks from the cab to Damascus Gate. We drove to the Nablus check point with a fun Israeli-Palestinian who sounded very excited about us going to Nablus. In fact, with an Israeli passport he cannot enter the Nablus himself. As we were driving away from Jerusalem, he told us about his family and he explained to us that on the left of the big freeway we were driving on live the Arabs, on the right the Jews. Also children attend different schools, and that is just the way it is.

We had read that we are supposed to walk through the check point by foot and then hop on another cab on the Palestinian side. Surprisingly, our taxi driver just stopped in a parking lot and told us to hop in another cab. While we were nervously waiting for the check point, we arrived to Nablus. The second cab driver spoke no English but had a very communicative use of his ten fingers. We bargain the price and got to the city center. Going from Nablus to Tel Aviv is quite a weird transition. Under this crazy sun, women wear long black dresses and their heads are covered.

Project Hope is like a family, and all the people we met today had a vibrant, positive energy. We dropped our bag at the office, signed some papers and discussed our project in more details with a young woman. They sounded excited about our project and we learned that we will be working with the children and teenagers at the Askar refugee camp. We will have three age groups: 9-11, 12-15 and 16-20. We will go visit the camp on Sunday, after the weekend that here is Friday and Saturday. The actual workshops will start on Monday.

We thought we were done for the day and looked forward to a nice shower… Instead, we got a tour of the city by a local volunteer. He was very friendly and happy to talk about his life. He studies English literature at the local university but he wants to become a professional translator.

Back to the Project Hope office we were given a short lesson on things we need to know about Nablus. The project coordinator explained to us that just a generation ago, women in Nablus ‘would wear short skirts’. He added that ‘The intifada and the latest Israeli invasion left people with nothing left other than religion’. We are also not supposed to talk about it during our workshops, or at least do very subtly.
The rest of the day game me euphoria (I am still trying to come down from this Honeymoon state).

After the meeting we visited our apartment which is a crazy house right in front of project hope’s offices. The evening included a concert with local musician in the French cultural Center, right next to Project Hope’s building. In the evening we met a lot of local volunteers and had chats about little things while we waited for the sun to go down. Nablus is just magical, (I cannot stop saying it) and I spent the evening with a deep state of well being that I had not felt in a while.

The evenings here end at around 11, the city gets too dangerous after this time. I share a dirty room with 3 girls and in the whole apartment there are around 30 people. We have one bathroom for girls, and one for the boys, only. People here come from all over the world and are all ‘special’ in some way. The house is covered with books of all sorts. I will turn around and give you some titles just to give an idea: ‘English-Arabic dictionary’, ‘This Week in Palestine’, Open call of proposal from the Eu ‘the Occupied Palestinian Territory’, ‘Hebron, Restriction of Palestinian Movement’, ‘the World’ s Most Dangerous Places”…and so on. All the volunteers are very friendly, passionate, and ‘into it’, very into it. Most of them know people, or have themselves been harassed by Israeli soldiers and they really feel for the Palestinian people. I arrived in the middle of a conversation about how humiliating, mean and just (quote on quote) ‘fucking inhuman’ the Israeli soldiers can be. I have troubles good and evil analysis… it is just not that easy to me. I was listening quietly for a while about people being stopped and mistreated for hours at the border, about 17 years old Israeli with big guns beating up 60 years old Palestinian man…than I got in the conversation. I was trying to see it from the Israeli’s point of view. However, the odium is so deeply rooted…it escalated with every violent episode. It is hard to be diplomatic here in Palestine. So hard because people feel it on their skin and each person has its own experience and it is through these lenses they perceive reality.

Today, as we were walking to the old city, the local volunteer showed us a destroyed house. It was just in the middle of the city and it was destroyed in 2002, by Israeli bombing. A whole family was killed, 4 children included. In front of the house there is a memorial, translated also into English. In big letters stands the sign ‘Never Forget… Never Forgive…’. In the back of my head my conscious tells me that this is destructive energy, but I cannot talk. I cannot talk because I don’t understand and because my house will probably never be bombed. My opinion stands in a limbo between feeling the Palestinian’s pain and wanting to find a way to think more rationally.