Getting ready for Jess

I have been living in our current house since the last week of May and it has seen so many people come and go out of it. It is a shame, I should have been taking photos of each of the occupants, it would have made a great collage. First there was Lacey (who had been teaching in Ethiopia and Egypt), Stephanie (a friend of mine from America), Adam (who came with a suitcase of stuff for my my beloved sister Genevieve sent for me, they were neighbors) and I. We then went to Ramallah and got Mike from Canada who found out about the job via Twitter. They all went for a few days to Jerusalem (which is when the stabbing at the checkpoint took place right in front of them, less than two feet away)The same day they departed, Kim Chi showed up back from her tour of Israel. The others returned with Lee, fresh from England. At that point it seemed like this little house of ours was jam packed full of people. So Adam when over to my old apartment to start cleaning and we were finally going to separated into the "girls' house and boys' house". Only Adam got there and decided that it was too much for him and we never saw or heard from him again. So later in the day the rest of the boys went over and moved into the house together as a pack. They came back for dinner that night with Fr. Vincent and in the middle of dinner two more teachers showed up, Kim and Tony. They had been friends before coming and had met during their study abroad program in Morocco. When we told Kim about the teacher running away that morning she called her boyfriend back home in Arizona and asked him if he would be interested in coming for the summer. He dropped out of summer school that same day and five days later arrived. Summer school started short one teacher... Samar, a Palestinian American who was spending the summer with his family in Jerusalem. He hadn't been back to the Holy Land in more than five years. He was suppose to come one day late but called Saturday night and said he would be arriving a week later. Madness!!!! The first week of school, i not only had to run around being the director but also figure out how to teach his class for him. By the time Samer actually arrived we realized that we had a problem. The five boys who lived at the boys house across town would not fit into one taxi. We hadn't budgeted for two taxi's so the only solution to the problem was if one of he guys moved back to the girls house and lived in the dinning room. So Dylan became a member of our crazy household which brought us back to a party of seven.

The summer continued faster than i could believe have imagined and suddenly it was the end of July. We need to give up our least on the old place, now known as the boy's house. which meant everyone there needed to move into the girl's place. All with in one day Mike, Dylan, Kim, Stephanie and I left for vacation to Jordan (I was the only one planning on returning) and Lee and Tony moved in. There was a week that Kim, Lacey, Amy, Tony, Lee and Lee's girlfriend all lived here. Along with some random Belgian guy that Lacey met wandering the streets of Ramallah. (our neighbors still ask about him)
I returned a week later (on a saturday) right as Lee and his girlfriend took off for a small trip to Hebron. Amy was gone but the others were all still around. Sunday afternoon, I drove Kim and all her belongings to the Tel Aviv airport for a Monday morning flight. And then Monday I drove back to Tel Aviv with Lacey, Lee and his girl friend. We dropped Lacy off at the bus station so she could take a series of buses that would get her to Cairo and Lee and his girlfriend got dropped off by the beach where they hung out till midnight and then went to the airport for a seven AM flight.

The whole airport thing is crazy. Most of the flights leave around 5 or 6 am. And Israel has a serious departing immigration procedure. It is actually harder to get out of the country than in the country for those of us who have stayed here a long time. We are very suspicious!!! The one thing that Israeli immigration doesn't want us doing is working/volunteering in the West Bank or Gaza, for many reasons. My dear friend Meirav explained to me that it has been known to happen that tourist like myself have been asked to take a letter or book or something small to people at home and it turned out to be a bomb or something harmful. Other people have gotten in trouble for taking out Pro-Palestinian memorabilia. One of my co-workers who will remain nameless for her own good bought about a dozen flags from all the different fractional groups her in Palestine. Her Hamas and Fatah flags were by far the most tame. It is amazing the things you can find at the intifada stores here in Nablus. My co-worker Isabel used to get strip searched every time she entered or left the country because she had stamps in her passport from Yeman and Jordan.
I know when I came back into Israel from Egypt a few weeks ago, I was given a very hard time for having so many pages of stamps in my passport (it is a 48 page passport with three pages that still have room) I am going to get a new Passport in September when i get paid since this one expires soon and i am hoping the clean passport will help me get out of the country when it is time for me to leave.

Once i returned from that trip to Tel Aviv to drop off the others it was just Tony and I. We spent the entire week cleaning up the place. When we moved in, we had cleaned everything well enough to live here for the summer but it was still pretty gross. The family that owns this house fled Palestine for Jordan during the 2007 mini-civil war here between Hamas and Fatah. Their daughter is still here and she rented it out to us. No one has lived her since and it was very obvious that they fled in the middle of the night or at least very suddenly by the random things that were left everywhere..
odd shoes, tooth brushes, random sheets or blankets on beds, Presents wrapped, a full suitcase of baby clothes.. We just kept shoving all the stuff in trash bags or random cupboards.
It was finally time to really clean and organize everything....
We had to re arrange furniture, go through bags and bags of stuff, dust, mop, clean everything.
and then the newest batch of teachers started showing up.
First there was Maureen from South Africa. A few days later, Lou from central California also arrived. And right after him, Sean came back. Only Sean lives in the basement apartment here.
So once again it is time to make a major clean re-arrange some stuff and get ready for Jess. She is going to be the new first grade teacher.
Safwan, my beloved, is desperate for her arrival!!! He has been so heart broken over Kim's departure and is very confused about who will be teaching him next.
She arrives tomorrow so i guess i need to get up off my behind and start sweeping and "mopping" ..