I got the job in Ramallah!!!!
and with my new principal's help, I found housing there too!!! For the first month at least, I am going to be living in the Anglican Church's home for their missionaries. From what I could tell today, it is a guest house that is also used as a hotel... It should be interesting. I kinda think it just might be my kind of place, where there are always random people passing through for me to socialize with!
I feel good about staying here in Palestine for now. My main motivation to stay is Safwan, but i also feel like i have gotten very figuratively beat up here and I don't want to give up on it yet. I am not down for the count, inshallah.
So first things first I am off to Egypt tomorrow. My bus leaves from Jerusalem at 8:30AM and i have not a clue how i am going to get there. I don't know if buses around here run at 6am or if i can even find a taxi to go there. It was suppose to be figured out for me by the school but, well...... it wasn't.
the other thing they were suppose to figure out was my pay, which they did. but they forgot to reimburse me the 140 shekels for the expenses in dealing with Jared, the teacher we had to take to the mental hospital. So now i have several hundred dollars in US dollars and only 16 shekels to my name, which obviously isn't enough.
just one more drama to add to the list.....
then the next hurdle is getting over the boarder. Israel has the hardest exit immigration in the world. I am going to have to start working on my story to why i have been here for so long. I am absolutely not allowed to mention the real work that I do... Usually I tell them i am here to study to become a nun. They ask me about all the convents I have visited and I start listing them. Of course i visited them in my first two weeks here with the tour that I was on with my grandparents. but no one needs to know that.
then getting into egypt should be a problem, but i need to get my passport renewed, and that might be a challenge. One of my least favorite places in the world to have to go to are the American embassies. They are always swarming with people and it takes hours to even be seen.
and then the drama will be getting back into Israel....
i need to got sleep and worry about these things in the morning.
good night for now!
knowing that I should be back in Palestine in a week, and that my coworkers Jess, Kaitlin and Curtis, whom I adore, are letting me keep my things here till i return made packing a million times easier!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Maggie's world changes
Last Saturday I was laid off... the timing was good in that my visa runs on Thursday. I am taking a bus on Thursday to Cairo where my friend Lacey will meet me and then we will progress to Alexandria where she works.
I am trying to figure out what comes next and have been applying several different positions around the world and have gotten a few offers...
Through several connections here in Palestine, I am going back tomorrow to a second interview at a Catholic school in Ramallah. It isn't nablus but it is only a one hour bus ride away from Safwan. So for the moment it is my top choice... But for now it is just a dream and a prayer.
No matter what, i have to go to egypt to get a new visa for Israel and to renew my passport that is about to expire, well in June. But most countries won't let you in if there is less than six months left on your passport.
I need to go and finish packing (i have no idea what i am packing for right now) and to prepare this lesson!!!
And thus begins the next phase of Miss Maggie's adventure.
I am trying to figure out what comes next and have been applying several different positions around the world and have gotten a few offers...
Through several connections here in Palestine, I am going back tomorrow to a second interview at a Catholic school in Ramallah. It isn't nablus but it is only a one hour bus ride away from Safwan. So for the moment it is my top choice... But for now it is just a dream and a prayer.
No matter what, i have to go to egypt to get a new visa for Israel and to renew my passport that is about to expire, well in June. But most countries won't let you in if there is less than six months left on your passport.
I need to go and finish packing (i have no idea what i am packing for right now) and to prepare this lesson!!!
And thus begins the next phase of Miss Maggie's adventure.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
the impossible task
The reality show that continues on…..
In every reality show contestants are given impossible tasks to carry out. Their entire future as part of the game depends on if they are able to complete the task and the grace that they exude as they do so.. Last week I was told that there were to teachers arriving to the airport in Tel Aviv at 2:20am on Sunday morning and Tuesday morning. Not only was I being asked to go and get them but then to come home sleep for an hour and teach a couple full days of class.
Usually if we want to go to tel aviv there are two ways to do it. Either take a series of buses to Jerusalem. Then walk across the city (or take a taxi) and then take a bus from the central station there to the central station in Tel Aviv and then take a bus from there to where we want to go in Tel Aviv. This route takes 4-5 hours.
OR you can take a bus to Ramallah from Nablus and after the second checkpoint make the bus stop and get out. At this point everyone on the bus will be horrified and very angry with you because it is obvious that you are switching loyalties. When you get off the bus you go and stand with all the settlers and try to hitchhike up to Ariel Settlement or hope and pray a settlement bus eventually comes. When you get up to the settlement you go and stand with all the other hitch hikers and again try and find a ride into town or hope and wait for the bus to eventually come. Depending on the rides and buses it can take between 1-3 hours to get to tel aviv this way. Hitch hiking on the settlements or between them is the normal way of life. When doing this route it is extremely important not to mention to anyone that we are living and working in Nablus. In Tel Aviv people look at you a little funny when we tell that we work and live in Palestine, specifically Nablus, but you would have serious problems if you were to tell a settler that the same. There is an absolute war going on and the settlers and Palestinians are the foot soldiers of each side.
But since I was going to the airport in the middle of the night, I needed to drive there. I needed to find an Israeli car to borrow from someone. There are two kinds of cars here in Nablus. The most common variety is a Palestinian car, these have green and white plates. The much less common car is an Israeli car, their license plates are yellow and black. Only the very rich and people with multiple passports have these cars. Palestinian cars are not allowed in Israel and Palestinians are not allowed to own these cars. I barrowed my bosses husbands car that is owned by a Samaritan, this is the easiest way to get around this law.
I had spent the day at an Oktoberfest in the town of Taibei, a Christian town with a brewery. Christians here are allowed to drink. Ten years ago a few Christian Palestinians had the great idea to start their own microbrewery in Palestine… making it Palestine’s one and only brewery. They have an annual festival and I had been planning to go for months now only to find out it was the same day as the first teacher’s arrival. So I decided to still go but to only go for a few hours and only have one beer. (very very sad)
Despite not spending the whole day and night there, I was exhausted. My plan was to go and come back and then sleep for a few hours before getting up at 1:30AM to leave for the airport. I don’t know that this was the best laid plan or not.
On the way home from the Oktoberfest I noticed that the street leading into Nablus was lined with Israeli soldiers. This is NOT the norm. It meant something had happened while I was at the Oktoberfest. And on the way into the last checkpoint to get into the city, they stopped our bus and questioned us for a few moments. Things had been better at the checkpoints for a few months now and this was a sign that things were back to being bad. I also noticed that there was a huge line of cars trying to get out of the city. Again a few months ago this would have normal but lately this hadn’t been happening.
As soon as I got home I went and looked on line at www.maannews.net , this is a great local news source in English with up to the moment information. They stated that a Palestinian had gotten beat up at the second checkpoint a few hours before. This in combination of the Jewish Holiday and all the drama going on in Jerusalem was leading me to feel very freaked out about the trip.
I went to bed and slept for three hours before starting on this crazy journey. It had be suggested earlier in the evening before that we keep a Kafia (palestian scarf) with us to put on the dash board while driving through the Palestinian portion of the drive and then just take it down while going through checkpoints and in Tel Aviv.
Over the Summer when we borrowed this car we would keep an “emergency hajab” (head covering) in the glove compartment. That way if we went through an area that we didn’t feel completely secure in, we would look more Palestinian or at least Muslim. However we no longer had this spare Hejab lying around, so after some thought, we realized the hoods on a sweatshirt would do. Jess (the most amazing co-worker) and I set off on the trip.
At this point some of you might be wondering why it was the two of us girls going out. Neither of us are the boss, we are both girls, and we both had full days of classes ahead of us. When I asked why us, I was told we were the only two they thought responsible and mature enough to handle this task.
Before we got to the first checkpoint we could see that the flags that indicate the brigade manning the checkpoint had changed. Usually they had red and white flags, but tonight it was a black and orange flag. This wasn’t a good sign. This is a checkpoint that has been recently declared “open”. However, I usually still get asked a dozen questions before they let me through and have been often turned back and not allowed through.
We got to the first checkpoint and were ordered to stop. One of the soldiers had, what I later learned to be a M-32 pointed directly at my face. He was standing maybe two feet away from my window. While he was “guarding me” with the gun the other soldiers searched the car briefly. Usually they ask me a ton of questions at this point. And usually I have to lie and make up a story. They must have noticed the absolute look of terror on my face. The soldier asked me, “are you okay?” I was so busy staring the down the barrel of that gun, that all I could do was nod. In the past seven months, I have had a lot of guns pointed at me and in my general direction, but this was the first time that I had a gun pointed directly at my head before in such close proximity.
They asked me where I was going, and I whispered, “tel aviv”
They wanted to know why I had come to Nablus, a city well known for it’s terrorist. I told them I was there for “Jacobs Well”, that we were Christians and just wanted to go back to Tel Aviv. At that they let us go and a hundred feet down the road up went the Kafia and on when the hoods of our hoodies until we got to our next checkpoint. This was the checkpoint, where the incident occurred earlier in the day. Because there are several settlements between this checkpoint and the last one, they just let cars with Israeli plates go through a separate line and never stop them. This night they actually stopped our car and did a quick search of it before letting us go. From here all we had to do was take another Palestinian road that lead to a settler road to Tel Aviv. There was only one more checkpoint and that one should have been an easy one. When we got there they had closed it down to one lane. And the car in front of me was being fully searched. They were taking everything out of it and had made the driver get out.. I started freaking again because this checkpoint was should be the easiest. The only people who can be on this road are Israeli citizens or tourist. The guy looked very Israeli, and I had not a clue to why they were giving him a hard time. Just as I thought there was no way for us to get out of our car being searched and all the Palestinian stuff in the car being found, another lane opened up and we were waved right through.
There was still an hour and a half to burn before it would be time to get to the airport. So we headed off to Jaffa to explore (at 1:30 am) and find some food. I hadn’t eaten dinner and only had a small lunch much earlier in the day. Usually when teachers come in, it is at a more reasonable hour and we are able to go the Magical Grocery Store. It is a large store even by American standards and unlike every other store in Israeli and Palestine, the prices are kind of reasonable. I think this might have been the part of the trip that Jess and I resented the most, that we were forced to go to Tel Aviv when the store wasn’t open. How down right unfair.
Jaffa is actually an amazing little place just a few blocks south of Tel Aviv on the ocean. The old section of town is a huge fort on the sea that feels very European and French because of it’s crusader history. It was really too late to walk around and explore the fort so we just had fresh juice and I had the most amazing bagel combination ever. We did drive around for a few minutes and then we were off to the airport.
The drive home was rather uneventful besides the on going rambling of Jared the new teacher… he deserves his own posting…. Which I will get to another day……
We made it back safely to our apartment at 5am only to have to be at school at 7am to teach all day.
This was all repeated again a few days later on Tuesday night… This time we insisted on getting the car right after school and making a night of it. Not only is it a million times safer to drive in the day light around here but if we are going to have to be up all night we should at least be able to have fun with it.
Except for getting home at 5 am and having to get up and teach all day again…… the second trip was less stressful in everyway AND…. It brought us a fantastic new teacher, Kaitlin! She is a great addition to the team.
In every reality show contestants are given impossible tasks to carry out. Their entire future as part of the game depends on if they are able to complete the task and the grace that they exude as they do so.. Last week I was told that there were to teachers arriving to the airport in Tel Aviv at 2:20am on Sunday morning and Tuesday morning. Not only was I being asked to go and get them but then to come home sleep for an hour and teach a couple full days of class.
Usually if we want to go to tel aviv there are two ways to do it. Either take a series of buses to Jerusalem. Then walk across the city (or take a taxi) and then take a bus from the central station there to the central station in Tel Aviv and then take a bus from there to where we want to go in Tel Aviv. This route takes 4-5 hours.
OR you can take a bus to Ramallah from Nablus and after the second checkpoint make the bus stop and get out. At this point everyone on the bus will be horrified and very angry with you because it is obvious that you are switching loyalties. When you get off the bus you go and stand with all the settlers and try to hitchhike up to Ariel Settlement or hope and pray a settlement bus eventually comes. When you get up to the settlement you go and stand with all the other hitch hikers and again try and find a ride into town or hope and wait for the bus to eventually come. Depending on the rides and buses it can take between 1-3 hours to get to tel aviv this way. Hitch hiking on the settlements or between them is the normal way of life. When doing this route it is extremely important not to mention to anyone that we are living and working in Nablus. In Tel Aviv people look at you a little funny when we tell that we work and live in Palestine, specifically Nablus, but you would have serious problems if you were to tell a settler that the same. There is an absolute war going on and the settlers and Palestinians are the foot soldiers of each side.
But since I was going to the airport in the middle of the night, I needed to drive there. I needed to find an Israeli car to borrow from someone. There are two kinds of cars here in Nablus. The most common variety is a Palestinian car, these have green and white plates. The much less common car is an Israeli car, their license plates are yellow and black. Only the very rich and people with multiple passports have these cars. Palestinian cars are not allowed in Israel and Palestinians are not allowed to own these cars. I barrowed my bosses husbands car that is owned by a Samaritan, this is the easiest way to get around this law.
I had spent the day at an Oktoberfest in the town of Taibei, a Christian town with a brewery. Christians here are allowed to drink. Ten years ago a few Christian Palestinians had the great idea to start their own microbrewery in Palestine… making it Palestine’s one and only brewery. They have an annual festival and I had been planning to go for months now only to find out it was the same day as the first teacher’s arrival. So I decided to still go but to only go for a few hours and only have one beer. (very very sad)
Despite not spending the whole day and night there, I was exhausted. My plan was to go and come back and then sleep for a few hours before getting up at 1:30AM to leave for the airport. I don’t know that this was the best laid plan or not.
On the way home from the Oktoberfest I noticed that the street leading into Nablus was lined with Israeli soldiers. This is NOT the norm. It meant something had happened while I was at the Oktoberfest. And on the way into the last checkpoint to get into the city, they stopped our bus and questioned us for a few moments. Things had been better at the checkpoints for a few months now and this was a sign that things were back to being bad. I also noticed that there was a huge line of cars trying to get out of the city. Again a few months ago this would have normal but lately this hadn’t been happening.
As soon as I got home I went and looked on line at www.maannews.net , this is a great local news source in English with up to the moment information. They stated that a Palestinian had gotten beat up at the second checkpoint a few hours before. This in combination of the Jewish Holiday and all the drama going on in Jerusalem was leading me to feel very freaked out about the trip.
I went to bed and slept for three hours before starting on this crazy journey. It had be suggested earlier in the evening before that we keep a Kafia (palestian scarf) with us to put on the dash board while driving through the Palestinian portion of the drive and then just take it down while going through checkpoints and in Tel Aviv.
Over the Summer when we borrowed this car we would keep an “emergency hajab” (head covering) in the glove compartment. That way if we went through an area that we didn’t feel completely secure in, we would look more Palestinian or at least Muslim. However we no longer had this spare Hejab lying around, so after some thought, we realized the hoods on a sweatshirt would do. Jess (the most amazing co-worker) and I set off on the trip.
At this point some of you might be wondering why it was the two of us girls going out. Neither of us are the boss, we are both girls, and we both had full days of classes ahead of us. When I asked why us, I was told we were the only two they thought responsible and mature enough to handle this task.
Before we got to the first checkpoint we could see that the flags that indicate the brigade manning the checkpoint had changed. Usually they had red and white flags, but tonight it was a black and orange flag. This wasn’t a good sign. This is a checkpoint that has been recently declared “open”. However, I usually still get asked a dozen questions before they let me through and have been often turned back and not allowed through.
We got to the first checkpoint and were ordered to stop. One of the soldiers had, what I later learned to be a M-32 pointed directly at my face. He was standing maybe two feet away from my window. While he was “guarding me” with the gun the other soldiers searched the car briefly. Usually they ask me a ton of questions at this point. And usually I have to lie and make up a story. They must have noticed the absolute look of terror on my face. The soldier asked me, “are you okay?” I was so busy staring the down the barrel of that gun, that all I could do was nod. In the past seven months, I have had a lot of guns pointed at me and in my general direction, but this was the first time that I had a gun pointed directly at my head before in such close proximity.
They asked me where I was going, and I whispered, “tel aviv”
They wanted to know why I had come to Nablus, a city well known for it’s terrorist. I told them I was there for “Jacobs Well”, that we were Christians and just wanted to go back to Tel Aviv. At that they let us go and a hundred feet down the road up went the Kafia and on when the hoods of our hoodies until we got to our next checkpoint. This was the checkpoint, where the incident occurred earlier in the day. Because there are several settlements between this checkpoint and the last one, they just let cars with Israeli plates go through a separate line and never stop them. This night they actually stopped our car and did a quick search of it before letting us go. From here all we had to do was take another Palestinian road that lead to a settler road to Tel Aviv. There was only one more checkpoint and that one should have been an easy one. When we got there they had closed it down to one lane. And the car in front of me was being fully searched. They were taking everything out of it and had made the driver get out.. I started freaking again because this checkpoint was should be the easiest. The only people who can be on this road are Israeli citizens or tourist. The guy looked very Israeli, and I had not a clue to why they were giving him a hard time. Just as I thought there was no way for us to get out of our car being searched and all the Palestinian stuff in the car being found, another lane opened up and we were waved right through.
There was still an hour and a half to burn before it would be time to get to the airport. So we headed off to Jaffa to explore (at 1:30 am) and find some food. I hadn’t eaten dinner and only had a small lunch much earlier in the day. Usually when teachers come in, it is at a more reasonable hour and we are able to go the Magical Grocery Store. It is a large store even by American standards and unlike every other store in Israeli and Palestine, the prices are kind of reasonable. I think this might have been the part of the trip that Jess and I resented the most, that we were forced to go to Tel Aviv when the store wasn’t open. How down right unfair.
Jaffa is actually an amazing little place just a few blocks south of Tel Aviv on the ocean. The old section of town is a huge fort on the sea that feels very European and French because of it’s crusader history. It was really too late to walk around and explore the fort so we just had fresh juice and I had the most amazing bagel combination ever. We did drive around for a few minutes and then we were off to the airport.
The drive home was rather uneventful besides the on going rambling of Jared the new teacher… he deserves his own posting…. Which I will get to another day……
We made it back safely to our apartment at 5am only to have to be at school at 7am to teach all day.
This was all repeated again a few days later on Tuesday night… This time we insisted on getting the car right after school and making a night of it. Not only is it a million times safer to drive in the day light around here but if we are going to have to be up all night we should at least be able to have fun with it.
Except for getting home at 5 am and having to get up and teach all day again…… the second trip was less stressful in everyway AND…. It brought us a fantastic new teacher, Kaitlin! She is a great addition to the team.
Friday, October 23, 2009
the past two weeks
I am working on writing blogs about the past two weeks. They will come I promise. But for now, two new teachers arrived. One is fantastic, her name is Kaitlin. She fits in so well with us that it is hard to remember a time before her arrival. The other one has already come and gone. Jared was just not cut out to be here and in the end had a manic psychic fit and with the help of the US embassy, and every other contact I had here we had to take him to Jerusalem to be hospitalized. They didn't keep him for more than a few hours but it was enough for us to make our get away. That was last weekend and i am still exhausted and emotionally scared from the drama of getting him out of Nablus. No one signed up for english classes that we were going to offer. Well actually no one signed up for any of the classes the school was offering. So it looked like for the past two weeks, i didn't have a job. But in the past few days it looks like about 25 students signed up and so we are going to start tomorrow. Inshallah things will go well. It looks like next week i am going to have to go on a visa run to jordan. The school says that the classes are too insecure to give me a another year long visa. Which puts me in a bind of sorts. I at this point I don't know what i am going to do next. If i am going to stay here or move on or move home. I know all of you are voting for me to move home. and I am sure if i actually read my blog i would agree with you. I just don't like admitting defeat.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
irony
I have been meaning to share this story on the blog for a few weeks now but was having writers block issues.
I had heard so much about Ramadan for the past six months and when it started it didn't seem like the end of the world.. The struggle of Ramadan was the length.. it became wearing that we couldn't eat or drink in public. If we wanted to eat we had to hide. Considering it was summer, and we walk up a big hill to school this was a challenge. You don't realize the number of times you natural walk around with a water bottle or soda can in public. And we were allowed to walk with them but just not drink out of them. It is so easy to unconsciously take a sip of water from the bottle you have in your hand while walking. My co-worker Jess learned this the hard way when she inadvertently took a drink on the way home and a driver pulled over his car to yell at her for disturbing his fast. The intensity of his anger shocked me and freaked me out a bit. Then Tony had an issue the next day where he was eating breakfast at school in our teachers room where we had been given permission to eat and he walked out the door while still chewing and got caught by the secretary. Ahmad the secretary freaked and reported him to the high up administrators who reprimanded him for disrespecting their fast.
Over all Ramadan was hard, but not as I feared it to be. It was the looks i got from people when i bought things in the stores and the students constantly asking me if i was fasting that really got old. Saying that, it was also fascinating to see how seriously everyone took it. That families really did gather together every night to eat Iftar. I had expected us to get invited to some of these dinner but no one did invite us. As internationals, we don't fit into the society here and for events like Iftar that are part of the well developed society here we had no place. Our neighbors would invite us over for tea after Iftar and our boss asked us to make iftar for her a few times but we ate dinner here at home every night. The restaurants were closed during Ramadan.
Finally Eid came... we were so excited for it, not only because we got a whole week off of school but finally we could eat and drink outside again. School let out of Thursday and Eid started on Sunday. The first day we went to Tel Aviv to pick up the new teacher Curtis and we brought him home and made a huge feast to celebrate his arrival. I was quite proud of myself for using up all the odds and ends in our kitchen priming us for a great shopping trip. Saturday Safwan came over and we spent the day playing with him, eating what ever was left at the house. Sunday was spend visiting people. This was so exciting to finally be part of the culture... more about Sunday later...
Monday came around and everything was still closed... and we had no food in the house
Tuesday we still had nothing in the house to eat.... and everything was still closed for Eid...
Wednesday we were getting desperate and still everything was closed...
Finally Thursday things opened again... the irony that during Ramadan we were able to eat... but during Eid when everyone else in Nablus was eating we were finally fasting..
I had heard so much about Ramadan for the past six months and when it started it didn't seem like the end of the world.. The struggle of Ramadan was the length.. it became wearing that we couldn't eat or drink in public. If we wanted to eat we had to hide. Considering it was summer, and we walk up a big hill to school this was a challenge. You don't realize the number of times you natural walk around with a water bottle or soda can in public. And we were allowed to walk with them but just not drink out of them. It is so easy to unconsciously take a sip of water from the bottle you have in your hand while walking. My co-worker Jess learned this the hard way when she inadvertently took a drink on the way home and a driver pulled over his car to yell at her for disturbing his fast. The intensity of his anger shocked me and freaked me out a bit. Then Tony had an issue the next day where he was eating breakfast at school in our teachers room where we had been given permission to eat and he walked out the door while still chewing and got caught by the secretary. Ahmad the secretary freaked and reported him to the high up administrators who reprimanded him for disrespecting their fast.
Over all Ramadan was hard, but not as I feared it to be. It was the looks i got from people when i bought things in the stores and the students constantly asking me if i was fasting that really got old. Saying that, it was also fascinating to see how seriously everyone took it. That families really did gather together every night to eat Iftar. I had expected us to get invited to some of these dinner but no one did invite us. As internationals, we don't fit into the society here and for events like Iftar that are part of the well developed society here we had no place. Our neighbors would invite us over for tea after Iftar and our boss asked us to make iftar for her a few times but we ate dinner here at home every night. The restaurants were closed during Ramadan.
Finally Eid came... we were so excited for it, not only because we got a whole week off of school but finally we could eat and drink outside again. School let out of Thursday and Eid started on Sunday. The first day we went to Tel Aviv to pick up the new teacher Curtis and we brought him home and made a huge feast to celebrate his arrival. I was quite proud of myself for using up all the odds and ends in our kitchen priming us for a great shopping trip. Saturday Safwan came over and we spent the day playing with him, eating what ever was left at the house. Sunday was spend visiting people. This was so exciting to finally be part of the culture... more about Sunday later...
Monday came around and everything was still closed... and we had no food in the house
Tuesday we still had nothing in the house to eat.... and everything was still closed for Eid...
Wednesday we were getting desperate and still everything was closed...
Finally Thursday things opened again... the irony that during Ramadan we were able to eat... but during Eid when everyone else in Nablus was eating we were finally fasting..
Friday, October 9, 2009
privacy and happiness
I finally felt the need to switch to a private blog when I realized my writers block was directly related to the fear of someone reading my blog and being disturbed by it. I don't mean for this to be a platform for politics, but instead a place for me to reflect on life in Palestine and my daily happiness and frustrations. Sometimes it is hard to tell when they mix together...
Today I was able to take my fifth grade class to the orphanage/ convalescent home where Safwan lives. I have been to a lot of convalescent homes and even orphanages in my day and as happy and well taken care of as the people are, it is still hard to see families and communities completely abandon these people because of dementia and sever disabilities. I wasn't sure how well my students would deal with it but after a few minutes of being frightened and unsure... they warmed up to the people who live there and really took care of them. I was so proud of them. They hugged and kissed and showed perfect respect for the elderly and then played with and made over the teens who are disabled who lived there. I have seen several adults at that house not do as well. The kids loved it and are already begging to go back and the bus driver told me he wanted ever kid in our school to have a chance to go there and do the same.
When i got home this afternoon, i started making a big welcome dinner for the new teachers. The first thing i did was make two peach cobblers. I was planning on giving one to our neighbors who are constantly inviting us over for tea and sending us food. Then i made a lentil pumpkin soup. Right as i had finished cutting up all the veggies and putting them in the pot we ran out of gas for the stove and oven. Some friends had invited us earlier for dinner at a restaurant in town. We had turned them down because we were tired and this soup is far yummier than anything that the restaurant has.. however now was the time to jump in a cab and meet up with them. i had called the landlord and he assured me he wouldn't be able to bring more gas over until 10pm. We were too hungry to wait.
we got there and immediately the richest man in Nablus, the mayor of nablus, the prime minister of Italy and several others all surrounded by very armed (ak-47) guards came over to great us and chat for a moment. They were very please to hear that it was our students who had preformed for them at the ceremony that morning.
After they left we realized that at the next table over were two british journalist that we had met a few nights before and we invited them to come and join our very large table of people.
only in nablus does a mini-disaster like running out of gas turn into an amazing evening.
Today I was able to take my fifth grade class to the orphanage/ convalescent home where Safwan lives. I have been to a lot of convalescent homes and even orphanages in my day and as happy and well taken care of as the people are, it is still hard to see families and communities completely abandon these people because of dementia and sever disabilities. I wasn't sure how well my students would deal with it but after a few minutes of being frightened and unsure... they warmed up to the people who live there and really took care of them. I was so proud of them. They hugged and kissed and showed perfect respect for the elderly and then played with and made over the teens who are disabled who lived there. I have seen several adults at that house not do as well. The kids loved it and are already begging to go back and the bus driver told me he wanted ever kid in our school to have a chance to go there and do the same.
When i got home this afternoon, i started making a big welcome dinner for the new teachers. The first thing i did was make two peach cobblers. I was planning on giving one to our neighbors who are constantly inviting us over for tea and sending us food. Then i made a lentil pumpkin soup. Right as i had finished cutting up all the veggies and putting them in the pot we ran out of gas for the stove and oven. Some friends had invited us earlier for dinner at a restaurant in town. We had turned them down because we were tired and this soup is far yummier than anything that the restaurant has.. however now was the time to jump in a cab and meet up with them. i had called the landlord and he assured me he wouldn't be able to bring more gas over until 10pm. We were too hungry to wait.
we got there and immediately the richest man in Nablus, the mayor of nablus, the prime minister of Italy and several others all surrounded by very armed (ak-47) guards came over to great us and chat for a moment. They were very please to hear that it was our students who had preformed for them at the ceremony that morning.
After they left we realized that at the next table over were two british journalist that we had met a few nights before and we invited them to come and join our very large table of people.
only in nablus does a mini-disaster like running out of gas turn into an amazing evening.
survivor palestine
When I first arrived to Palestine I met my boss, her husband and a coworker at a café in Tel Aviv. Somewhere in that first hour or so as we were drinking tea or driving to Nablus they told me that Isabel, the coworker had been on a reality tv show in Scotland before coming to Palestine. I remember saying something like, “I always wondered what people did after a reality show, I guess they come to Palestine”
Well little did I know that my life here would turn into a really bad reality tv show… only with out the cameras and million dollar prize.
On TV the rules of this game are simple: average Americans are abandoned in the middle of some of the most unforgiving places on earth.
Divided into teams, they participate in challenges and every three days, the losing tribe must trek to Tribal Council to vote out one of their own. Halfway through the game, the challenges shift to individual competitions when the tribes merge and become one.
Survivor is a game of adaptation, and the final two or three of each season are the players most able to adapt to their surroundings and to the people they are playing with. Survivor focuses on the people, and the social commentary that surrounds them. The game revolves around how these players can Outwit, Outplay, and Outlast.
Life here didn’t always feel like Survivor…..
I think it all started Aug 10th when Maureen arrived. She was a older south African lady.
Before she came it was just tony and I here hanging out in Nablus for the month waiting for the new ones to arrive. We had spend most of that time surviving the heat and cleaning the house for the teachers. We had been told they were going to be a bit older so we figured they would be less tolerant of the mess we had inherited
I hate saying that it was all Maureen’s fault. There might have been some cut throat tendencies before she arrived. I know at one point this summer when more of the summer school teachers were suppose to stay on, we felt strongly we would be able to stand as a single voting block and defend each other. When those two left Tony and I looked at each other somewhat suspiciously. Of the pervious four, the two of us had the weakest bond.
I had gone to bat for him several times over the summer but that was more because I was his boss defending him to the administers than anything else.
Maureen made it immediately clear upon her arrival that I hadn’t been taking care of Tony well enough. That it was a woman’s place to take care of the men completely. I think it was the second or third day that Tony mentioned he hadn’t slept well enough the night before because he was cold. Maureen looked at me and reprimanded me for not making sure he had a blanket at night when he went to sleep. Tony is a full capable 22 year old guy, had I tucked him in at night, he would have been freaked out. But some how when Maureen pointed this out to him, he bought it hook line and sinker. He was converted to her side. Tony had abandoned his alliance with me and switched teams. This was only the beginning of what she would do to form and strength her alliances.
Her next tactic was to start cooking up a storm. At first I was all about it, but it quickly became clear that it was her kitchen and I was unwanted. She needed to get all the credit and build all the relationships she could with her food… she quickly swayed Sean (who was never on my side) and Lana (my boss ) over her way.
And yet she continued to drive me insane by asking me a million and a half questions about everything. “what is the occupation that everyone keeps talking about?” “What are settlers?” “why do these people……” and on and on. She often referred to me as the human encyclopedia, but even though she asked a million questions she never listened to my answers or didn’t believe them to be true. So I quickly stopped answering them and instead responded with “I don’t know”. She also used to come into my room and if a closet door was open, look inside and tell me I hadn’t hung up my clothes right, and then shut all the doors. My laundry was never hung up to her liking, she didn’t like the time I got up or when to bed at night. I think my favorite Maureen moment was when the main drains for the house were plugged up and everything was coming back up the pipes. (In Palestine there are drains on the floor in every room for washing the floor) and the rooms were getting flooded with back water, it was REALLY gross. I called the landlord who sent people over. The workers came several times to try and figure out how to fix it and it took several days. In the mean time they asked us not to use the kitchen sink since it was the obvious cause to the problem. Maureen liked to cook and when she cooked she used ever pot and pan in the house along with the bowls and there were tons of dishes after dinner ever night. The rest of us were clear that we were going to have to either stop cooking or allow a back log of dishes to pile up. We explained this to her several times and she seemed to understand….. yet she would get up at 4 am to secretively wash the dishes as loud as she could (making sure to wake us all up) to prove that she wouldn’t tolerate undone dishes and because she was obviously a true believer in direct defiance. And of course the floors would flood and she would get up set and spend the day complaining about how the drains were clogged up. Talk about defiance. Maureen was also a Mormon who converted from being catholic. She loved to talk about it and had recently be rejected by the Mormon missionaries, which is how she ended up in Palestine.
A few days after her arrival brought the other new teacher Lou. Before Lou even came I was suspicious. I’ll admit it. Right after he signed the contract and bought his plane ticket he sent his new fellow co-workers and housemates a hello e-mail. It was more of a response to the packing list I had sent out. He was mystified that women here were suppose to cover up since “he was used to clothing being used to glorify the body”. It is an odd phrase anywhere but in a land were 95% of the women wear huge baggy black robes over their clothes and full scarves around their heads and neck allowing you only to see their actual faces and hand, glorifying the body isn’t even part of our world here, not even close. As you might know by now I am very into intuition. My red flags were going off all over the place with this guy. His arrival didn’t put me to ease at all. I pride myself on being one of those people who can get almost anyone to chat or at lease loosen up. Lou had mentioned that he had a daughter at one point so I asked him how she felt about him coming to a war torn land? He told me that “it was a rather person question that he would prefer not to answer”. I later found out that he complained to everyone that I never stopped asking him personal questions and trying to convert him. The later I never even mentioned to him although I know Maureen did a few times. She even told me that she had told him that if he would get religion in his life he wouldn’t be such a miserable person. I don’t blame him for being mad about getting religion shoved down his throat but I was not the one working that angle. I pretty much completely stopped talking to him about day two except to ask a few times if there was anything he needed at which point he would ignore me. His third day here he locked himself in his room for two days, not even coming out to use the bathroom. About a week after his arrival the next teacher arrived.
Her name is Jess and she is one of the few still standing. The day before her arrival I went into Lou’s classroom where he was busy prepping and told him a couple of us were going to go to the airport to pick the new teacher up and that the school janitor would be coming by the house to clean. I love this lady and she has cleaned for us before, but she is quite noisy and I had been I Lou’s room before to get the fan we all shared. In America the pictures he had taped up all over the walls would have been odd for a 60 year old man, however in a very conservative Moslem town in Palestine they were flat out haram. There were just pictures of models he had ripped out from fashion magazines. Let’s just say the models weren’t naked but they weren’t fully clothed to the standards appropriate in Palestine And if the janitor was going to be coming to clean the house, she was going to most likely go into his room to at least vacuum and would see this photos and the rest of us would hear about it forever from ever Arab staff member at the school. I was going in to find a way to politely get him to take the photos down.. In the end I didn’t have to ask because he offered to change rooms to a lesser room and gives his nice room to Jess. He said that the two of them had been writing many emails that week (found out later, the emails were to complain about me) and he thought she would need the nicer room to survive here. So while Maureen, Sean and I went to the airport to get Jess, Lou moved rooms and Sageta, the janitor cleaned the house.
When we returned from the airport we noticed a remarkable improvement in Lou’s personality. Suddenly he stopped sulking in his room. He was attempting to come out from hiding. And as this happened he started complaining about Sean. It was really strange. I really hadn’t spoken more than maybe 20 sentences to him in the week that he had been here and yet at first his frustrations of working with Sean were word for word exactly the same as mine. I started to say something to him about this and did for a second before going outside to take down clothes from the line. We were waist deep in the game and I certainly didn’t think I could trust him.
Two days after Maureen arrived she started asking very pointed questions trying to get me to criticize the school. I half-heartedly answered her and later that afternoon got pulled into my bosses office to be reprimanded for complaining to the new teachers and causing such a negative atmosphere. It was Maureen’s favorite trick, to twist my words on a subject she thought might be controversial and ask people things like, “Maggie said that you are bad at hiring new teachers, how long have you been doing this?”
She would do this to everyone.
The day after Lou arrived she started complaining about him to everyone, trying to get a response from someone, anyone about him. By this point some of us were on to her ways, at least those of us who didn’t have an alliance with her. The one point she did righteously have to go on was that Lou was stealing food from her in the middle of the night. He would sleep all day and claim that he didn’t like to eat but when we would get up in the morning all of us especially Maureen noticed that there was food missing from her cabinet. When confronted about this he claimed he was just searching for his cereal that he bought the week before. We had shown him several times were there cereal was and where his cabinet was. After he left we noticed that the food he had bought was still there in the cupboard unopened. Could he really not find it?
As the weekend progressed Lou quickly started digressing even more and self-destructing. His own demons were eating away at him in front of our eyes. At one point when I was going to the little shop down the street from us, I ask every one if there was anything I could get anyone. He said that he would like some chocolate. I asked him what kind and he said a variety and gave me 8 shekels, about 2 dollars. This was enough money to buy one of ever kind of candy bar they had. I bought it back to him and later in the evening asked him if he had tried any of them. He shouted at me that none of them were made with any quality at all. That he threw away the whole bag and why couldn’t Palestinians use high quality products when making food? (at which point I said nothing, but wanted to say, cuz were in a developing country nimrod)
Somewhere in there he started sending Lana violent emails complaining strongly about the school calling it an apartheid. Pretty quickly he lost all credit about bring up justifiable issues and just became crazy which frustrated me because I had been hoping he would open the door for dialog about the problems the school had. Instead he just became the problem and if at some later date we want to address these issues they will just be turned into Lou’s issues. The nastier and nastier he became the more apparent that Lou needed to go and be fired. I had been hoping that he would voluntarily resign since he has started threatening that over and over again. But instead the tribal council had to speak and we had to send him home.
This is where it go hard, tricky and manipulative…. Where I figured out how to go from his least favorite person here to the only one he had any respect for… After he got fired officially, he was given a few days to gather his things and stay in our mutual house. There is nothing as awkward as living with someone at a company house who has just been given the boot especially when it is in a far off foreign country, and that person doesn’t even have 10 dollars to their name, and that person has not a clue as to how to even get to the airport. Where as the other teachers hid in their rooms to avoid him at all costs I figured I had nothing to loose since he hated me already and I continued being overly sweet to him. ( I didn’t change my ways at all) And the first two days he was even meaner to me than ever. He confronted me at one point for not backing him up and I told him I couldn’t because I needed the school to stay open and running for Safwan, that I wanted to stay on the staff so that I could spend time with Safwan, that it would serve no purpose to me to get myself fired either at this point. I don’t know why but he could understand that and seemed to respect me for it. Also I overheard him on the phone one evening talking to his sister telling here that he “didn’t know where in the world the school was going to find another teacher to fill in for him since school started in three days”. I waited a few hours and politely told him that I had been pulled away from my project of starting community classes and would start teaching his classes until a full time teacher came. I don’t know if it helped that I was honest and upfront with him or not. But he seemed to understand. We also didn’t trust him to be alone in the house for those few days with our things. He had shown such hate and violent tendencies that we weren’t’ sure what he would do to our things. I got elected to sit at home and watch over the house while, “working from home”. He finally left… the relief I felt when I put him in a taxi to go to the bus station was unbelievable. But sadly all I could think was that Maureen needed to be next.
I know the next part makes me a horrible person, but it got to the point where I was trying to fantasize about her departure only I couldn’t quit come up with a scenario where she would need to leave. What happened next only made me feel that much guiltier.
It needs to be explained here that the teachers here at this school have had the absolute worse luck with people at home suddenly dying on them! Before I ever came there was a teacher the year before whose mother died unexpectedly. Then my good friend Dan died when I got here which sent me in a six-month tailspin. About two weeks after Dan died, my coworker Isabel lost her best friend from High School in a helicopter accident in the North Sea above Scotland. She went home for a week for his funeral. Then the second week of summer school one of the teachers, Mike, lost his childhood best friend in a car accident. He handled it really well but spent a lot of time over the summer grieving. And wouldn’t you know it, Maureen’s 45-year-old cousin died of pneumonia. The year before when she had been on vacation in America her sister had died and I don’t think she had quite forgiven herself for not going home for that funeral. She was absolutely inconsolable of course. It was hard because we all wanted to feel for her and help her thought it but she had burned so many bridges and had been so nasty to us that it was hard. She had been so sexist and really babied the boys and done everything she could due to isolate us girls but given human nature and who these boys were they didn’t come and consul her. Jess and I were the only two who were concerned about her and she didn’t really want our sympathy, she wanted the boys to be there. I tried to call every Palestinian person who I thought would be there for her. Lana, our boss came over. I took her to a special mass where she had met my friends. After mass the sisters and priest sat with her and listen to her. I even brought Safwan over to cheer her up. But she had been rude enough to all of those people that they were polite to her but only polite.
As to be expected Maureen’s tolerance for everything she didn’t approve of went spiraling down even more. And three days later she was fired for hitting students multiple times. She had actually yanked some students around the week before and had been warned. She insisted that in South Africa what she had done was completely acceptable but here in Palestine where in the government run schools where beating kits is completely normal our school prides itself on a hands off policy. In the weeks after she left it has come out just how rough she was with the students and they are finally feeling safe enough to tell us about the hitting and ear yanking.
The school felt horrible about having to fire her but also justified. They told her she could take as many days as she needed to pack up her four suitcases of things and figure out what to do next. Now it is easy for the office people to say that, because they don’t live with her. And when it happened and she was called out on it, she completely admitted to it. But living with her for the next three days was a different story. It only took a few hours before she hand completely spun the story around that she was telling people that she had only tapped people on the back and had never been warned before. I was completely trying to stay out of it and hide from her but she kept coming to me to complain to me. I didn’t want to let on that as horrified as I was by what she did, that I was secretly thrilled that her time was up and she was going home. At one point she wanted to show me how lightly she had yank the kids ear…. So she yanked mine and tears came to my eye and spent the next 30 minutes holding my ear trying not to cry or hit her back it hurt so bad. She also wanted to show me that it wasn’t big deal to smack a kid on the back and she smacked my back and OMG the only thing I could feel was rage that it was time to put her on a bus to the airport. I felt even more angry when I thought of her doing this to one of my own students.
Jess and I secretly ran up to the roof of the house to plot a way to get Maureen out of Nablus sooner than later. We knew if we didn’t do something weeks could go by and in the end we ourselves would have to leave the school.
At the same time as all of this was going on, we had house guest staying with us for several days. He was a friend of a friend of someone on the board of the school and was here to volunteer. In his real life he is a famous pianist from Slovakia who works as a professor during the days. He told them he could come and create a music program for the children here, when he came. Unfortunately he arrived in the middle of Ramadan. During Ramadan not only can you not eat or drink but you also can’t smoke. Kamil was such a chain smoker that he could only come to the school for about hour or so a day before he had to race back to our house to get his nicotine fix. Not only that, but it quickly became apparent that he had no interest in kids, teaching kids, or even teaching people how to teach kids. He spent the entire week smoking at our house, eating our food and hanging out with Maureen. I would have been thankful to have someone to sit with her except that only encouraged her angst and plotting against Jess and I. Eventually we told her that Lana needed her car over the weekend and if she wanted us to drive her to Jerusalem that we needed to go on Wednesday afternoon.
On the way she spent most of the time taking pictures of the drive. At each check point Jess demanded that she put the camera away which she hesitantly did so until we got the final checkpoint going into Jerusalem. Jess again asked her to put the camera away and she openly refused to until the final moment. It was her last openly definite moment of our experience with her. I was done with her and another wave of peace came over me as we drove away from the guesthouse. I drove straight to an Israeli grocery store to buy a big bottle of wine to drink the next night on the roof of our place with Jess to celebrate the end of one very long week. And one more tribal council we had survived.
Well little did I know that my life here would turn into a really bad reality tv show… only with out the cameras and million dollar prize.
On TV the rules of this game are simple: average Americans are abandoned in the middle of some of the most unforgiving places on earth.
Divided into teams, they participate in challenges and every three days, the losing tribe must trek to Tribal Council to vote out one of their own. Halfway through the game, the challenges shift to individual competitions when the tribes merge and become one.
Survivor is a game of adaptation, and the final two or three of each season are the players most able to adapt to their surroundings and to the people they are playing with. Survivor focuses on the people, and the social commentary that surrounds them. The game revolves around how these players can Outwit, Outplay, and Outlast.
Life here didn’t always feel like Survivor…..
I think it all started Aug 10th when Maureen arrived. She was a older south African lady.
Before she came it was just tony and I here hanging out in Nablus for the month waiting for the new ones to arrive. We had spend most of that time surviving the heat and cleaning the house for the teachers. We had been told they were going to be a bit older so we figured they would be less tolerant of the mess we had inherited
I hate saying that it was all Maureen’s fault. There might have been some cut throat tendencies before she arrived. I know at one point this summer when more of the summer school teachers were suppose to stay on, we felt strongly we would be able to stand as a single voting block and defend each other. When those two left Tony and I looked at each other somewhat suspiciously. Of the pervious four, the two of us had the weakest bond.
I had gone to bat for him several times over the summer but that was more because I was his boss defending him to the administers than anything else.
Maureen made it immediately clear upon her arrival that I hadn’t been taking care of Tony well enough. That it was a woman’s place to take care of the men completely. I think it was the second or third day that Tony mentioned he hadn’t slept well enough the night before because he was cold. Maureen looked at me and reprimanded me for not making sure he had a blanket at night when he went to sleep. Tony is a full capable 22 year old guy, had I tucked him in at night, he would have been freaked out. But some how when Maureen pointed this out to him, he bought it hook line and sinker. He was converted to her side. Tony had abandoned his alliance with me and switched teams. This was only the beginning of what she would do to form and strength her alliances.
Her next tactic was to start cooking up a storm. At first I was all about it, but it quickly became clear that it was her kitchen and I was unwanted. She needed to get all the credit and build all the relationships she could with her food… she quickly swayed Sean (who was never on my side) and Lana (my boss ) over her way.
And yet she continued to drive me insane by asking me a million and a half questions about everything. “what is the occupation that everyone keeps talking about?” “What are settlers?” “why do these people……” and on and on. She often referred to me as the human encyclopedia, but even though she asked a million questions she never listened to my answers or didn’t believe them to be true. So I quickly stopped answering them and instead responded with “I don’t know”. She also used to come into my room and if a closet door was open, look inside and tell me I hadn’t hung up my clothes right, and then shut all the doors. My laundry was never hung up to her liking, she didn’t like the time I got up or when to bed at night. I think my favorite Maureen moment was when the main drains for the house were plugged up and everything was coming back up the pipes. (In Palestine there are drains on the floor in every room for washing the floor) and the rooms were getting flooded with back water, it was REALLY gross. I called the landlord who sent people over. The workers came several times to try and figure out how to fix it and it took several days. In the mean time they asked us not to use the kitchen sink since it was the obvious cause to the problem. Maureen liked to cook and when she cooked she used ever pot and pan in the house along with the bowls and there were tons of dishes after dinner ever night. The rest of us were clear that we were going to have to either stop cooking or allow a back log of dishes to pile up. We explained this to her several times and she seemed to understand….. yet she would get up at 4 am to secretively wash the dishes as loud as she could (making sure to wake us all up) to prove that she wouldn’t tolerate undone dishes and because she was obviously a true believer in direct defiance. And of course the floors would flood and she would get up set and spend the day complaining about how the drains were clogged up. Talk about defiance. Maureen was also a Mormon who converted from being catholic. She loved to talk about it and had recently be rejected by the Mormon missionaries, which is how she ended up in Palestine.
A few days after her arrival brought the other new teacher Lou. Before Lou even came I was suspicious. I’ll admit it. Right after he signed the contract and bought his plane ticket he sent his new fellow co-workers and housemates a hello e-mail. It was more of a response to the packing list I had sent out. He was mystified that women here were suppose to cover up since “he was used to clothing being used to glorify the body”. It is an odd phrase anywhere but in a land were 95% of the women wear huge baggy black robes over their clothes and full scarves around their heads and neck allowing you only to see their actual faces and hand, glorifying the body isn’t even part of our world here, not even close. As you might know by now I am very into intuition. My red flags were going off all over the place with this guy. His arrival didn’t put me to ease at all. I pride myself on being one of those people who can get almost anyone to chat or at lease loosen up. Lou had mentioned that he had a daughter at one point so I asked him how she felt about him coming to a war torn land? He told me that “it was a rather person question that he would prefer not to answer”. I later found out that he complained to everyone that I never stopped asking him personal questions and trying to convert him. The later I never even mentioned to him although I know Maureen did a few times. She even told me that she had told him that if he would get religion in his life he wouldn’t be such a miserable person. I don’t blame him for being mad about getting religion shoved down his throat but I was not the one working that angle. I pretty much completely stopped talking to him about day two except to ask a few times if there was anything he needed at which point he would ignore me. His third day here he locked himself in his room for two days, not even coming out to use the bathroom. About a week after his arrival the next teacher arrived.
Her name is Jess and she is one of the few still standing. The day before her arrival I went into Lou’s classroom where he was busy prepping and told him a couple of us were going to go to the airport to pick the new teacher up and that the school janitor would be coming by the house to clean. I love this lady and she has cleaned for us before, but she is quite noisy and I had been I Lou’s room before to get the fan we all shared. In America the pictures he had taped up all over the walls would have been odd for a 60 year old man, however in a very conservative Moslem town in Palestine they were flat out haram. There were just pictures of models he had ripped out from fashion magazines. Let’s just say the models weren’t naked but they weren’t fully clothed to the standards appropriate in Palestine And if the janitor was going to be coming to clean the house, she was going to most likely go into his room to at least vacuum and would see this photos and the rest of us would hear about it forever from ever Arab staff member at the school. I was going in to find a way to politely get him to take the photos down.. In the end I didn’t have to ask because he offered to change rooms to a lesser room and gives his nice room to Jess. He said that the two of them had been writing many emails that week (found out later, the emails were to complain about me) and he thought she would need the nicer room to survive here. So while Maureen, Sean and I went to the airport to get Jess, Lou moved rooms and Sageta, the janitor cleaned the house.
When we returned from the airport we noticed a remarkable improvement in Lou’s personality. Suddenly he stopped sulking in his room. He was attempting to come out from hiding. And as this happened he started complaining about Sean. It was really strange. I really hadn’t spoken more than maybe 20 sentences to him in the week that he had been here and yet at first his frustrations of working with Sean were word for word exactly the same as mine. I started to say something to him about this and did for a second before going outside to take down clothes from the line. We were waist deep in the game and I certainly didn’t think I could trust him.
Two days after Maureen arrived she started asking very pointed questions trying to get me to criticize the school. I half-heartedly answered her and later that afternoon got pulled into my bosses office to be reprimanded for complaining to the new teachers and causing such a negative atmosphere. It was Maureen’s favorite trick, to twist my words on a subject she thought might be controversial and ask people things like, “Maggie said that you are bad at hiring new teachers, how long have you been doing this?”
She would do this to everyone.
The day after Lou arrived she started complaining about him to everyone, trying to get a response from someone, anyone about him. By this point some of us were on to her ways, at least those of us who didn’t have an alliance with her. The one point she did righteously have to go on was that Lou was stealing food from her in the middle of the night. He would sleep all day and claim that he didn’t like to eat but when we would get up in the morning all of us especially Maureen noticed that there was food missing from her cabinet. When confronted about this he claimed he was just searching for his cereal that he bought the week before. We had shown him several times were there cereal was and where his cabinet was. After he left we noticed that the food he had bought was still there in the cupboard unopened. Could he really not find it?
As the weekend progressed Lou quickly started digressing even more and self-destructing. His own demons were eating away at him in front of our eyes. At one point when I was going to the little shop down the street from us, I ask every one if there was anything I could get anyone. He said that he would like some chocolate. I asked him what kind and he said a variety and gave me 8 shekels, about 2 dollars. This was enough money to buy one of ever kind of candy bar they had. I bought it back to him and later in the evening asked him if he had tried any of them. He shouted at me that none of them were made with any quality at all. That he threw away the whole bag and why couldn’t Palestinians use high quality products when making food? (at which point I said nothing, but wanted to say, cuz were in a developing country nimrod)
Somewhere in there he started sending Lana violent emails complaining strongly about the school calling it an apartheid. Pretty quickly he lost all credit about bring up justifiable issues and just became crazy which frustrated me because I had been hoping he would open the door for dialog about the problems the school had. Instead he just became the problem and if at some later date we want to address these issues they will just be turned into Lou’s issues. The nastier and nastier he became the more apparent that Lou needed to go and be fired. I had been hoping that he would voluntarily resign since he has started threatening that over and over again. But instead the tribal council had to speak and we had to send him home.
This is where it go hard, tricky and manipulative…. Where I figured out how to go from his least favorite person here to the only one he had any respect for… After he got fired officially, he was given a few days to gather his things and stay in our mutual house. There is nothing as awkward as living with someone at a company house who has just been given the boot especially when it is in a far off foreign country, and that person doesn’t even have 10 dollars to their name, and that person has not a clue as to how to even get to the airport. Where as the other teachers hid in their rooms to avoid him at all costs I figured I had nothing to loose since he hated me already and I continued being overly sweet to him. ( I didn’t change my ways at all) And the first two days he was even meaner to me than ever. He confronted me at one point for not backing him up and I told him I couldn’t because I needed the school to stay open and running for Safwan, that I wanted to stay on the staff so that I could spend time with Safwan, that it would serve no purpose to me to get myself fired either at this point. I don’t know why but he could understand that and seemed to respect me for it. Also I overheard him on the phone one evening talking to his sister telling here that he “didn’t know where in the world the school was going to find another teacher to fill in for him since school started in three days”. I waited a few hours and politely told him that I had been pulled away from my project of starting community classes and would start teaching his classes until a full time teacher came. I don’t know if it helped that I was honest and upfront with him or not. But he seemed to understand. We also didn’t trust him to be alone in the house for those few days with our things. He had shown such hate and violent tendencies that we weren’t’ sure what he would do to our things. I got elected to sit at home and watch over the house while, “working from home”. He finally left… the relief I felt when I put him in a taxi to go to the bus station was unbelievable. But sadly all I could think was that Maureen needed to be next.
I know the next part makes me a horrible person, but it got to the point where I was trying to fantasize about her departure only I couldn’t quit come up with a scenario where she would need to leave. What happened next only made me feel that much guiltier.
It needs to be explained here that the teachers here at this school have had the absolute worse luck with people at home suddenly dying on them! Before I ever came there was a teacher the year before whose mother died unexpectedly. Then my good friend Dan died when I got here which sent me in a six-month tailspin. About two weeks after Dan died, my coworker Isabel lost her best friend from High School in a helicopter accident in the North Sea above Scotland. She went home for a week for his funeral. Then the second week of summer school one of the teachers, Mike, lost his childhood best friend in a car accident. He handled it really well but spent a lot of time over the summer grieving. And wouldn’t you know it, Maureen’s 45-year-old cousin died of pneumonia. The year before when she had been on vacation in America her sister had died and I don’t think she had quite forgiven herself for not going home for that funeral. She was absolutely inconsolable of course. It was hard because we all wanted to feel for her and help her thought it but she had burned so many bridges and had been so nasty to us that it was hard. She had been so sexist and really babied the boys and done everything she could due to isolate us girls but given human nature and who these boys were they didn’t come and consul her. Jess and I were the only two who were concerned about her and she didn’t really want our sympathy, she wanted the boys to be there. I tried to call every Palestinian person who I thought would be there for her. Lana, our boss came over. I took her to a special mass where she had met my friends. After mass the sisters and priest sat with her and listen to her. I even brought Safwan over to cheer her up. But she had been rude enough to all of those people that they were polite to her but only polite.
As to be expected Maureen’s tolerance for everything she didn’t approve of went spiraling down even more. And three days later she was fired for hitting students multiple times. She had actually yanked some students around the week before and had been warned. She insisted that in South Africa what she had done was completely acceptable but here in Palestine where in the government run schools where beating kits is completely normal our school prides itself on a hands off policy. In the weeks after she left it has come out just how rough she was with the students and they are finally feeling safe enough to tell us about the hitting and ear yanking.
The school felt horrible about having to fire her but also justified. They told her she could take as many days as she needed to pack up her four suitcases of things and figure out what to do next. Now it is easy for the office people to say that, because they don’t live with her. And when it happened and she was called out on it, she completely admitted to it. But living with her for the next three days was a different story. It only took a few hours before she hand completely spun the story around that she was telling people that she had only tapped people on the back and had never been warned before. I was completely trying to stay out of it and hide from her but she kept coming to me to complain to me. I didn’t want to let on that as horrified as I was by what she did, that I was secretly thrilled that her time was up and she was going home. At one point she wanted to show me how lightly she had yank the kids ear…. So she yanked mine and tears came to my eye and spent the next 30 minutes holding my ear trying not to cry or hit her back it hurt so bad. She also wanted to show me that it wasn’t big deal to smack a kid on the back and she smacked my back and OMG the only thing I could feel was rage that it was time to put her on a bus to the airport. I felt even more angry when I thought of her doing this to one of my own students.
Jess and I secretly ran up to the roof of the house to plot a way to get Maureen out of Nablus sooner than later. We knew if we didn’t do something weeks could go by and in the end we ourselves would have to leave the school.
At the same time as all of this was going on, we had house guest staying with us for several days. He was a friend of a friend of someone on the board of the school and was here to volunteer. In his real life he is a famous pianist from Slovakia who works as a professor during the days. He told them he could come and create a music program for the children here, when he came. Unfortunately he arrived in the middle of Ramadan. During Ramadan not only can you not eat or drink but you also can’t smoke. Kamil was such a chain smoker that he could only come to the school for about hour or so a day before he had to race back to our house to get his nicotine fix. Not only that, but it quickly became apparent that he had no interest in kids, teaching kids, or even teaching people how to teach kids. He spent the entire week smoking at our house, eating our food and hanging out with Maureen. I would have been thankful to have someone to sit with her except that only encouraged her angst and plotting against Jess and I. Eventually we told her that Lana needed her car over the weekend and if she wanted us to drive her to Jerusalem that we needed to go on Wednesday afternoon.
On the way she spent most of the time taking pictures of the drive. At each check point Jess demanded that she put the camera away which she hesitantly did so until we got the final checkpoint going into Jerusalem. Jess again asked her to put the camera away and she openly refused to until the final moment. It was her last openly definite moment of our experience with her. I was done with her and another wave of peace came over me as we drove away from the guesthouse. I drove straight to an Israeli grocery store to buy a big bottle of wine to drink the next night on the roof of our place with Jess to celebrate the end of one very long week. And one more tribal council we had survived.
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