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.