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.