Thursday, June 23, 2005

Week in Review

The past week has been an interesting one. Since I last wrote my two friends have been deported; one of them was kept only overnight in prison and then sent home, the other couldn't get a plane ticket for almost a week. I've come down with a mysterious illness that has kept me in bed for the past few days. I hope very much that it will go away soon.

Last Friday I travelled to Ramallah to visit with a friend and stay with her family for the weekend. It was a crazy experience. Most of my time in Palestine over the years has been spent in Nablus, in the Balata camp. Life there is hard but in many ways beautiful. The closeness of the community is something I have never witnessed before, as is the strict adherence to conservative social mores. These regulations are wide ranging and must be taken seriously. In all my time in Palestine I've hardly ever worn a short sleeved shirt. That is, until I experienced the 'other' side of Palestine, wealthy Ramallah.

I arrived in the cultural capital of Palestine sometime mid-afternoon on Friday and called Yasmine's house in order to get directions. Instead of giving me exact directions her mother directed me to the Friend's Boys School. She said she'd pick me up there. Just a short walk from the center of the city, I waited a while until she arrived. In a brand new Audi, without a head covering, wearing short sleeves. A new world, I thought. I am about to enter a new world.

Their house is incredibly beautiful. Built in 1928 and recently remodeled, there are enough rooms for all three children to have their own space---something I have never encountered in Palestine. Of course the country is like every other--there are wealthy and destitute, the comfortable and the cramped. I was and continue to be so shocked by the disparity; travelling to Ramallah and experiencing this 'other side' of Palestine reinforces my belief in the refugee's rights to return to their lands or to be granted compensation. A refugee camp, though a symbol of resistance and survival, is no place to make one's home.

Yasmine wasn't around when I got there. According to her sister, who could have been dressed for a night out in Paris, she was at the pool. The pool? 'By the way', her sister said, 'why are you wearing long sleeves? It's fucking hot outside.' My weekend was only to become more strange.

We arrived at the Grand Park Hotel in the wealthiest neighborhood of Ramallah and I found a scene that looked more like Florida than the Palestine I thought I knew. Men and women half naked, in bikinis, drinking beer and lounging on the deck of a beautiful pool. People swimming together. I was experiencing such culture shock that it took me a full hour to get used to the idea of taking my shirt off in front of so many people.

Anyway the rest of the weekend was spent doing entirely bourgeosie things like eating in fancy restaurants, drinking coffee in expensive cafes, and seeing films at various cultural societies who were participating in the Arab Film Festival.

More on that later.

But first, check out this story about the fighters from Balata:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/45A17A5A-34D8-4488-9226-21FB59C93237.htm

Always holding it down. The PA has done and will do little for the people there, and they know it. You can always count on Balata to demonstrate to the world what's really going on...

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