For a while I’ve been wanting to put up a more personal entry on the old blog, but procrastination, work, and life have gotten the best of me. But just yesterday I caught up on a bunch of personal e-mails, so I thought I’d paste in some updates I wrote to various people. So, if you’ve e-mailed with me this week, chances are you may have already seen parts of this entry. In case people are interested, I’ll divide it into sections, so it will be easy for you to find something you haven’t read.

Christmas in Bethlehem

On Christmas I decided that I had to visit the Church of the Nativity, which marks the birthplace of Jesus, for the midnight mass. To get into the Church of the Nativity you had to wait outside in a line that took about two hours. There was a freezing rain and there was nothing covering the line. Between the 30-something temperature, the freezing rain, and the wind gust I can honestly say it’s probably the most miserable I’ve ever been waiting in line.

After about fifteen minutes of this I told my friends that I had no interest in waiting in line and left to find an alternate means of entering the church. I exited the line, and tried to figure out my next move underneath an awning across the street from the police station. Just then a police officer stepped out, opened an umbrella and this well-dressed men stepped out under the umbrella. About twenty other heavily armed police officers followed him. I realized that this must have been a visiting dignitary who'd come to the Church of the Nativity for Christmas. I knew that the dignitary and I had one thing in common: we weren't waiting outside in freezing rain to get into the church.

The dignitary and his entourage of police officers started striding towards the church and I fell in with the group. I just marched along like I had no reason not to be with them. It also happened that my jacket and cap looked just like the Palestinian police officer uniform. We got to the entrance, guards threw open the gate, and I was whisked past the security checkpoint into the church. My friends didn't get into the church for another hour and a half. It was probably one of the best things I've ever done in my life: impersonating a police officer to get into a religious ceremony.

Once inside the church I checked out the midnight mass. Having never been to a midnight mass I'm not sure what others are like, but this one was almost like a carnival. All of the pews were full and the isles were crammed with people. Since the mass was entirely in Latin, I'd venture to say that the vast majority of people couldn't understand it. There was always a buzz of chatter from the audience, and one couple in the back of the church was cuddling, perhaps on the verge of making out.

New Year’s Eve

My Palestinian neighbor invited me to his family's BBQ for the New Year. I spent most of the BBQ arguing in Arabic with a Sheikh about why I hadn't converted to Islam. When he found out that I'd studied the Middle East, Islam and even read the Qur'an he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t a Muslim. I told him I was pretty happy as a "Christian" (things would have gone from bad to worse if I tried to explain that I was spiritual, but not religious). He thought my argument that all religions are different paths to the same thing was wrong and borderline haram, sinful. Several times I said that I'd welcome the fires of Hell before becoming a Muslim. Apparently the Sheikh was the crazy uncle present in every family (I won’t name names as to who is the crazy uncle in my own family). His family seemed to keep their distance and his nephews, cousins, and brothers kept giving me high fives whenever I refuted his silly points. Through and through I’ve found that no body likes a religious zealot.

After the BBQ my twenty-something, Palestinian friends and I wandered around Bethlehem until 2AM watching the Palestinians party in the streets. Teenagers and even some adults rode around on the tops of speeding cars. Periodically they rolled onto the hood when the car abruptly stopped, but then they'd climb right back on the roof and the car would speed off again. Another group of kids would periodically stop traffic as they clapped, and danced. Most drivers parked their cars and danced with the kids for a while before driving off.

Frustrations with Ignorance in Palestine

I'm really tired of Palestinians telling me some of the stupidest “information” as though it were an undeniable fact. Here are a few examples of the kind of things people tell me:

-The first Lesbians in the history of the world were from Japan. During World War II Japanese women started having sex with other women because all the men were away at war and the Japanese love sex. This first started happening in a Japanese town called Lesbit, so that's why they're called Lesbians.

-Palestinian children are smarter than American children because they study for eight hours a day after school. (Palestinians go to school for four hours a day. I talk to the kids in my neighborhood quite often and IF they have homework it takes about 20 or 30 minutes, maybe an hour. Like most normal kids, they don’t do anymore school work than they have to.)

-All Palestinians speak perfect English. If a Palestinian can’t remember an English word, and you can’t figure out what word he’s trying to remember, it’s because you, as a native English speaker don’t know your language well enough.

If you try to challenge any of these “facts,” Palestinians will argue with you until you couldn’t care less if they told you all Americans lived in caves underground. It's gotten to the point that I’ve just stopped trying to correct people. The other day a Palestinian man was going on the usual rant about how all black people in America are criminals (he'd never visited America or met a black man). Nobody in the Middle East likes black people. Rather than tell this man that there are a lot of really nice, intelligent black people in America, I told him that in Chicago a black man robbed me at gunpoint (true), and that all black people steal money so they can buy fried chicken and watermelons. He nodded, as though he already knew this.

Thoughts about Israeli Security

Here are a few random stories about Israeli security:

Dave's friend from the University of Chicago visited us right before Christmas. While he was here we took a picture of him wrapped in an Arab headscarf holding one of our plastic bee-bee guns that looks like a mini-AK-47. The picture looked exactly like the pictures of the martyrs that are hung all over Palestine. He's an American Jew, so we thought it was a pretty funny picture on several different levels. On his way out of the country the Israelis asked to look at the pictures on his camera when they found out he'd been in the West Bank. Of course they discovered the picture. They proceeded to question him for three hours and all the questioning kept coming back to "How could you think a picture like that is funny?" So essentially they detained someone for three hours because he had a different sense of humor.

Our Israeli-Palestinian friend, Fayrouz was passing through the Bethlehem-Jerusalem checkpoint the other day and got detained for an hour and a half. After she passed through the metal detector the guard asked her to bring the stack of baskets that people put wallets and change in back to the other side. Fayrouz responded that she was late and it was the soldier’s job to do that. For that she got detained for an hour and a half, and questioned about what exactly she was doing in the West Bank. So, essentially she got detained for not doing an Israeli soldier a favor and giving a little lip.

While I was with the Red Crescent in Nablus, the Israelis surrounded a village for several hours while they arrested several "suspected terrorists." Meanwhile the ambulances just waited for the troops to leave so they could go in and clean up. When we went in the residents led us to a woman's house. She was probably in her late forties or fifties and a group of people helped her down the stairs. She hobbled like she had a broken leg. At first I thought she'd been hit with a stray rubber bullet, which can do quite a bit of damage. The EMTs loaded her into the ambulance and she was just sobbing. Gradually she'd quiet down to a whimper and then start sobbing again.

I couldn't understand what she was saying, but I later found out that after her husband and son were arrested the Israelis started grilling this woman. They wanted to know where her husband’s guns were. He had one gun, because he was a police officer, but they were accusing him of having more than he was supposed to. She told them her husband only had one gun. The woman was a Muslim who normally wore the veil, so they threatened to tear her clothes off to see if she was hiding a gun under her dress if she didn't tell them where the guns were. Again she told the Israeli soldiers that her husband only had one gun so they slapped her and hit her with the butts of their rifles and tried to tear her dress off. Eventually they just threw her into a ditch and left. I'm not really sure what happened to me, but when I first saw the woman, before I knew exactly what had happened to her, I almost cried.

Thoughts about Freelancing

Several of you have asked which articles I’ve put on my blog are getting printed. So far the Kuwait Times claims to have taken the one Nablus EMTs, Efram (the Souvenir guy), political tourism, migrant workers, the environmental group, and probably the one about house demolitions I’ll put on my blog immediately after this post. In shaa Allah, God willing, they're being printed. The Kuwait Times has been a bit hard to reach these days, and it's impossible for me to track when/if they run my stuff as I don’t live in Kuwait.

Occasionally, it happens that a paper will use your stuff and refuse to pay you, since there's really no legal recourse you can take in the Middle East. The Kuwait Times editor has been very friendly when she does communicate with me, so I hopefully I won't find myself in that unpleasant situation.

Some day I'd like to start working for some American newspapers, but it's quite difficult to break into that market. If a paper subscribes to one of the news wires like AP or Reuters, it's cheaper and easier for them to use a generic article from the wire than it would be to buy one from me. Also, unless you're writing for the NY Times or a big national paper, most editors want stories to have a "local angle." For example, if I wanted to get something in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, to beat the stuff coming off the news wire I'd have to find a way to connect the issues in Palestine to Cleveland. Needless to say that can be a bit difficult at times. The national papers already have correspondents in the Middle East, and beyond that they have a network of established freelancers they regularly work with. So, it's a real challenge to break into the American market as a foreign correspondent. But I'm enjoying it. I only wish I could have greater financial security, but hopefully that will come as/if I get more established.

Thoughts about the 16 year-old in Iraq

(In case you haven't heard about this, you can read the BBC article about it here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4575450.stm )

As someone who spent the winter break of my junior year of college in Iraq nine months after the war started, I thought I’d be more empathetic to a 16 year-old who went to Iraq for winter break. First off, I was fairly disgusted that he didn’t tell his parents he was going to Iraq and then used their money to do so. Poor form. If you’re going to a war zone, tell your parents and loved ones. Sure they’ll worry, but at least let them know where they should look for the body if you go missing. Second off he sounds a lot like these useless peace activists you see all over the Middle East who know nothing about the region so they do more harm then good. He wrote this in an essay about his trip:

“Going to Iraq will broaden my mind... I want to experience during my Christmas the same hardships ordinary Iraqis experience everyday, so that I may better empathize with their distress.”

You don’t experience other people’s hardships and you will never know what other people’s suffering is like. To believe that is to trivialize other people’s problems. That’s what most peace activists in Palestine try to do, and I think it’s downright offense. Even if this kid got naturalized as an Iraqi citizen, got a flat in the Karrada district of Baghdad, and started waiting in line with the other Iraqis desperate for work who periodically get blown up by the resistance, he would still be there by choice. He would chose to suffer, while Iraqis, Palestinians, people in the Democratic Republic of Congo have no choice. It doesn’t help them any if you leave a life of comfort, luxury and privilege to go “suffer” with them. You can’t choose to suffer. If you’ve made suffering your choice you probably enjoy suffering a bit, so you’re not suffering. Most of your pain will come from guilt that you’re not suffering as much as the people whose suffering you want to feel.

However, I’ll cede that this kid is only sixteen, and he’s got balls. Brass balls. With proper training I think he could be a fine individual. Were he placed under my tutelage, I’d share with him the two most important things I’ve learned from being a visitor in regions of conflict:

1) Love and hate are the same emotion. If you’re in love with someone you think about them all the time and for better or worse you make decisions that aren’t entirely rational. You do the same things when you hate someone; hate and love are just different ways of expressing passion. If you’re capable of love, you’re capable of hate. I don’t know why this is important in conflict zone, but I think about it a lot when I meet truly racist people.

2) You mean nothing to the world, but if you’re lucky you mean the world to several people. Say what you will about terrible things happening in Palestine or Iraq, but let’s take a minute to think about some of the things happening in Africa. In the Democratic Republic of Congo about 4.5 million people have been killed in the last decade. In Liberia people are periodically beaten to death and the attackers eat the victims’ hearts. A lot of people die in really terrible ways and live under oppressive conditions, but without a personal connection to these people, the average person doesn’t lose a lot of sleep. Sure they think it’s terrible and it’s disturbing for people to hear about, but how many people actually do something about it? Something small, like write a letter to their congressmen? It’s beyond the average human’s capacity to care about every atrocity that happens in the world. If you become the victim of an atrocity most people probably won’t care all that much. If they do care, they won’t care for very long. If you’re cynical you might say that you mean nothing to the world. But remember, that if something terrible happens to someone you love it feels like your world is ending. So, if you want to matter take the time to form excellent interpersonal relationships. Don’t waste your time trying to feel people’s suffering, just be their friend and make them feel like they matter to your world.