January 28, 2001

Elizabeth and another volunteer packing boxes of clothes donated to the Jahallin Bedouin.

A paucity of pictures again today, but how do you capture a cancellation on film? ("Aargh!" said Charlie Brown) There was too much rain to do the planting, so it has been postponed for next Sunday. Considering the fact that we rearranged things in Zababdeh to be away, and that we had such fun on our commute yesterday, it's doubtful we'll be back. Most of the "Internationals in Palestine" are centered in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, so a cancellation is not a big deal. For those of us way, way up in the hinterlands who are carless (or is it "careless"?), however, it's a drag. Our mantra for the past couple of months, which seems to apply so well here, has been "chalk it up to the learning curve."

We made it back to Jerusalem (traveling another bizarre detour to avoid the roadblocks - at some point, almost arbitrarily, the taxi driver turned off the road and into what seemed to be the desert. We then traveled along a "road" at the bottom of a valley strewn with garbage until we reconnected with a small village road again). Once in the "Holy City", we connected with our friend who was packing boxes of clothing donated for the Jahallin Bedouin.

There was a new volunteer on the project, a Modern Conservative Jewish college student from Cleveland. As we talked about our experiences over the past few months, it was very clear that her vision of this land has been shaped by very different things than ours. We found that our mental maps of the land had very few common reference points. Our West Bank is landmarked by Palestinian cities and villages, connected (now) by windy roads, whereas hers is marked by Jewish settlements connected by highways. It was as if we were talking about two totally different countries.

Our trip back to Zababdeh was mostly along the same route, getting us back in time to eat some homemade maqlube. Yum.