August 6, 2001

For Palestinians, the sight of Israeli soldiers is an all-too-familiar one.

In the evening, we took a nice walk over to the Latin Convent's restaurant to hang out with some friends from the program. To our surprise, we ran into three of Marthame's 12th grade students from last year, as well as two Zababdeh-ites who are currently studying at Birzeit. We called ourselves the Zababdeh settlement and talked about last year's headaches, good times, and their dreams as they all head off to college next year.

One of their friends who is from Birzeit came over and recounted his story of getting grazed by a bullet in the skull at the Birzeit checkpoint a few months back. Nothing like that to sober us up from our dreaming.