May 22, 2003

Two cakes? Yes, please!

Finding international community when living abroad is critical.

More exams at school, and afternoon preparations for Marthame's birthday party. We're combining his birthday party with a farewell fete for the World Council of Churches (WCC) volunteer team, who completed their 3 month stint here and will leave soon. Time flies. So at their place we and they and most of the university ex-pats joined together for a pot-luck style bash, with Palestinian pizza, hummus, corn casserole, beef pea curry, olives, shwarma, and of course chocolate cake and fresh strawberries. It was super.

Multiple nations and organizations represented in this lovely group.

Joining us was also a young Jewish American, fresh from a stint with the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron. As he said, "I went with CPT because there's no JPT yet." He's here for a few days to look at the new Peace program at the nearby Arab-American University. It was a fascinating conversation. One of the teachers at the University is half-Jewish, and one of the locals from nearby Qabatia told us that his grandmother was Jewish - his grandfather met her while working in Israel. This place is far more complex that we had ever expected.