July 6, 2003

Marthame and Fr. Firas prepare their vestments for the Melkite Liturgy.

Marthame woke up early to practice the liturgy. He had done this once before with Fr. Hossam at the Anglican Church, preparing the gospel reading a month in advance, practicing it over and over again, getting the pronunciation and the vowel markings right. And when he had it down perfect, the Jenin invasion came and Fr. Hossam was stuck in Nablus and we evacuated to Nazareth.

Marthame chants the liturgy with Fr. Firas there to help him just in case.

This time, with a full week of Birzeit courses under his belt, Marthame felt more confident. They certainly did help, as did attending the various liturgies for three years and getting used to the patterns of pronunciation (formal Arabic can be quite different from colloquial). Marthame also wore Fr. Firas' red vestments, standing with him throughout the liturgy. In the end, he did just fine.

After a quick lunch of stuffed squash (but a new kind of squash, not the usual koosa - Palestinians seem to have a million different kinds of cucumber and squash), we met up with our taxi driver for the ride back south. One of the plusses of this driver is usually his air-conditioner - but unfortunately it's on the fritz.

We waited for a good half hour at Hamra checkpoint (the Tayasir checkpoint is simply closed), but passed after a quick check of the luggage.

At the next checkpoint, one soldier began to examine the documents. His superior officer came over, gave a superfluous look at the paperwork and passed it back to the driver. "Salamaat. Goodbye."

We reached Qalandia, where we soon found a shared taxi to Birzeit. Entering the village, we found the checkpoint there deserted. The roundabout trek still took three and a half hours, though, but we made it in the end. It'll be an early night - hopefully enough exhaustion to get our sleeping schedule back on track!