September 18, 2001

Children and teachers lined up for the morning assembly.

Today looked to be like yesterday - long roads, almost all teachers and students present. Marthame started the day subbing again, but the usual teacher arrived. Ten minutes late, looking a little haggard from the journey, but arrived nonetheless. The students were ecstatic (Marthame tried not to take this personally, especially since he was ecstatic, too).

There were more incursions into Qabatiya last night, too, so everyone's a little bleary-eyed these days. The question remains "what's gonna happen?" The past week has been horrendous for the Palestinians, with numerous incursions and dozens of deaths, mostly in our part of the West Bank. But even if world attention has turned away, it seems that American governmental pressure has not. And so Arafat has declared a unilateral cease-fire, and the Israelis have announced no more offensive actions. We really hope this means good news for our area, but we also wonder what it means for the world as we seem to move closer and closer to the brink of something truly chaotic and horrible. Lord have mercy.