February, 2003
Marthame was lending a hand with the video conference bringing together Italians, Israelis, and Palestinians.
After school, Joanna brought together about twenty girls, from first through third grade, to teach them a few basics about ballet.
In other places, the water had washed out the soil beneath the road, and it had caved in in places. A couple more stuck cars decorated the side of the road.
Marthame is teaching an introductory college-level course on Church History - 1250 to present - at Ibillin's Mar Elias College.
At the Latin church in Zababdeh, today is seminary Sunday, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Roman Catholic seminary in Beit Jala.
A young Palestinian man from the Jenin region fits an army profile of terrorist, and so he might not be able to travel at all.
Why must these people, these wonderful people who have welcomed us so graciously, why must they suffer so?
The commotion yesterday afternoon took place at the home of one of the Kindergarten teachers.
By nightfall, the tanks were gone, but the planes had come to take their place, circling until the wee hours of the morning. It's hard to sleep like this.
No tanks today, but there was shooting at the edge of town. The Israeli camp is long gone by now, but we're still getting visits.
n the evening, we met with Fr. Aktham to talk about our contingency plans. With the world situation such as it is, there's a lot of “if”ing going on.
The young man tried to explain that he's been trying to get his ID changed to say Jenin, but he can't because the only place he can do so is at the Palestinian Authority Office in Jenin which no longer exists.
Each car, however, was missing one tire, and the tires were stacked in a neat pile. The soldiers had come a half hour before and systematically removed one tire from each of the cars, then left. Couldn't have seemed more arbitrary unless they had set fire to the pile.
In the evening, we decided to try the other movie theater in town at the Popular Arts Center.
On our way back to Ramallah, we saw three women standing at the Qalandia checkpoint observing the goings-on. They were three observers from Checkpoint Watch, an Israeli group which was concerned by all of the abuses reported at various checkpoints.
They grew up as children of the first Intifada; one told us as a teen she spent a night in Israeli "children's jail" - she and her friends were arrested for practicing dabke, traditional Palestinian dance.
We also stopped by the school to look at the English Club, which is becoming a display room for creative English projects by the students.
Tanks grinding through the hills woke us up this morning, as did shooting at the edge of town.
being happy over here doesn't belong to happiness; it's from the sickness of being bored of sadness
The electricity remains spotty in the village - mostly on, but periodic outages - so getting together in a place with reliable lights (and heat!) is a luxury.
It's exciting to be part of it all, but with the impending war, it seems like this area will fall silent for a while as far as the outside world is concerned.
This is truly worrying. Not only do we need electricity for such a big chunk of our work - internet, emails, etc., and not only do we, like everyone else, need electricity to keep a lot of food from spoiling, but our building is set-up so that an electric generator refills the water tanks on the roof. Once they empty, if there's no electricity, there's no water.
Elizabeth accompanied the tenth graders on their class picnic where they enjoyed the beautiful sunshine, singing and playing, and teaching each other the dance to the "Ketchup Song".
