Where we all are. One year later
It’s been almost a year since I was last in the West Bank this past August. It’s been over a year since May of 2007 when I left the first time after nearly five months living in the city of Nablus. I started this blog to convey my experiences there to friends, family, and whoever else might happen to read it. My hope all along was that in some small way readers could come to see the people I knew and the places I saw as I knew them and as I saw them: in a personal light.
Well, this blog is done now, but before I stop for good, I thought I’d pull one last entry out of my sleeve. This is an update on some of my closest friends from Nablus (all names have been changed) most of whom have shown up at some point or another in my earlier blog entries. This then is where we all are, one year later.
Sharif was one of my closest friends in Nablus. There was not a single moment in public when he was not cracking a smile or pulling a practical joke on someone. Sharif was the one who once wrote on a chalkboard in my classroom “Life is a camera, so smile”. He also told me the story about fooling the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints by pretending he spoke only French—with anyone else I’d be sure they were just joking with me, with Sharif you considered that he just might be crazy enough to do it. In private he was much the same, but with intermittent moments of cold hard seriousness. Still, he was never bitter. I think I admired that the most about him.
Sharif was born with a limp—one of his legs was shorter than the other—and had undergone seven surgeries on it since he was a child. Each surgery failed to correct the limp, and he underwent an eighth and final surgery when I was still in Nablus. By the time I came back to visit last August, he had been on crutches for three or four months. Still, same smile and laugh.
We’ve e-mailed a few times since then. He asked for my help looking for ways to come to America for college. We looked at visa application forms, and college transfer applications, and scholarship applications, and decided that barring a miracle he would have to borrow money at home somehow, we even hypothesized that he could borrow the money for a few days from extended family, print a bank statement showing that he had enough money to support himself for a year in America as per the student visa requirements, then return the money immediately thereafter. It was not a hopeless situation, but neither of us had real answers. After a month or two without contact from him, I e-mailed and asked him if he still was thinking about college in America.
He wrote back saying he wasn’t sure. “Sometimes, I just want to stop thinking. Do you understand what I mean?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, only that I couldn’t stand the thought of him ever giving up.
Adam and Hassan don’t show up in any of my blog entries, but I spent uncounted evenings with the two of them joyriding around the city before the army incursions began after midnight, sitting at hookah bars, coffee shops, and our favorite downtown pizza joint (they always insisted they pay). They showed a complete disregard for my host organization’s curfew rules, and lived in the moment, recklessly, with a wild verve for life and companionship. They lied to their fathers, both of whom I knew rather well, about where they were and when they would be back so that they could squeeze out just another quarter hour of joyriding or lounging around town.
Adam was one of the founders and managers of the Children’s Center that hosted Nablus’ champion youth ping pong team and where I taught a roomful of little boys aged five to twelve every Monday and Wednesday for three months. All of the managers were young, and they were some of the kindest people I met in Nablus. Many of the people whose stories follow were managers at that same center. He had spent a year in an Israeli jail for breaking the permit/checkpoint system that restricts freedom of movement from region to region within the West Bank. The real reason he was arrested was because he had spent time working as a junior level political operative for what both the United States and Israel classify as a terrorist organization. Because of his history, and allegations of his continued involvement with said organization (which he denies, though rumors in Nablus flew thick and fast around the subject until no one could be sure of anything) he was recently arrested again and has been in another Israeli jail now for over half a year. His father, a local school teacher, joined him in jail a few months after his arrest. They leave behind a younger brother and sister/son and daughter, neither older than ten.
I lost touch with Hassan soon after Adam’s arrest. I asked after him through mutual friends. They only told me that he was incurably lonely.
Iman, whose personal account of being arrested during the 2007 February invasion of Nablus can be read here, was another manager at the Children’s Center. He won a scholarship to study for a summer in Jordan, then finished his degree in computer science and is now looking for a job in Nablus.
Kareem was an eighteen year old bear. Six-foot, massive, and with a face that wore two expressions: a surly frown, or a childlike grin. Still, for all that, he was timid and afraid sometimes. He was the one who first told me about Iman's arrest and asked me to come save him if he himself were ever arrested.
I spoke with Kareem on the phone once while I was in Cairo for those two summer months between leaving Nablus and coming back to visit for August. Because of the Children’s Center’s association with Adam and his assumed political leanings, all of the managers had come under threat from an opposing faction’s henchmen. Kareem told me on the phone how they had come to his house and shot at him and one of our friends, how they had hidden from the gunfire, how someone’s elderly mother died of a heart attack from fright, and how they were dragged off, interrogated and beaten.
I never spoke with Kareem again. In August Adam and Hassan told me to stay away from him without giving me clear reasons. Rumor from a friend of a friend in local intelligence had it that some of Adam’ circle of friends had been turned spy so as to keep a closer watch on him. I am fairly certain this is what happened to Kareem and a few other friends from the Children’s Center whom I never saw again. Mostly it makes me sad what happened. The only thing that makes me angry is imagining what sort of intimidation, what sort of threats and bullying they must have had to use on Kareem to make him spy on his own friends.
One of my favorite memories I have with Kareem was when we were walking back to the center together after watching the children at a soccer match. Kareem turned to me and asked, “Brian, would you ever kill someone?” I looked at him a moment before answering. “I don’t want to kill anyone ever,” I told him, “unless someone I love will die if I don’t.” And he smiled at me, his childlike smile. “You’re just like me then.”
The Children’s Center where we all worked was burned down by those same henchmen around the same time. I am told the children cried, though I only got to see a few of them again after that—the political situation was too unstable when I visited in August and my host organization worried about what would happen if I were seen associating with the losing side. The managers wanted to rebuild and restart, but were forced to wait until things calmed down in the city for fear it would just be burned down again. They are still waiting.
Muhammad was the former paramedic whose brother died two years before I met him. But he was always a clown—literally! He and his friends started a small circus group in hope of bringing a little fun and laughter to Palestinian children’s lives. I am unashamed to say that he is one of the most admirable people I know, and the world would be a better place if we could all be only half as good a person as he.
Muhammad tried to give three of us volunteers clowning lessons. It was much harder than I thought. Clowning is serious business. He began by holding up a plastic red clown nose, elastic string and all.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked us. “This” he pronounced, “is the smallest business suit in the world.” If he hadn’t been so serious we might have laughed at him.
We then proceeded to practice our clown faces: “there are at least ten degrees between the happiest you can get, and the saddest you can get. Show it on your faces”. Muhammad was a surprisingly stern clown teacher, and it was surprisingly uncomfortable to breath through that clown nose the whole time.
This past winter Muhammad got engaged to a friend of mine who volunteered at the same time with us. They’re getting married this summer or as soon as possible, and we hope they will be very happy together.
Faizan carried himself with more dignity at the age of twenty-two than most people attain in their lifetimes. He was the friend who told me that if the soldiers hit him at the checkpoints he would hit them back even if it cost him his life. He was also the older brother of Mu’min, the drippy nosed four year old whom I wrote about in one entry. The first memory I have of Faizan was when, before I even started teaching at the Children’s Center, the children heard that I knew some martial arts.
“Faizan knows karate!” one of the children shouted, “Fight with Faizan!”
I looked embarrassedly at Faizan, and Faizan, with his typical composure, simply stood there and said “Ok, try to hit me if you want.”
So I half-heartedly threw a punch and he blocked it and countered. I backed up and threw some kicks, just to prove to him and the kids that I could do it, then he got in under my range and it turned into a breathless little bit of feints and soft punches at which I definitely lost. By the end, naturally we were great friends forever.
I distinctly remember one night Faizan insisted he accompany me back to the international apartment—the inner city wasn’t safe at night for foreigners. Before we parted ways, he looked out over the city lights dipping into the narrow valley, and he told me he’d sworn to himself he would not run from Palestine.
“This is where I will build my life, this is where I will make my work, start my family, here in my country.”
So it surprised me when I received an e-mail from him just two months ago from Saudi Arabia. It said: "My friend Brian, how are you? How is your life? Things here are very beautiful. There are no checkpoints, no shooting, everything is stable compared to our situation in Palestine. Sometimes I feel that you and the others have forgotten us and don’t care about us. But for us, we will never forget you, not until the last day of our lives, because for us when we choose a friend and they prove themselves to us we will never forget them. So I am waiting for your response to this e-mail, because you are still my friend and a brother until the last day of our lives. Your brother, Faizan”
It took me two weeks to write Faizan back. When I did, I told him I could never forget him or Palestine and my friends there.
Sometimes it’s hard to stay in touch with my friends from Nablus, because our lives are so different. I catch myself thinking of them when I have a day to sit around the house and do whatever I want. When I visit a particularly nice shopping center to have dinner at a restaurant with old college friends. When I try to imagine having my ideal job, or getting married and starting a family. It’s guilt born of empathy and friendship. There are days and nights when things resurface so vividly, and guilt drives my mind up the walls looking for some way through to help them. What if I could get Sharif into the country and set him up to live with me while he goes to school? How can I get Adam and his father out of jail? Whatever happened to Kareem; is he safe? And I see again the faces of all the children I taught at that center, leaping up and down and shouting “Teacher! Teacher! Pick me, pick me!” before they even knew the question I was about to ask them.
Most of the time I think in terms of the greater good: there has to be a better way to most effectively contribute to the world. But other times I wonder, if I’m not helping the friends who are right in front of my face, just what the hell am I doing? And sometimes I surrender despairing and contemplate how much easier it would be if I just dropped the idealism and guilt.
I’ve taken to praying, because I just don’t know, and because I suspect I can’t handle things like this on my own. I haven’t come up with answers, but it helps clear things out and lends perspective. All I know is that people need people, and so I’ve turned to you in a way, because these are my friends, and so are you, and I need you to see them as people, even if only for awhile in little snatches of human connectivity, as if that way I might be doing a tiny something for them, as if that way they might know that they are never forgotten.
posted by Bloo at 4:51 AM
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