Ideals and Ordeals: April 6

My last three days have been so crammed-full with travel, meetings, and business, that I have had no time to sit and write. It is 11:20 PM but I want to share some of the highlights of two of those days.

Ramzi Aburedwan at Kamandjati Music Center, Ramallah

Logistics: Monday morning I worked logistics; calling up groups I plan to visit and arranging the visits, and talking to ANERA about getting a permit for Gaza. Here is my plan: taking care of business in the northern West Bank this week, heading to Jerusalem/Bethlehem over the weekend, taking care of business in Bethlehem/Hebron next week, and meanwhile waiting for the Gaza permit. ANERA put in a request to the Israeli government for a permit for me to travel to Gaza. (I donate 5% of the profits on my sales to ANERA.) They anticipate it will take 10 days or more to hear back from the Israelis. So, the earliest I would hear back would be April 16^th. My flight home from Amman is on April 22^nd, so if I get a permit to visit Gaza, I will pretty much drop everything else and go. So, by April 16^th I plan to be done with my essential business in the West Bank.

Kamandjati Music Center: On Monday afternoon I visited the Kamandjati Music Center in Ramallah. (Al Kamandjati means “the violinist”.) I became aware of this wonderful school through a friend from Concord, MA who fixes violins. She went on a concert tour with the Kamandjati School through the West Bank a year and a half ago. This school was founded by Ramzi Aburedwan who grew up in a refugee camp near Ramallah. He became a symbol of the first intifada when a picture of the young Ramzi throwing a stone at an Israeli jeep was made into a popular poster. In his teens, Ramzi fell in love with the viola, studied in France, and returned in September 2004 to open the center. Unlike the Edward Said music school, the Kamandjati provides music training to those who can’t afford to pay. The Kamandjati teaches music to more than 300 Palestinian children free of charge, focusing on the most vulnerable ones, particularly refugees. It gets much of its funding from European foundations. It is housed in a beautifully restored and updated old building in the Old City of Ramallah. Music lessons there include string instruments, percussion, and voice. I spent an hour and a half at this wonderful center talking with Ramzi, Celine (the administrator), Julia (a British voice teacher), and the PR person. Kamandjati teaches a mixture of occidental and oriental music. My hope is to bring Kamandjati to Boston for a concert and fundraiser.

Sam Bahour: Late Monday afternoon I met with Sam Bahour, a very successful Palestinian American Business man. Sam has his hand in many things in Palestine. He has malls and grocery stores in Ramallah, he has a consulting business (Applied Information Management), and he has recently created the Dalia Association with the purpose of “Mobilizing Resources for Palestinian-led Social Change and Sustainable Development”. I wanted an hour of his time to talk to him about what I do and get advice. Sam is the only person I know in Ramallah who works in the private sector. My personal nickname for Ramallah is NGO-city, since it seems virtually everyone works in a foreign-funded NGO or for the Palestinian Authority. We chatted about the need for me to focus on specific products and find existing channels for them (e.g. find specific products to put in church-based catalogs). I talked about my need to have people on this end (in Palestine) help me with supply and quality assurance issues. He said that once I link to a larger distributor it will be easy to get people in Palestine working on this. Meanwhile, I could locate people in each city I deal in and pay them to handle some of this. For instance, I could pay someone in Hebron on an hourly basis (assuming a rate of $120-150 per day) to check the ceramics before it is shipped to me so that I am not shipped poor quality pieces. Ditto for Bethlehem, Ramallah, etc…. I spoke to Sam about my problem getting some of my Christian items into Christian bookstores (they expect me to produce a color catalog before they will consider any of my items – this would be a huge expense for me). He suggested that I pick three items to put on a bookmark with pictures and descriptions, print it up professionally, and try to get in that way. The bookmarks would also be good items for handouts when I am invited to speak or sell. Sam gives presentations on the problem the Israeli occupation causes for people trying to do business in Palestine. He will notify me if he is asked to give one of these talks before I leave. I told him I am trying to specialize in giving this sort of talk because it opens up the subject of Israel/Palestine to audiences that might not relate as easily to the general human-rights based talks.

Jenin Creative Cultural Center: I jumped aboard a shared taxi in Ramallah on Tuesday morning for an hour and a half ride up to Jenin to visit the Jenin Creative Cultural Center. It was very smooth sailing. We drove right through the checkpoints. I enlisted the help of one of the young men in the taxi to load my phone card into my cellphone and to talk to the center to help me get off at the correct street corner. He was happy to help and proudly introduced himself as a resident of Jenin Camp.

Jenin is the furthest north city in the West Bank. It was subject to a heavy Israeli incursion in 2002 and was very inaccessible for two years (the checkpoint between Birken and Jenin was closed). Jenin Creative Cultural Centre is “a non-governmental association, established in 2005 by a group of Jenin youth, for the purpose of providing cultural and educational services for the local Palestinian society in general, and the youth sector in particular in Jenin area.” Among other things, the center is involved in art workshops, concerts, promoting children’s art both inside Palestine and around the world, and working with women’s cooperatives to produce handicrafts. Their dance group gave a performance in Sweden in 2007. They did a musical tour in the UK and Scotland in 2006. They brought a theater show with 16 children to Venice and Berlin three weeks ago. They are always looking for volunteers who can spend 3-6 months teaching keyboard, violin, or guitars. They also look for funds to pay these teachers stipends.

Yousef, my host in Jenin, does PR for the center, but his fulltime work is as a translator and PR person for the Palestinian Authority Ministry of the Interior. Yousef’s job at the Ministry of the Interior is what makes it possible for the center to coordinate with the ministry and do positive work within the schools. When I arrived in Jenin, Yousef and a theater and puppet group were piling in a van to bring a show to a private Islamic school in Jenin. I joined them. Over 300 children gathered in the large inside courtyard to watch the performance. One of the performers was a young woman from Norway working with the puppet theater. A friend of hers from Norway, a volunteer with the World Council of Churches working with the EAPPI (Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine Israel), came along to watch the performance. She chatted briefly with me about just how forlorn she has become monitoring checkpoints and agricultural gates in Tulkarem for three months to observe the time of opening and closing of the gates and to try to stop Israelis from abusing Palestinians. The break to watch children’s theater was much needed. The theme of the theater and puppet show was “We Have a Choice”. It was to teach children the difference between lazy and responsible behavior. With wonderful humor they got across anti-smoking messages and pro-exercise messages. They poked fun at the lazy, smoking, fat character that was picking his nose, rubbing his eyes, and picking food out of his mouth. The recorded background music included popular, rock, and rap.

Mobile theater at school in Jenin

Puppet Theater in Jenin

Jenin Schoolchildren enjoying theater

Jenin Schoolgirls Enjoying Theater

Yousef in Jenin

Sixty to sixty five thousand people live in Jenin city. In Jenin district there are 330,000 people. Around 40% of the population are refugees. About 17,000 of them live in Jenin camp (the camp that faced a major Israeli attack in 2002). Prior to closures and the building of the wall, the major source of employment was in Israel. Many worked in agriculture, construction, and infrastructure. Now Palestinians in Jenin are not permitted to work in Israel and Palestinian Israelis and other Israelis are prevented by the wall from traveling to Jenin to make purchases. Yousef talked about how important Israeli customers were to the economy previously. He said that even settlers would bring their cars to Jenin to have them repaired. Yousef feels that Jenin is the city most affected by the wall.

The economy in Jenin is primarily agriculture based. The word Jenin comes from the word Jana (which means Paradise). The problem today is that the people of Jenin can’t get those agricultural products out of Jenin to market because of the wall and the many checkpoints. The waits at checkpoints are too long to take eggs, milk, and meat through them. They can sell agricultural products in Jenin, and sometimes bring them to Nablus. In addition to traveling impediments there is a lack of water. Israel has been digging deep wells and pumping the water to settlements. Israel determines how much water the municipality of Jenin can use. There is not enough, so water is rationed by the municipality of Jenin. They divide Jenin up into three to five sectors, and each area is allocated water on only some days of the week.

Many of the refugees in Jenin come from right over the green line in Israel’s Galilee. They can see their confiscated land from their rooftops. After they became refugees, many of them farmed their own land for the new Israeli owners. Now they can’t farm it for themselves or for the Israelis.

Other employment in the Jenin area includes a marble factory (in Qabatiyeh), olive oil, factory for producing agricultural tools, and public services (teachers, doctors, security, police, and ministries). In the entire West Bank 200,000 Palestinians are in public/gov’t service.

Because of the dire economic situation in Jenin, 27,000 of the residents now work in Ramallah. Some have been forced to move to Ramallah. Others live there in the week and go home to Jenin on weekends. Some employers in Ramallah offer housing or group residences for these workers.

Yousef himself is married to a Palestinian Israeli woman and has three children. They are forced to live apart. The Israeli Knesset has ruled out family reunification (in other words, they will not give Palestinians permission to live with their Palestinian Israeli spouses in Israel). If his wife moves to the West Bank with him she will no longer have Israeli citizenship and be able to visit her family. So, she and the children live 14 km away in Israel. To visit him, she must sneak around into Jenin, which means an 80 km trip. When his son was in a hospital in Israel recently the walls and checkpoints prevented him from visiting him. Yousef says that there are thousands of marriages between Palestinians in Jenin and Palestinian Israelis. They all face these issues.

Yousef said that the people of Jenin are extremely pessimistic now. Many of them are emigrating where they can – e.g. Norway and Sweden – to improve their situation. When I asked him about the current political situation he clearly had no hope. His take (which would of course reflect the Fatah position): even if the Palestinians unify it won’t help because the US and Israel won’t talk to any Palestinians then.

Yousef is clearly looking to make more connections for the center and for the economy of Jenin. He was very pleased that I visited, really hoped to spark my interest in buying some of the handicrafts of Jenin, and was quite disappointed that I had not brought an overnight bag to spend the night. It had not occurred to me that the visit would include an overnight. I hopped on a taxi at about 5:30 for the return to Ramallah.

I must admit that, despite seeing the wonderful theater show and the smiling kids, I came out of Jenin very depressed. It really did seem like a squeezed city.