massdisempowerment

this was initially an email to a friend, but i think it deserves to be copied into my blog (sorry P for reusing the email...!)

Notes from Palestine:

wow, it's been a wild ride here... i hurt my foot pretty badly a week ago playing soccer (football) and it's still not great but have been teaching breaking to kids here as part of my volunteer work and that's amazing. they are so interested and dedicated. otherwise it's just been a lot of soaking up the culture and political situation and of course the food. i am truly loving it. i'm already planning to try to come back next summer (theoretically i'll be starting grad school of some kind the following september)... i'd love to come back and teach the group more breaking and also work on more promotion stuff for the organization.

visited jericho and the dead sea yesterday and ramallah today. all filled with great historical significance and immense beauty. it's been a lot of crossing ridiculous checkpoints and witnessing the incredible disrespect shown to grown men and women by 16 and 17 year old israeli defense force soldiers at these checkpoints. the baby-faced soldiers carry enormous guns and wield unnecessary power (whether or not someone may pass to get to their work or their family and exactly how much humiliation they have to put up with to get there) for their age and for what our morality deems acceptible. it's really upsetting. sometimes it's more overt --i've heard numerous stories of women being handed (in their ID cards as handed back after inspection) soldiers numbers and then being berated the next time they pass for not calling the man... and then, of course even more disturbingly, men --and women --being forced to strip with very little cover from the public eye in order to be searched (over and over again as they pass weekly or daily) at checkpoints. it's this undercover "violence" as one man put it... might not be overt but it ends up leaving these people with a sense of powerlessness and impotence that leads to violence mis-directed at friends, wives, children... and of course other israelis who are somewhat complicit of course, but not necessarily any more so that any of us americans are with respect to the situations in iraq, congo, nicaragua, to name a few. The whole power structure of palestine seems broken and i dont know how one could fix it. that being said, there is beauty everywhere and vibrant culture and happiness, and humans seem to make out of any situation. palestine is not a country filled only with slums and poverty and sadness. it is filled with fresh meat, a near-constant stream of weddings, music that makes old men shake their hips like shakira, and the quintesential "arab hospitality". there are of course millions of things to cite regarding the things that don't work well and and are not positive but that's found anywhere. i'm not meaning to idealize or idolize the region, but it's worth noting that people are not entirely without hope and certainly not without life.