Arrival

My flight into Ben Gurion airport Tel Aviv arrived late in the evening and maybe for that reason, the security was fairly cursory. I was a bit nervous because I was carrying an Arabic language textbook and remembered stories of trouble that previous visitors to Palestine had had on account of dictionaries. But my questioning was fairly brief. Maybe my name helped me again. The immigration control official took a look at my passport and I told them that I was here to do some travelling and 'to catch up with my family', a prepared explanation that I reckoned would lead my interrogator down a safe path. She asked me if I was an immigrant ('Are you making Aliyah'), not with suspicion as might be the case in the UK, but with the implied expectation that I should be, that I was somehow expected to be. On my saying no, I received a sullen look and my passport was stamped with a three month visa. And that was that.
The shared taxi I took from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was fast along the motorway until we reached the city itself and then meandered around different suburbs dropping off different travellers, through areas that I did not know, some wealthy, some more interesting because more down at heel but with more character, areas full of orthodox Jews dressed in black hats and frock coats, thin gaunt-looking young men, men with beards pushing prams. One of the last to leave the taxi was a young man listening to an ipod who I took to be an Israeli before he started talking to me and he turned out to be from England working for a human rights NGO in Jerusalem. He was returning from the UK for a holiday. He started to tell me about his work in Jerusalem which seemed to be connected with an international church group, and I invited him to Abu Dis. 'I will show you round Jerusalem', he said. He spoke of 'all this madness', meaning the situation, which is inescapable.
I was eventually put at the Jerusalem Hotel near the old city, just like last year, and waiting for me was a taxi driver from Abu Dis, not Sami like last year but his son Faud. We drove in darkness through the eastern part of the city, waved through a barrier and down a fast road that led to Abu Dis. I remember Azariyah from last time, concentrated rows of shops, ramshackle garages and warehouses, some smart shops, and the pervasive wall bordering the road. We reach the village of Abu Dis, one main road, crossroads and a rough side road leading to our volunteers flat. I have four flatmates this time, a young German woman who has been living in London, an Italian, an English woman who is working for an NGO in Ramallah, and her friend.
I start teaching the next day. A small but startling thing. Two young children playacting. One has a large stick. He pretends to question the other one, sitting him down on a chair, pretending to batter him with the stick, pretending to slap him across the face. The other kid enters into the game with incredible energy. I had arrived the previous night at 10.30. At 11.00 pm I was told, some soldiers had rounded up about thirty youths on the street and forced them to stand spreadeagled against a wall for two hours.
The community centre where I am teaching looks in a better state than last year. The rooms have been painted and decorated, there are more books, only one whiteboard though, and the photocopier is not working. Still, improvisation is the thing.
Today, we had lunch with a doctor. His wife is the headmistress of a girls' school in Azariah. He the head of a medical centre. There are no hospitals in Abu Dis. The nearest Palestinian hospitals are in Jericho, or Ramallah, or Bethleham an hour away. Otherwise people here have to go to a hospital in Israel. But to go there you need papers that can take five days to obtain. Women have been known to give birth at checkpoints here. 'We are like caged animals here', the doctor says.