Onward to places new and hard to understand.

In my last post I wrote about waking up and w atching a sunrise from a foreign country. One of the things I did not note was that on clear days I can see the Jordanian Hills and Bethlehem. I can also see a wall. It's ten or twelve feet tall, grey, and topped with razor-wire.
This wall separates my new home from Bethlehem, which to my great surprise is only a twenty minute walk away. Twenty minutes away but a million miles from the norms that I have experienced so far in the Middle East.
Before I talk about Bethlehem I want to talk about the Old City of Jerusalem. I have been through it twice now, once to get acquainted with the city and yesterday we did a walking tour of the Christian Jerusalem, stopping at some of the stations of the cross on the Via Delarosa and reaching our goal of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. (Which was beautiful in a very odd way, considering it is broken up between many churches.)This norm with people from all over passed by us without a second glance most of the time, tourists are a given on a Saturday afternoon.

Back to today and the things I saw. They made me sad. Not in the sense that the people were sad, they were living their lives, enjoying the sun (which has been absent for the last three days) and being so very helpful when my group and I got lost as we were working on a photo scavenger hunt. (Let's just say that the three words I know in Arabic were used a lot.) But I noticed that unlike the people in Jerusalem where the movement between places was easy and fluid, the actions of the Palestinians were less so. As my group walked past the wall on our way back to the check point we walked past miles of graffiti. We finally got back to the checkpoint only to find it way more crowded than it normally is. Scott (a good friend from Jessup that is here as well) spoken to a Palestinian man and found out, that in January, Christian Palestinians who live in the West Bank are allowed to pass the check point to visit Jerusalem as sort of a gift. Only in January, he said to Scott that it was the first time his children had been on the other side of the wall. It was a treat for anyone who does not cross the checkpoint daily with work papers.

This is an example below of some of the graffiti I saw, It breaks my heart. Yet as I have beginning to find out, taking sides does not solve the problem here it makes it more stratified. All I can hope is that in the next three months I can learn and speak to the people here and find a spot on the fence to see both sides. I do hope one day though that this wall will be torn down too.

Peace and Love,

Kylie