Visitors meeting

  • 20 January 2006

George is my contact on this new NoBorders business. We meet in a bar in zone 2 for a coffee. I thought it weird to have a one to one conversation about volunteering over a coffee, but when I see George he is at a table talking to some five other people. We all introduce each other and then they resume the conversation, which seems to be at the stage of the actual travelling to the detention centre, somewhere in zone 6. (note below)

Kawawis-Jerusalem. News from Jayyous

  • 10 December 2005

I wake up to find myself on my own, so I just get up and eat some of the food I brought with me as breakfast. I hear the sound of an engine and go to see what it is. Two men, one on foot and another one on a tractor, are spreading seeds on the fields around the village.

Kawawis III. The journalist

  • 8 December 2005

I receive a call saying that E., an Israeli activist who comes here regularly to get information about incidents that need to be reported, will be coming today for a visit. It will be a change I look forward to: I will finally have a conversation in English, after two days of speaking a word at a time and trying to make sense of people’s gestures.

Kawawis II. The visit

  • 7 December 2005

Today is a visit day. A lot of grandchildren of H.’s mother come to see her. They had to come walking down the path that the taxi took me from, crossing the road that functions as a wall.

Hebron – Kawawis

  • 5 December 2005

Today is my last day here and as a good bye to the house where we stay I do a “tour” around it. It is a neighbours’ building and the most interesting part of it is the flat roof. The drums containing the water that is supplied to all the block neighbours are kept here.

Hebron IX. WIG

  • 3 December 2005

Today is Saturday and, there is a “visit” from the “women in green” (WIG) scheduled for today. It doesn’t’ happen every Saturday, but they do come rather regularly, and people who have been in Tel Rumeida for months are familiar with their doings.

Hebron VIII. The donkey

  • 2 December 2005

Today D. and I patrol the lower street together, between the stairs and the checkpoint every one have to use to go from this neighbourhood to the rest of Hebron and vice versa.

Hebron VI. They’re all terrorists

  • 30 November 2005

I’m usually in the lower street, but some times I am up the hill, where the children enjoy themselves playing ball games or asking us to take pictures of them. If you take one’s picture, that’s it, you’re done, they won’t stop bugging you until you have taken two pictures of each of them, and then again in groups.

Hebron V. Apartheid

  • 29 November 2005

It is mostly quiet in the street where I “patrol”. The street is usually deserted, apart from the soldiers at the checkpoints and the odd Palestinian. The shops are all closed down. Their doors are all green but rotten because they are not used or painted or looked after. Most of them have David’s stars painted on them, just like the Nazis used to paint swastikas on Jews’ shops. Now it is Palestinian shops that have a Jewish sign on their doors.

Hebron IV. Lies

  • 28 November 2005

My favourite spot to patrol from is the place where I first saw D. when I first arrived here. The spot is good because from here we see, at the same time, the coffin-checkpoint to our right, and the illegal Israeli settlement (or at least the settlers that would come out of it to violently harass Palestinians) to our left.