February, 2003
Marthame was lending a hand with the video conference bringing together Italians, Israelis, and Palestinians.
In other places, the water had washed out the soil beneath the road, and it had caved in in places. A couple more stuck cars decorated the side of the road.
A young Palestinian man from the Jenin region fits an army profile of terrorist, and so he might not be able to travel at all.
Why must these people, these wonderful people who have welcomed us so graciously, why must they suffer so?
By nightfall, the tanks were gone, but the planes had come to take their place, circling until the wee hours of the morning. It's hard to sleep like this.
No tanks today, but there was shooting at the edge of town. The Israeli camp is long gone by now, but we're still getting visits.
n the evening, we met with Fr. Aktham to talk about our contingency plans. With the world situation such as it is, there's a lot of “if”ing going on.
The young man tried to explain that he's been trying to get his ID changed to say Jenin, but he can't because the only place he can do so is at the Palestinian Authority Office in Jenin which no longer exists.
Each car, however, was missing one tire, and the tires were stacked in a neat pile. The soldiers had come a half hour before and systematically removed one tire from each of the cars, then left. Couldn't have seemed more arbitrary unless they had set fire to the pile.
They grew up as children of the first Intifada; one told us as a teen she spent a night in Israeli "children's jail" - she and her friends were arrested for practicing dabke, traditional Palestinian dance.
being happy over here doesn't belong to happiness; it's from the sickness of being bored of sadness
It's exciting to be part of it all, but with the impending war, it seems like this area will fall silent for a while as far as the outside world is concerned.
This is truly worrying. Not only do we need electricity for such a big chunk of our work - internet, emails, etc., and not only do we, like everyone else, need electricity to keep a lot of food from spoiling, but our building is set-up so that an electric generator refills the water tanks on the roof. Once they empty, if there's no electricity, there's no water.