Pause in the Sinai

I was invited to go with friends to the Sinai this week. We stayed with Bedouin in the desert, drank tea, rode camels, and drank more tea. It was not a tourist experience. The friends who invited me are German anthropologists who've been living on and off with this tribe for years. It was not exactly a comfortable experience. My Arabic is terrible, and I don't speak German. So I spent a lot of time sitting quietly, and drank a lot of tea. A lot. Plus, half our group got violently ill. Which was made more difficult by the fact that there were no toilets or toilet paper. But, despite all this, when we returned home, we realized we had collected all these vivid and funny stories and sat around the table shaking with laughter over them. Like the camel that managed to run after a female camel from another caravan despite the fact that his legs were tied together. Or one of the young boys in the Bedouin tribe who was given a mattress for Eid (the rest of the tribe sleeps on the ground) and showed it off joyfully to anyone who came to visit. And it was revolutionary to live a deep and simple life even just for a few days.

Wanderlust

And so it's been nine months that I've been in the Middle East. I've gotten to the point where I feel uncomfortable about being so comfortable here. As I adjust and Bethlehem begins to feel more and more like home, I've started to feel rootless. When I left, it wasn't my intention to sever the strong network of relationships I had back home. But, time is short and phone connections are bad. In one painful experience, a friend sent me an e-mail baring the intimate details of her life, only to have an virus send the message to all of her contacts, including family members and teachers. This incident has effectively frozen either of our attempts to communicate since. And although I've made new friends here, none of them can compare to the 10- to 15-year relationships I left back home. All of this has led me to wonder, fairly often, what in the hell am I doing here?

This feeling was encapsulated by an trip to Jericho my friend B. and I took yesterday with her five-year-old daughter. We were attempting to go to a food festival that was part of Jericho's 10,000th birthday celebrations. Jericho being 10,000 years old seems like it would be a big deal, so we were surprised to be completely unable to find the festival.

It's pretty typical in the Middle East to roll down the window and ask whoever is walking by for directions. We did this about six times. Nobody had ever heard of any festival, and the people we asked gave us completely opposing directions. We finally ended up following a policeman on a motorcycle who drove us all around town before finally understanding where we wanted to go and taking us there. The whole time we were driving around, B.'s daughter kept piping up from her car seat, sounding like the voice of reason.

"Why are we following this strange man on a motorcycle?"
"Red and white lines mean we shouldn't park here. Why are we parking here?"
"Why don't either of you know where you're going?"

B. and I lost whatever mythical adult-knows-best status we had ever had months ago, the last time we got incredibly lost in the West Bank. But, we kept turning around and cheerfully explaining that things would work out. And, in the end, it was true. The festival was a disappointment, but we had good conversations, a long lunch by a fountain, and came back with our bags full of homemade jam, cheese, and honey. And somehow, that image of the three of us persistently leaning out the window to ask for directions, and cheerfully trying to make the best of things sums up what it's taken to make a life in the Middle East. It's adventurous, but almost never glamorous or comfortable or smooth. And when my voice of reason pipes up, I turn around and tell it everything is going to work out.

Back to class

I've been told that it takes six months of living in a foreign country for the language to start to stick. That has held true for me. When I first arrived, it took a Herculean effort for me to learn each word. The moment I stopped studying, all that hard-won vocabulary would slip out of my Teflon brain. But now, seven months into my time here, I'm getting some traction. I decided it's time to go back to Arabic class. My friends recommended a great teacher. She's encouraging, which is important because learning Arabic tends to make me feel completely incompetent. And the way she explains the language is almost like poetry. About halfway through the class, I had a funny tickle in the back of my throat, and I realized if I were a cat, I would be purring.

This is some of what she told me:
• "When you say yaret, or I wish, it comes from the deep heart. I wish I could go to Jerusalem. (She lives about three meters from the checkpoint to Jerusalem, but can't get a permit to go there.)"
• "When you want to love the people, you want to speak the language."
• "If you tell someone niyyalak, or I envy you, you want to say it with a smile on your face. If you say it angrily with knots in your stomach, people are superstitious, and they will say you sent them the evil eye. I don't believe in this, but it's a word to be careful with."

And most importantly, she told me, "Talk! Talk loudly. Look in the mirror and talk to yourself. Don't think you will break the language."

Summer in Palestine

People here in Palestine would think it's funny I'm even bothering to post this because this salad is as common as french fries in the U.S. But it's what I have been living on in the hot weather. It's been in the high 90's, and often past 100 every day for months. This is abnormally hot for Bethlehem. It's hard to think, move, and eat. As my friend recently posted on Facebook, "I'm sorry if I'm not returning phone calls, but it's hot and I'm dysfunctional. Don't blame me, blame your God." This salad seems to be the only thing that helps. It's commonly called Arabic Salad.

Ingredients:
• Cucumbers
• Tomatoes
• Fresh Mint
• Fresh Parsley
• Lemons
• Hot pepper to taste (such as jalapeno)
• olive oil
• salt
• avocado (optional)
• tahini (optional)

I'm not giving you amounts because it really doesn't matter. If you can find cucumbers with thin, sweet skins, those are the best. These are also ubiquitous in Bethlehem, and my roommates and buy several kilos at a time and eat them in a few days. Chop all the vegetables into small cubes. Peel and chop the lemons as well. On days when this salad is all I eat, I add avocado or mozzarella so that it has a few calories. Mix everything together and Add some olive oil, mint, parsley, and salt to taste. If you want a thicker dressing, mix a few teaspoons of tahini with the olive oil and a little water until it's a thin paste. That's all! If you really want a true Palestinian experience, you can throw lemon juice, mint, sugar and ice in the blender for a limonana, or mint lemonade.