I realized that the talks wouldn't start for another few hours when we turned on the TV in the restaurant to watch Al-Jazeera, the International English version. There didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary around Ibdaa, in Dheisheh. It was all pretty quiet. I did a few things and showed my latest video posting of some of the youth at Ibdaa:

(and available for download off the Ibdaa Cultural Exchange download page)

I also discovered that the questionnaire I filled out the other day for the Al-Jazeera English website was online (Click here to view the article)

I stumbled across one of the protests against the Annapolis talks around 3:30 this afternoon. It was mere minutes away from Ibdaa yet when I got back to Dheisheh it was eerily quiet, the center was virtually empty.

Tonight we sat in a restaurant in Bethlehem with around 20 Palestinian males. The sweet aroma of arguila hung in the air; everyone's eyes were glued to the large screen television where the speeches of Bush, Abbas and Olmert were shown live from Annapolis. Greg and I sat, relatively quietly, in the corner and picked out words from the Arabic translation here and there. For one brief few minutes a strange voice in English came through the speaker above our heads, translating a few of Abbas' words into English. The one word that stuck in my head from the few words that were translated was "freedom." And just like that the English translation ended and we were back to picking out the Arabic words we knew.