Al-Jazeera English- The Perspective from the Street
(my piece of the interview appears second)

When the Soldiers Came: Life as a Palestinian Refugee
(you may have read this article already but here it is published on the Glimpses.org web page)

Its interesting when Palestinians who read my blog ask me to write more especially about my experiences this week with the Annapolis protests. I was quite shook up on Tuesday. I managed to stumble across the major protest in Bethlehem as I was coming back from the bank, hundreds of Palestinian security force members combined with the protestors. The security force members had on different uniforms, green ones, blue and black ones and then the all black with matching ski masks, the holes cut for the eyes and mouth. Guns everywhere. The reports are conflicting about what happened but the few minutes that I saw were pure chaos. The eyes of the Palestinians in the taxi with me turned to see how I reacted before we pulled out and away from the area. I'm still trying to figure out what happened. To piece things together from what I saw and what I am reading in the news.

On Thursday morning, I crossed my fingers and walked out the door at Ibdaa early in the morning, my destination...Jerusalem. In the back of my mind was the question as to how easy it would be to cross into Jerusalem after the tensions in the air surrounding the Annapolis conference and my own personal experience on Tuesday afternoon. But it was a piece of cake to get past the checkpoint, there was hardly anyone on the bus and the soldier hardly glanced at my passport. I met again with my Israeli friend who has helped coordinate my work with a 6 th grade class of Israeli students and provided me with volumes of thoughts revolving inside my head, a different side of the story. We sat at the same table at the same café on a street corner in Jerusalem. We been checked by a security guard before walking in to get our coffee and food. On the street corner the discussion again took a political and historical air, our words driving in, around and up to the issue. I wonder if anyone was listening to our conversation.

We traveled up a winding road into the hills behind Jerusalem, past historical sites that i can only begin to comprehend the significance of and onto a kibbutz. I had never been on a kibbutz before and so this was a new experience. But in having grown up in an intentional community, on a farm area in Michigan and at a retreat center in Washington, the atmosphere felt comforting, the smells well-known. Except for the security coded gate around the school that is required by law.

The school is a comfortable collection of buildings on a small parcel of land. Sandboxes. a sloping soccer field where the grass doesn't grow, slides, toys, a little garden for each class in old tires and a variety of multicolored drawings catch the eye at the first glance. A familiar event caused me to smile. The youth knew I was coming and one caught a glimpse of me standing outside the classroom when she walked out for a second. "Hi Pablo," came her voice reminiscent of the children in Guatemala who would call out my name when they saw me since their grasp of any of the languages that I speak was minimal.

I introduced myself in Hebrew. I have no idea how I did but I tried a few phrases, "My names is..." "I am from..." "Thank you." I didn't spend more than 45 minutes with the youth, a typical 6 th grade class. They all tried to talk at once, some looked off into the distance, when I took some photos a few jumped up to the front. I introduced myself, told a few stories about Guatemala, talked a little about school in the United States, answered a question about my tattoos, and squirmed when asked where I live now and what work I do. I had a good time with the youth. I don't know how to ask the question that I am tossing around in my head. It has to do with the innocence on both sides of the children in this conflict, with their involvement (or non-involvement) with what is going on, with their lack of knowledge about the youth just kilometers away, with their need to live on land surrounded by security, where fences, guns, security guards, checkpoints, patrols, etc. are just part of the everyday life. One question of course is how can the youth live so close together and know nothing about each other? Yet the context that I travel around in everyday screams of the WHY.