I had my first Palestinian Arabic lesson today. The dialect here is so different from what I studied in Graduate School but little by little I am starting to hear individual words and put sentences together. As the lesson drew to a close my tutor, Ajmad, got a phone call and his eyes lit up. He started jabbering to me in English and apologized but he had to run because his friend who had been in jail for 4 years was coming home. I didn't find out yet what he had been in prison for but just the look on Ajmad's face told a hundred stories.

Some of you have asked why I am here. Many of you have expressed concern over my current choice of living in a violent area full of conflict. The answer to that question is complicated and I'm still trying to formulate it in my head. While I was in Graduate School I met a 42-year old Palestinian man, the first I had ever met. This man was Ziad. In the course of the next year Ziad and I became close friends, sharing classes, playing on both indoor and outdoor soccer teams and having many long individual discussions together as we lived in the same dorm. In addition, a conflict arose on the campus, in fact it exploded around the Palestine/Israel issue. With many passionate Pro-Palestinians and then Jewish/Israeli students on the campus this issue sparked a number of heated discussions and, for some, caused them to feel threatened. As a co-president of the student government this issue fell right in my lap. What happened on campus is much larger than I care to go into here and I don't even know all of the things that happened. Many students still left the campus angry about what occurred. That being said, I never really participated in the discussions. I realized that I really knew nothing about the issue; my knowledge of this part of the world was limited really to the news I had watched and read about unfolding with the war in Iraq. I didn't fell qualified to add anything to the discussion.

I believe that in order to talk about a situation such as this conflict it is important to have some first hand knowledge of it, that you can't only base your understandings on what you have read, heard or seen through the media. This issue saturated the campus for the last month plus of my time in Vermont. I turned the thoughts over and over in my mind several times. In the grand scheme of things, this seemed like the place where I would learn the most about the problems in this world, about trying to work through oppression and also, about putting one foot in front of the other even in the face of imposing obstacles.

I talked constantly in the last few weeks with Ziad about what I was thinking. Obviously Ziad is biased, having been born into the occupation, being sent to jail several times and continuing to live under a lack of freedom. But in our conversations he never once asked me to take his side, he asked me to come to my own conclusions. I once asked him, "How can I do that?" and his answer was, "Come see for yourself but don't just see the Palestinian side, see Israel's side as well." I think in that moment I was hooked. How can I come to understand the situation without seeing it for myself and without taking all the perspectives into account? I understand that some of my writings thus far might have hints of Pro-Palestinian in them and that's because I haven't been to Israel yet. I don't see myself as Pro-Palestinian. I see myself as Pro-Human Rights and Social Justice. And I still believe that in order to understand this world that we live in, I must look at it from multiple angles. If I only hear one story then I am missing many parts of the whole.

I am just scraping the surface of all the reasons that I choose to come here and work. There is so much more to it. And maybe what I have written here doesn't even make that much sense but I'm working on it. Life is a continuous learning process. But its in the small moments like the one mentioned above where Ajmad's friend got out of prison, or each time where we drive near the wall and someone says, "I can't go there but you can." or we are stopped at a checkpoint with guns pointed at us that I am starting to learn a piece of what it means to live here. I'm not going to try and influence anyone else's ideas of what is happening here, I am only trying to write about what I see and what I experience.

On that note, if someone had told me a month ago that I would be spending some of my extra hours on various basketball courts around the West Bank, walking the sidelines with my arms folded, crouching in the huddle outlining plays, leading various practices, discussing the needs of the team until the wee hours of the morning and giving interviews to Arabic newspapers after the games I would have laughed yet here I am. Basketball in Dheisheh is bigger than just the game, larger than the 14 players that make up the team, something greater that anything I can put words to. It provides the players, who have jobs and families with a measure of team building, stress relief and leadership skills. It provides the community with a sense of hope, of pride and of relief from the constant oppression and occupation that they must live under daily. After the last championship in Bethlehem some of the elder members of the community stood up and talked passionately about what they team meant for them. While I couldn't understand most of the words, I could hear the emotion echoed in their every word.

I knew I would be working with the basketball teams but not at this level. Last year the team won the Palestinian championships in Ramallah, the same championships I have currently taken over as interim head coach for and started last week.

The story of how basketball began in Dheisheh is inspiring. Up until four years ago they did not have a team, basketball was only played by the more privileged, the elite. As Ibdaa continued expanding its programs their sports project widened to include basketball and now their teams are at the top levels of competition. They have the only team to come from a refugee camp both on the men's and the women's side. Most of the players have only been playing organized basketball for a few years.

Well, that's enough for the day....phew....